Re: Vanishing Act

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

It is clear from this summary that a lot of publishers within Elsevier are
making their own decisions. As we know Elsevier have formulated a policy
to cover instances when they feel they should (wording deliberate) delete
e-files from their online database, but I strongly suspect that the staff
down the line have forgotten that the policy exists. As a part-time
publisher in a large organisation I am deluged with advice and
instructions and, I am sorry to say, I delete much of it. Life in a large
library cannot be that different.

However there are serious issues of principle here. The policy that
Elsevier have formulated seems unacceptable to the library community.
Elsevier have good record (see their copyright policy) for changing their
policies in response to reasoned objections. There is no necessary
antagonism between publisher and librarian in this area and guidelines can
be drawn up and promulgated, which might become conventions - the way a
publisher acts naturally. In the print environment there are masses of
precedent. In the digital environment there is little precedent as yet and
a tendency (driven by the Internet ethos and now fortunately going away)
to assume that precedents and experience do not matter.

Scott Plutchak, David Goodman and I have recommended a panel on this topic
(what you do when online content infringes law or decency or convention)
at the 2003 Charleston Conference. It is also just the sort of issue that
IFLA should be taking up with IPA or (more realistic) ARL with AAP and/or
STM. I know that some at STM are interested in dialogue.

Incidentally my reading of the extensive correspondence covering the Human
Immunology issue is contrary to the survey below. Elsevier did not make
the first move. They followed the instructions of the society responsible
for the content of the journal. I am not suggesting that this gets them
off the hook, but the survey gives the wrong impression.

Anthony Watkinson


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ann Okerson" <ann.okerson@yale.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 9:53 PM
Subject: Re: Vanishing Act

> Liblicense-l readers:  The following message, though long, is of
> considerable interest as a discussion of the "purged" articles of which
> there has been recent mention.  The e-mail format coming to liblicense had
> gotten somewhat garbled and in particular a few of the proper names of
> authors of articles have lost accented vowels and so may seem a bit
> peculiar.  We apologize for that gap, but the item is otherwise forwarded
> as received from M. Lapelerie <lapeleri@voltaire.timone.univ-mrs.fr>
>
> ************************************
>
> In the the Chronicle issue of January 10, 2003, Andrea L. Foster published
> a paper about the way the Editor Eslevier is retracting some articles
> already published: "Elsevier's Vanishing Act. To the dismay of scholars,
> the publishing giant quietly purges articles from its database". A case
> study raises several issues.
>
> A research, performed in Science Direct on November 15, 2002, shows 38
> "missing" papers in the database. And generaly, in place of the paper, we
> can see the ritual text:" This paper has been removed for legal reasons."
> When it was possible, that is, when the author names and the title of the
> articles were mentionned in the electronic notice, I asked the authors why
> their papers have been removed. In some cases it was not possible to get
> in touch with the authors, because neither author name nor article title
> was mentionned in the online edition: they seemed to be definitively
> "missing in action".
>
> Some of authors never answered my email. For instance, Prof.Nikitas
> Assimakopoulos. Some of them answered, and the answers are very
> interesting: Some papers are "retracted" just for material reasons.

[SNIP]