How my open access article is for sale at Amazon for $5.16

*UPDATE*: Amazon has removed the e-book. Emanuele Pasqualotto found 117 additional articles for sale as kindle e-books, see this list* 

When you publish in Open Access journals, most will make your work available with a CC-BY license. A CC-BY license gives whoever wants to re-use your work the right to do so, in any way they can think of – even commercially. It’s the best way to make knowledge freely available.

I published an open access article consisting of a primer on calculating effect size in Frontiers in Cognition in 2013. The article is quite popular, with over 200 citations according to Google Scholar, and I’m really happy people find it useful. I was nevertheless a bit surprised to see someone was selling my article as a Kindle e-book on Amazon for $5.16. I feel that if someone sells a book with my name on the front cover, they should at least let me know.

My main problem here is that people are fooled into buying something they can get for free with just a mouse click. Some (unidentified) individual is probably getting the 35% profit margin, but Amazon is really the one making this possible, and they are getting the remainder of the 65% of the sales price. Although it is Amazon’s right to make money this way (after all, we have companies selling bottled water for $2, which is almost the same thing), it’s a bit weird, and I would say that even though it’s legal, it’s not desirable.

There’s not much I can do about this, but there was something I could do. Amazon makes it very easy to self-publish e-books. Frontiers allows you to download an EPUB version of my article. This means you can simply fill out some forms, and publish your own e-book on Amazon. In 3 minutes, I was able to sell my own open access article for the lowest possible price Amazon would allow.

I’ve made it as clear as possible that this e-book is also available for free:

It’s interesting to experience the negative emotional response when you see someone making money of something you’ve shared with a CC-BY license. Even though it’s legally allowed, and rationally, the CC-BY license still the best way to share scientific knowledge, it was unexpected and felt abrasive that someone would publish a book with my name on the cover without telling me. 

All that was probably needed for me not to get upset was a better realization that publishing open access CC-BY allows for such practices, and the more rational realization that CC-BY will be best for society, despite these silly attempts of single individuals to make a direct profit by selling my work.