[ih] Fwd: Internet Histories Volume 9, issue 3 is BS

[John Gilmore]

Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> Please notice: All research articles in this volume are open access.

Please notice:  All statements by academic publishers must be very carefully
parsed.

I guess book reviews are not "research articles".  This journal is
published by Taylor & Francis, the notorious rapist of academic
copyrights.  Not aware of that yet, I followed Brian's link to the "full
volume", and followed a link to the book review of:

  Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory, by Ian Milligan
  Reviewer: Kieran Hegarty

It gave me a teaser first-page, wanted me to "log in", and offered me
the choice to pay USD 56 for a downloadable PDF of the book review
(which they would then lock up 48 hours later so I couldn't get it any
more), or to pay USD 157 for downloadable PDFs (for 30 days) to every
article in the issue (an even worse sucker deal, since the main articles
are all "open access" and already available for free).  Indeed, I then
read one of the main articles, and it was freely readable without
logging in.  Though to actually download an "open access" PDF, I had to
first navigate through their proprietary Javascript PDF-reader software,
whose apparent job is to discourage you from downloading the PDF into
your browser or filesystem (and to prevent automated web-crawlers like
the Internet Archive or the Library of Congress from archiving the "open
access" PDF).

Why would anyone on this list choose to contribute to such an
enterprise?  The whole thing is set up as a scam, to draw in authors by
claiming to offer "open access" but actually still including proprietary
copyrighted information in every volume.  Thus the volumes of the
journal themselves are NEVER open access, they are proprietary.  They can
never be archived for posterity, instead only streamed from their
corporate owner until they tire of provisioning that access.  This is a
perversion of the process of archiving history, and a perversion of
"open access" academic publishing.  It contributes to the "digital dark
age" rather than averting it.

	John