Ah, the old “We’ll just infect you and your family with HIV, haha!” tactic to silence reporters. This is a company that, again, caters directly to the community of the HIV infected, exposed that community’s personal information, and then used HIV infection as a cheap threat on a reporter simply for reporting on the leak. Why would anyone want anything to do with these people any longer? And, while barely apologizing, Hzone appears to be more interested in doing CYA than true security.
Tag: HIV
Elsevier Appears To Be Slurping Up Open Access Research, And Charging People To Access It
Oh, Elsevier. The publishing giant has quite the reputation for its desire to stop people from sharing knowledge unless Elsevier can put up a toll booth. A huge number of academics have signed pledges to boycott Elsevier and not allow their works to be published by the company. Also, in the last few years, there’s been a rapid growth in open access and requirements that research be distributed for free (often under a Creative Commons license).
Almost exactly a year ago, we had a story about Elsevier charging for open access content, and apparently the company hasn’t gotten any better. Ross Mounce recently noticed that Elsevier appeared to be selling a paper on HIV infection for $31.50 + tax (after which you have just 24 hours to download it, or just kiss that money goodbye)
The problem, however, is that the paper was actually published by competing publisher Wiley under an open access Creative Commons license (and is available free of charge on its website). The key author on the paper, Didier Raolt told Mounce that he had no idea why Elsevier was selling his paper, and that he had not given permission. The paper is under a Creative Commons license, but it’s a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. And while I’m not a fan of NC/ND licenses, it’s pretty clear that this license does not allow someone to step in and start selling the paper.