We know that most academic journals and edited volumes ask authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement before proceeding with publication. When this is done, the publisher becomes the owner of the paper; the author may retain some rights according to the grace or otherwise of the publisher. Plenty of authors have rightly railed against this land-grab, which publishers have been quite unable to justify.

It’s an oddity to me that when publishers try to justify their existence with long lists of the valuable services they provide, they usually skip lightly over one of the few really big ones.

I hope it’s clear to anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while that I do try to be fair to Elsevier (and indeed to everyone). Although I’ve often had occasion to be critical of them, I’ve also been critical of Palaeontologia Electronica , PLOS and Royal Society publishing, among others; and I have praised Elsevier when they’ve done good things.

Back in July I wrote an open letter to Wiley, asking them to use the Creative Common Attribution licence for their open-access activities. They sent two brief notes in response — one from Director of OA Rachel Burley, and the other from STM Publicity Manager Jennifer Beal. Both are appended to my original post. Unfortunately, I dropped the ball in following this up — my apologies to Rachel and Jennifer.

“But Mike”, you say, “What’s wrong with publishers making a profit?” Nothing is wrong with publishers making a profit.

Last Friday I got an email from Dr Stuart Taylor, Commercial Director of the Royal Society, wanting to set up a phone-call to talk about the issue I raised about the editorial procedure on Biology Letters . I got back to him with my Skype handle, but without fixing a date or time. Then on Monday this week I was approached by Lucas Brouwers, a journalist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Folks, In response to our recent post about reject-when-you-mean-revise and submission-date massaging at Royal Society journals, Susie Maidment tweeted: Since then I have heard from several other sources — including Stuart Taylor, Head of Publishing and Commercial Director of the Royal Society — that these practices are widespread. Can anyone confirm this from their own experience? It needs to be stamped out wherever it happens.

Just a quick one for Matt Butler, who in a comment on the orignal postwrote: I just looked as well, and here’s what I saw: Front page of Biology Letters web-site, http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/, as of 7:12am on Saturday 6 October 2012 So there it is, prominently displayed right on the front page: So it’s not just that false submission-to-acceptance dates are given on individual papers;

If you haven’t already read the last post, please go do so before reading this one.

In a third “open letter to the mathematics community”, Elsevier have announced that, for “the primary mathematics journals”, they now offer free access to all articles over four years old. The details page shows that 53 journals are involved.