I hate to keep flogging a dead horse, but since this issue won’t go away I guess I can’t, either. 1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about this interesting situation with Elsevier, which David Tempest’s remarks at the Oxford Evolution or Revolution debate highlighted: they can’t afford (literally or figuratively) to tell us how much they charge different institutions for the same stuff.

The Scholarly Kitchen is the blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishers, and as such discusses lots of issues that are of interest to us. But a while back, I gave up commenting there two reasons. First, it seemed rare that fruitful discussions emerged, rather than mere echo-chamberism;

I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to Academia.edu represent at best a grotesque PR mis-step, an idiot manoeuvre that I thought Elsevier would immediately regret and certainly avoid repeating.

Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions. Enter Elsevier, stage left.

A few years ago, in my programming day-job, we had a customer who we were providing with software components and a bit of custom development. While this was going on, we had a sequence of meetings with them in which we pitched several possible system designs, explaining how we could help them use our components in various ways. After this had been going on for a while, our contact at the customer had to take us to one side.

Suppose you’re working on a Wealden sauropod — for example, the disturbingly Camarasaurus -like isolated dorsal vertebra NHM R2523 — and for some reason you desperately want to publish your work in Cretaceous Research . But it’s published by Elsevier, which means that if you’re committed to open access, you have to find an exorbitant $3300 for the APC.

[Background: read Stephen Curry’s excellent summary of the new BIS select committee report on Open Access.] Paul Jump’s coverage of open-access issues in Times Higher Education continues with today’s post discussing the fallout from the new BIS report. That report says: There’s your problem, right there.

I just read Mick Watson’s post Why I resigned as PLOS ONE academic editor on his blog opiniomics. Turns out his frustration with PLOS ONE is not to do with his editorial work but with the long silences he faced as an author at that journal when trying to get a bad decision appealed. I can totally identify with that, though my most frustrating experiences along these lines have been with other journals.

You know how every time you point out a problem to legacy publishers — like when they’re caught misrepresenting their open-access offerings they explain that it’s very complicated and will take months to fix? Here’s how that should work: To summarise: I found a bug in the PeerJ system;