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

[Brian E Carpenter]

John,

I passed it on without comment, but I fully agree.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 10-Oct-25 07:52, John Gilmore wrote:
> 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