The Japan Institute of Heterocyclic Chemistry has initiated legal proceedings against the digital preservation site CLOCKSS, which made thousands of papers published by a journal previously run by the institute accessible, Chemistry World has learned.
In April, Chemistry World reported that the Japanese institute abruptly removed all the papers published by Heterocycles since it was launched in 1973 with little warning. An archived version of an editorial notice posted on the Heterocycles website said that the journal had ‘completed its role in promoting the recognition of heterocyclic chemistry as a discipline’.
At the time, Alicia Wise, executive director of CLOCKSS, a dark archive of millions of journal articles and hundreds of thousands of books, told Chemistry World that her organisation holds a complete record of Heterocycles since the Japanese institute signed up to the service in 2011. CLOCKSS’s policy states that the archive can make a journal’s content public – even without the consent of the publisher – six consecutive months after it disappears from the internet.
On 25 June, seven months after Heterocycles was taken down and libraries that subscribe to the journal were left without access to its papers, CLOCKSS triggered access to around 18,000 articles published in all 106 volumes of the journal.
But Chemistry World understands that the Japanese institute has taken legal action against CLOCKSS. Wise didn’t reply to questions about the legal action in several requests for comment. The Japanese institute also didn’t respond.
‘Throughout this saga, the conduct of the Japanese Institute of Heterocyclic Chemistry has been troubling, including the vague and unsigned discontinuation notice, the removal of article access without comment or warning despite ongoing library subscriptions and now this lawsuit against critical infrastructure of scholarly publishing,’ says Daniel Himmelstein, head of data integration at the drug discovery firm Related Sciences.
‘My perception of CLOCKSS is that they do things by the book,’ says Dave Hansen, executive director of the nonprofit organisation Authors Alliance. ‘I would be surprised if they did this without a lot of careful thinking about what their responsibilities are under the terms of whatever that agreement is.’
Hansen speculates that behind the scenes the Japanese institute may be negotiating with a for-profit publisher or another outfit to host Heterocycles. ‘In that case, you wouldn’t want a service like CLOCKSS being triggered where access would be provided,’ he adds. ‘That’s the only real reason I can think of why they would be pursuing it so aggressively.’
‘Without the filings, it’s difficult to assess the merits of the case, but absent some sort of misstep by CLOCKSS it would appear baseless,’ Himmelstein adds. ‘This is an important case to watch as it will battle test CLOCKSS and whether its protocols can overcome a hostile publisher in exactly the situation it was designed for – the preservation of the scholarly record when the rightsholder fails to provide access. Unfortunately, the associated legal costs risk straining the budget of the not-for-profit CLOCKSS organisation.’
No comments yet