This is a very strange article. The offence is abuse of a software licence - in particular not obtaining one to use the software. This is an important issue, and IMO the world in general and academia in particular has got to learn that software doesn't just come out of thin air, if you want high quality and especially if you want maintenance you will have to pay for or contribute to it in some way. But then the article goes off talking about access to academic publications, a totally separate issue. It's of definite importance but I fail to see how retracting a paper due to breaking the law connects with it.

Companies like Elsevier take tax-funded resaerch results, tack on their own copyright and make a living off selling access to that content.

So they have a conflict of interest with regard to copyright law, where they promote a very strict interpretation, basically to protect their own revenue stream.

In addition, not having "a license" to base a paper on can be anything from having no license at all, only having a personal license instead of a team license, up to not having bought additional rights to publish results/screenshots/logos/etc.

Companies like Elsevier take tax-funded resaerch results, tack on their own copyright and make a living off selling access to that content.

The problem is two fold: The publishers won't allow libraries to only buy the journals they want and force them to buy way more than they want. Second, the researchers could stop publishing papers in pay-to-view journals.

I believe some funding bodies (e.g Welcome Trust) now mandate that any papers must be published in free-to-read locations.

I'm surprised that America allows tax-funded research to be kept behind paywalls. Isn't this why so much of NASA's work in freely available?

There is another aspect to this.

Not all research in academic institutions is totally funded through public grant schemes.

There is research done at academic institutions that is funded either fully or in part by commercial entities, so there may actually be reasons why the distribution of a paper has more interested parties than just the author, the academic institution and the publishers.

But I wonder how nuanced academic licensing is for commercial software. It may be that there are additional license clauses in software being used for commercially funded research over and above the normal academic license. So the authors may have been free to use software as a go-to tool, and publish the results for purely publicly funded academic research, to support and develop their expert knowledge, but would have needed additional licenses for a commercially funded research project. If they hadn't realised this, it is possible that they just fell into this hole.

But I'm speculating here. It would be good to get more information of exactly how they were unlicensed, but it wouldn't surprise me if we never find out.

Agee. It is odd as a quick visit to the Flow-3D website, indicates, subject to a few conditions, free academic licenses are available.

Also whilst the paper has been “retracted”, a version is still available, albeit with “RETRACTED” stamped in red across every page. So it should be possible to attempt to contact the authors.

Because is this a case of the authors using a free research licence beyond the 4-month limit, or the university department not maintaining a subscription, or something more deliberate.

Well of course it is. They don't want any random person reading it. After all, they may not be qualified.

(I'm firmly in the camp that says if it's a publicly funded body - say, a university - that has provided the paper, it should be easily available free of charge, or for at most a minimal charge. The problem with information like this is that you don't know if it's of any use to your immediate problem without actually reading it.)

Yes, I totally agree - in principle, but those Open Access journals are even more expensive to publish in than Evilsvier journals. Unless you have the grants to actually pay for that on top of the ridicolous publication charges you just don't do it. The science publishing world is completely f'd up: you do your reasearch, some of it on your own time (because, hey, it's interesting, and the 40 hours or so you get paid for are taken up with teaching or faculty stuff, or writing grant proposals, etc.). You write the paper, send it off to a publisher. Then it gets sent to your peers for review (who do that in their own time, for free, see above), and then you pay for it to be published. And then you pay to access your own bloody article you just wrote and paid to get published. It is a f'ing mess, and even ten years ago (when I quit academia) you could easily by a grand for a medium sized paper with a couple of colour pictures (those cost extra, because of... dunno, they say so, used to be that printing colour was expensive, but nowadays this is all "online only") - without it being open access. So... yeah. There's that.

And a software license for a couple grand per year and probably person (and those are "academia rates")? You got to be joking! There's no way small groups in underfunded basic research have that kind of cash.

You'd be surprised what you get for if you ask. We get requests from Academia for our software, and if it's research focused will often give a free license for a year or so.

I guess the issue there is even if the research was paid for the publishing wasn't. How significant the costs of publishing are I don't know, storing a few bits on a web server is trivial and the peer reviewers do it for free, though there will be some admin to that. Can anyone explain what else there is, if anything?

Perhaps though we should be putting more effort in to resolving the more fundamental issues, like the positive result bias in getting published in the first place. I know Ben Goldacre has some ideas, is there a movement we can get behind?

So if they licence the software they can resubmit the paper?

Seems rather pissy.

It seems rather stupid to use unlicensed software if you intend to publish an article on a site that specifically states that you need to have all your ducks in a row.

That's kind of like a training course in Excel where none of the computers have an official license and you see the red banner at the top stating that this version is unlicensed.

Not very professional.

>a secondary publishing right should be established to ensure that researchers themselves can distribute their work without permission from their publisher<

I'd rather have a law saying any reasearch paper fundet by public money has to be published on the universities web server without a paywall or other access restrictions (and before any 3rd party like Elsevier may publish the same article).

I'm currently studying at a university, and i get access to all of Elsevier's articles, and some other major publishers. Every time i need to access the uni proxy to gain access, it think to myself "this is ridiculous". I can't imagine having to pay insane amounts to access these articles.

Even worse: these publishers don't do jack shit. You need to pay to submit a paper, then the peer review is done by unpaid academics (of course they could refuse, but expect a "the publisher will remember that" popup). Then they publish it, take most of the money instead of giving it to the researchers, and pretend it's all for protecting academic integrity. The only thing they are protecting is their bottom line and their circlejirk system called impact score.

I firmly believe that scientific publishing should be non-profit, or even better, community run. Especially research done with public grants. What pisses me off even more, is when they sell the research data to commercial entities and AI companies.

Not sure what is going on here. Flow-3D has a large and free academic program and according to they website currently supports four universities in Egypt. So why go after this paper and not reach out to the university concerned and sort out a valid license agreement. Are they pissed off with universities using hacked licenses, this particular piece of research or what. And why has the university not got a valid licence have they just not bothered. Did the researcher even know the licence was invalid? Note the paper is still available for download, just with Retracted across every page. There appears to be a completely different and possible more parochial story here than that implied in the article.

Then there's JStor. I did a quick check and they have papers I wrote long ago on there. I can pay to download a copy of my own work. Did they ever ask for permission to take money for them? Of course not. The really annoying thing was that at least one of them was in a free publication at the time.