# Open Access Journals: CC Bait and Switch?


I'm currently doing some surveying of the Open Access publishing
landscape, together with a professor. We are trying to get a sense of
the different actors, motivations, etc. We will be sharing much more
from this research as it matures, but for now, I wanted to mention one
thing that has come up frequently. I have been investigating a sample of
OA journals, visiting their websites to gather basic statistics like
whether they use open licenses or not, whether authors can keep their
copyright or have to transfer it to the publisher, whether the publisher
is for-profit or non-profit, etc.

The first thing that I realized is that finding this information is very
difficult. Some journal websites are very helpful, and spell it all out
(these are typically templated web pages belonging to big publishers).
For many others, you have to dig deep into the "author's instructions"
PDF, to find the information you are looking for, and in many other
cases, you cannot find it at all.

When it comes to the use of open licenses, there is also a fair amount
of confusion, and many web sites will have contradictory statements. To
just choose one example (the last one I looked at, but there are
**many** like this): [The International Journal of Clinical and
Experimental Pathology](http://www.ijcep.com/). This journal is
published by [e-Century Publishing Corporation](http://e-century.org/),
a US corporation that publishes a total of six OA journals, with the
slogan: "Always Publishing, Always Open-Access / We are working towards
the Freedom of Sciences".

The journal sustains itself on the publication fee, which is \$900 for
each paper accepted under ten pages, and \$100 for each additional page.
Given that all the articles are available for free download, it does
fulfill the most narrow criteria of OA publishing. But does it also
offer articles under an open license, allowing dissemination, even
modification, translation, etc? According to their [Instructions to
Authors](http://www.ijcep.com/instructions.html), yes.

Here is their copyright policy in full:

**Copyright Policy** By submitting a manuscript to IJCEP, all authors
agree that all copyrights of all materials included in the submitted
manuscript will be exclusively transferred to the publisher - e-Century
Publishing Corporation once the manuscript is accepted.

Once the paper is published, the copyright will be released by the
publisher under the “Creative Commons Attribution License”, enabling the
unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction of the
published article in any medium, provided that the original work is
properly cited.  If the manuscript contains a figure or table reproduced
from a book or another journal article, the authors should obtain
permission from the copyright holder before submitting the manuscript,
and be fully responsible for any legal and/or financial consequences if
such permissions are not obtained.

All PDF, XML and html files for all articles published in this journal
are the property of the publisher, e-Century Publishing Corporation
(www.e-Century.org). Authors and readers are granted the right to freely
use these files for all academic purposes. By publishing paper in this
journal, the authors grant the permanent right to the publisher to use
any articles published in this journal without any restriction
including, but not limited to academic and/or commercial purposes. If
you are interested in using PDF, html, XML files or any art works
published in this journal for any commercial purposes, please contact
the publisher at business@e-century.org.

So, there are a few issues here. The journal requests you to transfer
the copyright to them, and state that they will release the article
under a [CC BY license](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/),
but then go on to state that this will enable unrestricted
non-commercial usage of the article. However, the CC BY license does not
restrict commercial usage. If they desired this, they would have to use
the [CC BY NC license](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/). 
They also state that all PDF, HTML and XML files will be the property of
the publisher, and that permission is granted to use these for "academic
purposes".

This is confusing – are they saying that there is a difference between
the copyright in the Platonic idea of the article, and the copyright on
each of the individual expressions of that article? But if the article
is only offered through HTML, PDF and XML, what does that mean? What if
I took a picture, and said that the picture was freely licensed, by the
JPEG I put on my website was copyrighted?

How does this confusion play out in practice though – for most visitors,
who don't stop to read the instructions for authors, but merely want to
access the articles? Well, let us choose a random article, "[Androgen
deprivation and stem cell markers in prostate
cancers](http://www.ijcep.com/910004A.html)", which is featured in the
latest issue. Looking at the abstract page, there is no mention of an
open license, only a line at the bottom stating "IJCEP Copyright ©
2007-All rights reserved". Nothing about right of reuse for academic
purposes, etc. Let us download the
[PDF](http://www.ijcep.com/files/IJCEP910004.pdf), and see if there is
further information inside the actual article.

There is no reference to any open license inside the PDF. In other
words, this is a traditionally copyrighted article - no hint anywhere
that other permissions might be granted, whether they be CC BY, or
"permission for academic reuse". The confusing text in the instruction
for authors might be specific to this journal, but the mention of a CC
license in one place of the website, and no use of CC license on the
actual article, happens quite often.

Sometimes this is because the website inserts a copyright notice by
default. University of Toronto's institutional repository
[T-Space](https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/) had this problem, it
would show "This item is licensed under Creative Commons BY", and right
below that a line saying "Items in T-Space are protected by Copyright,
with all rights reserved". Now they have changed that last line to say
"unless otherwise noted".

Back to the journal business, there are two issues here. One is whether
the stated intent in an information for authors PDF that articles will
be released under CC BY is legally binding, and whether this in fact
makes all articles on the site CC BY, even though this was not noted
individually for each article. Regardless of this however, the whole
point of CC licenses is to make it easy for people to copy, share,
modify and distribute versions of the licensed material. If it's not
clearly noted on the item (both on the abstract page, and in the PDF
generated) that the item is licensed under CC, you lose all this
benefit, and the item might just as well be copyrighted.

This is all the more egregious, because this publisher in particular
publishes 6 journals. I hope all OA journals can have a look at the
information they make available, and clarify this, so that there is no
doubt of the intention of the journal, whether for authors (I would be
upset if I submitted my article to this journal, thinking it would be CC
licensed, and then find the PDF distributed without any information
about this), and for readers.

Stian