From: Dominic Benson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2017 10:45:23 +0000

It's a similar situation to when one changes subscription agent.
Payments from the new agent are transacted and reconciled but, after
the grace period expires at perhaps a handful of publishers, the
apparent "non-renewal" by the former agent may trigger a cancellation
process and subsequent loss of access to subscribed content. The
supply chain breaks too easily.

Similar events happen when titles transfer between publishers as Ross has noted:

http://rossmounce.co.uk/2015/03/07/another-day-another-elsevier-website-illegally-selling-articles/

Imagine what might happen when a publisher's platform migrates to a
new service. There have been several instances in recent months. Check
(again), please?

Kind regards,

Dom Benson
E-resources Librarian, Library, Information Services
Brunel University London


-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2017 17:03:32 +0000

It would be very interesting to see a rigorous, data-driven study of
the extent of this problem. Ross has found a handful of articles that
aren’t being made OA despite an APC being paid, and presumably there
must be more – but are there ten more, or a thousand more?

I wonder if you could arrive at a valid conclusion through a
sample-based study: take, say, ten issues each from 20 or 30 hybrid
journals from a variety of publishers, and see how many of the
putatively OA articles in them are behind paywalls. (But how could you
know for certain whether an APC had been paid for any particular
article? Hmmm.)

The characterizations and inferences in Ross’s piece strike me as a
bit over the top – but clearly there is a problem. I’d love to get a
better idea of whether it’s small, medium-sized, or large.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
[log in to unmask]