Roundup of academic-publisher misconduct

I had a bunch of bookmarks saved on academic-publisher misconduct and the brewing revolt of academic libraries against these publishers, intending to post them as links on Google+, but they just kept coming too fast, so instead I’m posting a roundup of them here.

• False claims of copyright by Elsevier. Elsevier continues to fraudulently claim copyright on public-domain journal articles from the 19th century. The response from their industry association, the International Association of STM Publishers, makes clear that they have no intention of changing their misbehavior voluntarily. Via Julia Reda and David Roberts.

• A rapidly-growing set of university libraries are cancelling package deals with major publishers and, more importantly, sticking to their cancellation afterwards. “Relatively few libraries that actually do cancel their Big Deals end up regretting it.” A lot of the cases involve Wiley rather than our favorite target, Elsevier, and several of them involve academic societies rather than for-profit corporations. Via Timothy Gowers.

• The Dutch appear poised to cancel their national package deal with Oxford University Press after OUP refused to work towards making all Dutch-authored papers open-access and to avoid double-dipping for open-access publications (making authors pay to make their papers open access and then making libraries pay again to access the papers). This appears to affect primarily medical journals. Via David Roberts.

• Louisiana State University sues Elsevier after LSU’s School of Veterinary Medicine Library cancelled their redundant deal for Elsevier journals (also covered by a blanket deal for the whole campus) and Elsevier stopped allowing access to the school despite the blanket deal. An odd twist to the story is that Elsevier refuses to accept service for the lawsuit: Despite doing plenty of business in the US, and taking plenty of legal action there on their own behalf, they have been taking the position of not being a US business when it comes to receiving lawsuits, and have been forcing LSU to go after them through international law. Via David Roberts and Timothy Gowers.

• Many predatory journals have been successful in getting indexed by PubMed according to a new study (posted behind a paywall in an Elsevier journal). Beall’s list of predatory journals was used to identify these journals, and is now sorely missed. Via Retractionwatch.