If you’re getting a sense of déjà vu from this blog post title it is probably because we’ve been here before e.g. in 2017, in 2016, in 2015, in 2014. These profitable ‘errors’ seem to keep occurring… Today, Elsevier sold me 48-hours of access to an article in the journal Computational Toxicology , with the title: “Ab initio chemical safety assessment: A workflow based on exposure considerations and non-animal methods”. The price?

In December last year, it was widely publicized e.g. in Science magazine [1], that Scopus has been instrumental in legitimizing publication scams whereby authors pay to bypass real scholarly peer review and have their work published on a website that looks like a real scholarly journal but is in fact not a proper journal, merely an impersonation of one.

In late 2016, Martin Eve, Stuart Lawson and Jon Tennant referred Elsevier/RELX to the Competition and Markets Authority. Inspired by this, I thought I would try referring a complaint to the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about some blatant fibbing I saw Elsevier engage-in with their marketing spiel at a recent conference.

OpenCon 2015 Brussels was an amazing event. I’ll save a summary of it for the weekend but in the mean time, I urgently need to discuss something that came up at the conference. At OpenCon, it emerged that Elsevier have apparently been blocking Chris Hartgerink’s attempts to access relevant psychological research papers for content mining. No one can doubt that Chris’s research intent is legitimate – he’s not fooling around here.