#ProQuest + #GoogleScholar = scam? Exhibit #123:
- Researcher publishes article in journal, using #CC BY.
- ProQuest republishes article, with author, title, date, DOI, licence. Also, with terrible layout, but without images.
- Their DOI doesn't link anywhere. You need to type "https:/doi.org/", add the DOI, paste URL, to find the actual publication. Grey zone of CC BY requirements?
- GS indexes the publication and provides the ProQuest link instead of the proper URL.
Aaargh.
I have seen precisely the same pattern with articles in DHQ as well. They know exactly what they're doing.
@christof @ElenLeFoll @proghist in my view this clearly violates the license of CC BY as it does not respect the attribution bit. Probably @creativecommons could chime in?
@tillgrallert @ElenLeFoll @proghist @creativecommons
Would be interesting to dive into the details of the CC BY requirements. Is mentioning the name sufficient to comply with the "attribution" requirement? The obligation to link to the source is clearly not met by "mentioning" an inactive DOI, imho. And of course this is strategic technical ineptitude...
@tillgrallert @ElenLeFoll @proghist @creativecommons
This is what CC says about the linking requirement:
"If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must: retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material: [...] a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;"
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.en
I think that for a URI to be complete, it needs scheme + authority + path, not just the path!
@christof @ElenLeFoll @proghist @creativecommons
After reading through the CC BY license I am none the wiser whether one has to clearly indicate that the material in question had been originally published somewhere else. The DOI as provided by #ProQuest reveals this fact but only after manually parsing the string with a resolver. Readers unfamiliar with the Programming Historian are made to believe that ProQuest is the original publisher or the platform officially hosting the original content.
However, ProQuest clearly violates the attribution requirements by modifying the layout and removing images. The CC BY license explicitly states that “You must […] indicate if You modified the Licensed Material”.
@christof @ElenLeFoll @proghist @creativecommons @dingemansemark
This is getting worse by the minute. I followed @christof|s hint concerning the reproduction of articles from #DHQ / @DHQuarterly looking for one of my own papers (https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/000593/000593.html).
In this case #ProQuest blatantly violates the CC BY-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/) by
- not mentioning the license
- producing a derivative
- not linking to the original
I am very much in favour of @adho.org, as the publisher of @DHQuarterly, following the path outlined by @dingemansemark. I will also log a complaint with #ProQuest through my employer.
@tillgrallert I am not familiar with #ProQuest. I've only seen #PhD theses being stored there, but this whole thread has not given me a good impression at all. I do hope that your complaint leads to systemic change in the way they operate their business.
@ElenLeFoll I had used ProQuest for accessing unpublished or gray academic literature in the past but hadn’t visited their website in years. Now, it seems to replicate other bibliographic aggregators.
@tillgrallert @ElenLeFoll @proghist @creativecommons @dingemansemark @DHQuarterly @adho.org
We discussed this in our seminar on "DH and the Law". Turns out, the way authorship, source and licence are attributed are not technically problematic. The real issue is the fact that the original publication has been transformed, not to say botched, by removing most formatting and all illustrations. The mandatory notice describing such a transformation is missing in violation of the licence.
@christof @tillgrallert @ElenLeFoll @proghist @creativecommons @DHQuarterly @adho.org
AFAICS, the transformation is not the only problem; the absence of a hyperlink to the original is also in violation of CC-BY's stipulation of "appropriate credit" https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/#ref-appropriate-credit
also "not technically problematic" is too low a bar I would say; why not hold ProQuest to higher academic standards?
