Nearly a year ago I blogged that the Royal Society of Chemistry was charging ca 100 USD per student for re-use of a 2-page “Open Access” article (http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/11/06/royal-society-of-chemistry-will-charge-students-for-re-using-gold-open-access-articles ). The RSC has responded (very slowly) and in June replied to this blog: http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/11/06/royal-society-of-chemistry-will-charge-students-for-re-using-gold-open-access-articles/#comment-138142 :

An update, to show we deliver on our commitments:

We’ve fixed the Rights Permissions problem on OA articles. Now also clear licence information on the article, including CC-BY as an option.

e.g. http://doi.org/mt4

So I went back to the article:

Clicked on “Request permissions” and got:

So just the same 100 USD per student. This has been “fixed”? “Delivering on commitments”? Doesn’t look as if the RSC even tried it (it takes 2 minutes to check).

Now I don’t suspect that RSC are deliberately continuing to try to charge people for Open Access articles. But it raises the question of their competence – and probably many other publishers – in assuming that Open Access articles are managed properly. And any errors seem to be in the publishers’ favour.