Matt

All points 8 and 9 of the Terms and Conditions of the website are saying is that the other content on our websites (i.e. the general information pages, FAQs etc) are (c) BioMed Central.[/quote]

That may be the case, but the language of the Terms and Conditions is not clear. Perhaps it is a problem in translation — either from British English to American English or from Legalese to English. These are the relevant parts:

4. All articles published by BioMed Central on this Web Site marked “Open Access” are licensed by the respective authors of such articles for use and distribution by you subject to citation of the original source in accordance with the Open Access license.

8. Subject to clause 4 you may not redistribute any of the Content of this Web Site or create a database in electronic form or manually by downloading and storing any such content Site without the prior authorization of BioMed Central.

It would be clearer if #8 started “With the exception of material covered by clause 4 you may not….”

[quote comment="20556"]I believe that email would be received by organizations (mostly in the commercial sector, but some such as OhioLink in the academic sector) which have had contact with BioMed Central in the past about advertising opportunities. For anyone who is no longer interested in this information, the email provides a clear opt-out option.[/quote]

I doubt I signed up for this information — I’m not even sure I have created a BMC account in the nearly three years I’ve been working for OhioLINK. Since OhioLINK receives a feed of BMC article content for its own electronic journal center, it is possible that an overreaching marketing engine harvested OhioLINK staff e-mail addresses to add to its database. (In my position at OhioLINK, I get a lot of mail like this and didn’t really consider it Spam even if it was unsolicited.) The contents of the email, though, did serve as a launching-off point for a review of the nature of BMC itself.

I believe that email would be received by organizations (mostly in the commercial sector, but some such as OhioLink in the academic sector) which have had contact with BioMed Central in the past about advertising opportunities. For anyone who is no longer interested in this information, the email provides a clear opt-out option.

A couple of responses:

First, Peter asks “Here’s a good question: can one take the open access article data from BMC and construct competing value-added services? Based on reading point #8 in BMC’s Terms and Conditions9, it would appear not.)”

Absolutely you can – that is the whole point of the Creative Commons Attribution license under which all the open access research that we publish made available. As long as you appropriately attribute the source, both commercial and non-commercial reuse of the content is allowed. Point #4 makes this clear.

All points 8 and 9 of the Terms and Conditions of the website are saying is that the other content on our websites (i.e. the general information pages, FAQs etc) are (c) BioMed Central.

You might ask why that’s important? In fact, it’s more important than you might think. We recently had a situation where a competing commercial publisher had plagiarized large chunks of our site (including our detailed ‘instructions for authors’) word-for-word and was re-using that material (without any form of acknowledgement) to set up a series of competing commercial open access journals.

Secondly, Bill:

BioMed Central is most definitely not, and never has been, a spammer. We take privacy and related email-marketing policy issues very seriously – our reputation depends on it

Users who register on BioMed Central have to explicitly check an additional box if they wish to opt-in to receive information from third parties about products relevant to their interests. If you do not ask to receive this information, you will not be sent it – however many people do ask to receive it, and find it a useful source of product information.

In addition, like many other journals such as Nature (for profit), Science (not for profit) and the PLoS titles (not for profit), BioMed Central incorporates appropriate advertising sponsorship within its journal content, in the form of banner ads and keyword-driven text ads. These ads are intended to be relevant to the user, and they help to defray the cost of publishing, so that it does not have to be carried entirely by the academic research community. Ironically, in this respect, the advertising carried by BioMed Central is an example of exactly the type of broadening of the base of financial support that Yale Library called for.

I don’t like that Point #8 much, either, and I’m no lawyer but it’s not immediately clear to me how the restriction on copying is compatible with their license.