The presenters found an e-book where all of the 'chapters' comprised articles from different issues and volumes of their journal. These were used without the journal’s permission or any form of approval. The journal’s co-publisher neither gave permission nor was contacted. Also, no one contacted the authors of the articles involved for permission.
The journal is open access with electronic and hard copy published papers. It has a Creative Commons permission 3.0 publishing license. All authors submit written copyright forms for their articles before publishing. The CC license requires that an appropriate credit be given, which in this case has not been done.
In this case, specifically:
1. All articles in this e-book that were 'stolen' from the journal have no indicators to the origin of this material or links to the original source of this material. The header containing the journal’s logo as well as the logo of the co-publisher that is normally positioned in the original form of the articles has been removed.
2. Under the section, 'permission', in the e-book it is stated that all chapters were first published somewhere else, but the abbreviation that is given is not correct and therefore is deceptive. The abbreviation points to a government institution and not the journal.
3. The format of the articles is copy and pasted directly from the original (double columns; position of the images, tables and graphs, etc).
4. In the 'list of contributors' are listed all authors and coauthors involved in these particular articles. To the journal’s knowledge (and they have asked nearly half of them in person), none of the authors has been contacted for their permission.
Questions for COPE Council
- What can the journal do?
- Is there any course of action they can take?
Advice on this case is from a small number of COPE Council Members. Most cases on the COPE website are presented to the COPE Forum where advice is offered by a wider group of COPE Members and COPE Council Members. Advice on individual cases is not formal COPE guidance.
This is primarily a legal question, and COPE is not able to offer legal advice. If the editor has ready access to legal counsel in their jurisdiction, they should certainly consult with that counsel. With that proviso, it seems the journal owns the copyright and has issued a CC license that includes the BY attribution component. It appears that the ebook distributor has failed to comply with the terms of the Creative Commons license. The journal can certainly contact the ebook creators to advise that they believe this ebook has infringed on their copyright. They might also look at how the ebook is being distributed. Typically, third party hosts and distributors have a mechanism for reporting content that infringes on a copyright, and so they journal may be able to file a complaint and have the ebook removed.
However, the type of CC license is important. For example, if the license is indeed CC BY, then the attribution statement in the republication needs correcting, and the journal can provide the correct citation. If the original CC license contains an NC (non-commercial use only) or ND (no derivatives allowed) component, then there may be greater problems if the second publisher is charging for what is a derivative work. If the CC contained an SA component, then derivative works would be allowed but the new work is also meant to allow SA.