Monday, November 14, 2011

Seriously annoyed with Nucleic Acids Research and Oxford University Press right now

Well, I was working on adding some paper links for an online version of my CV and I discovered something very annoying.

I went to get a link for my 1994 paper in Nucleic Acids Research.  I wrote this paper with my then girlfriend, now wife, and her advisor Ginny Walbot.  The paper was on finding a "transpose" motif in one of the proteins that was part of the autonomous element for the Mutator transposon in maize "Sequence similarity of putative transposases links the maize Mutator autonomous element and a group of bacterial insertion sequences."

So I went to Pubmed and searched for Eisen JA and Mutator and got the Pubmed entry here.  And then I looked at the links in the upper right and there were two.  One to NAR and one to Pubmed Central.  I note - the paper has been freely available online for years.  I vaguely remembered noticing some issue with the NAR version in the past so I went to that site.  And there it was



Wow.  Even though the paper is freely available in Pubmed Central, NAR is trying to charge for it.

What the f**#?

Same thing for my other NAR articles:



Not sure what the deal with this is.  Could be a glitch.  COuld be a feature.

4 comments:

  1. As far as I can tell, this always happens. The availability of a free version of a paper, on PubMed or elsewhere, doesn't stop journals from trying to charge for it. The question is whether anyone ever pays.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Does not ALWAYS happen ... and NAR has generally been good in the past. But it is more common that it should be ...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Does the DOI direct to the pay version? If so thats a shame

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, Dave, alas the DOI doi: 10.1093/nar/22.13.2634
    points to the NAR page. Crap

    ReplyDelete

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