If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu from this blog post title it is probably because we’ve been here before e.g. in 2017, in 2016, in 2015, in 2014. These profitable ‘errors’ seem to keep occurring… Today, Elsevier sold me 48-hours of access to an article in the journal Computational Toxicology , with the title: “Ab initio chemical safety assessment: A workflow based on exposure considerations and non-animal methods”. The price?

UPDATE 2024-06-11 posted here. At the time of writing this (2024-04-11), the entire content of a “key” chemistry journal called Heterocycles , with over 17,000 articles in it, from 1973 to 2023, has been knocked offline due to what the publisher vaguely describes as “various circumstances”. The journal has been unavailable to access online since December 2023, which means the content has been offline for four or five months now!

In late 2016, Martin Eve, Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant referred Elsevier/RELX to the Competition and Markets Authority. Inspired by this, I thought I would try referring a complaint to the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about some blatant fibbing I saw Elsevier engage-in with their marketing spiel at a recent conference.

I am highly curious as to why Elsevier do not seem to be responding to emails at the moment: Four days ago, continuing an existing thread on the public GOAL mailing list, I wrote to Dr Alicia Wise (Director of Access and Policy at Elsevier), about how Elsevier’s paywall systems are wrongly defrauding readers across the world by charging them to access content that has been paid-for to be open access.

Just a quick post tonight. Yet another paywalled open access article. It’s becoming a daily occurrence!

The TL;DR summary: In February 2017, when Elsevier were accused of selling one paid-for hybrid open access article, at first they sowed doubt about it, then three days later admitted it to be true. In their admission they state that it is the only wrongly paywalled open access article “affected” at their websites.

TL;DR Elsevier are selling access to open access articles again I saw this humorous tweet today: This tweet references the fact that Elsevier have been caught selling access to paid-for “open access” articles in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

Yesterday I published a blog post calling for ongoing monitoring of ‘hybrid’ open access articles and academic publisher services in general. Today I want to share with you some highlights from my brief checks on 2 years worth of Wellcome Trust ‘open access’ article processing charge (APC) supported published research outputs.

In a recent series of posts I’ve become fascinated with how unnecessarily fragile the scholarly communications system seems to be in 2017: Oxford University Press have failed to preserve access to the scholarly record (23-01-2017) Documenting the many failures across OUP journals (24-01-2017) Comparing OUP to other publishers (25-01-2107) As a reminder, academics literally invented the internet, I think we can and should be doing

Any good scientist knows that one must have an adequate experimental control when trying to determine the significance of effects. Therefore, in order to test the significance of the 106 broken DOIs I reported at OUP yesterday, I created a comparable stratified ‘control’ sample of 21 journals NOT published by OUP that are indexed in pubmed.