Elsevier charge $37.95 for access to an unformatted manuscript with intrusive watermarking and the illustrations removed

Today should be a day of rejoicing, as it brings us a new sauropod: Arackar licanantay Rubilar-Rogers et al. 2021., a small titanosaur from Chile.

It’s not, though. Because not only is this paper behind a paywall in Elsevier’s journal Cretaceous Research, but the paywalled paper is what they term a “pre-proof” — a fact advertised in a tiny font half way down the page rather than in a giant red letters at the top.

“Pre-proof” is not a term in common usage. What does it mean? It turns out to be an unformatted, double-spaced, and line-numbered manuscript. In other words, this is an AAM (author’s accepted manuscript) of the kind that the authors could have deposited in their institutional repository for anyone to read for free.

But wait — there’s more! By way of “added value”, Elsevier have slapped a big intrusive “journal pre-proof” watermark across the middle of every single page, to make it even less readable than a double-spaced line-numbered manuscript already is:

Sample page from “pre-proof” of Rubilar-Rogers et al. 2021. Reproduced under the Fair Dealing doctrine as non-commercial research, criticism / review / quotation, and news reporting (sections 29, 30, 178 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988). Get back in your box, Elsevier copyright lawyers.

If you want to see this for yourself, Elsevier will let you download it for $37.95:

Yeah. Thirty-seven dollars and 95 cents.

And now, the punchline. You may be wondering why, when a new sauropod has been announced, I didn’t lead with a nice image of one of the vertebrae? After all, are we not Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week?

It’s because there are no images of the vertebra. There are no images of any of the fossil material. In fact, there are no images at all.

Yes. This “pre-proof” omits all twelve illustrations. (We know there are twelve images, because all the figure captions appear at the end.) I have no idea what Arackar licanantay looks like. None at all. And for this, let’s just remind ourselves again, they charge $37.95.

I want to be careful throwing words like “fraud” around, but what I will say is that this is behaviour unbecoming of a major and once-respected multinational corporation. If a publisher’s behaviour ever merited the label “predatory”, surely this is it.

References

• Rubilar-Rogers, David, Alexander O. Vargas, Bernardo González Riga, Sergio Soto-Acuña, Jhonatan Alarcón-Muñoz, José Iriarte-Díaz, Carlos Arévalo and Carolina S. Gutstein. 2021. Arackar licanantay gen. et sp. nov. a new lithostrotian (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the Upper Cretaceous of the Atacama Region, northern Chile. Cretaceous Research 104802 (pre-proof). doi:10.1016/j.cretres.2021.104802