In my recent preprint on the incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck specimens, I?discuss three well-known sauropod specimens in detail, and show that they are not as well known as we think they are. One of them is the Giraffatitan brancai lectotype MB.R.2181 (more widely known by its older designation HMN SII), the specimen that provides the bulk of the mighty mounted skeleton in Berlin.

That photo is from this post, which is why it’s disfigured by red arrows pointing at its epipophyses. But the vertebra in question — the eighth cervical of MB.R.2181 — is a very old friend: in fact, it was the subject of the first ever SV-POW! post, back in 2007.

In the reprint, to help make the point that this specimen was found extremely disarticulated, I reproduce Heinrich (1999:figure 16), which is Wolf-Dieter Heinrich’s redrawing of Janensch’s original sketch map of Quarry S, made in 1909 or 1910. Here it is again:

Taylor 2015: Figure 5. Quarry map of Tendaguru Site S, Tanzania, showing incomplete and jumbled skeletons of Giraffatitan brancai specimens MB.R.2180 (the lectotype, formerly HMN SI) and MB.R.2181 (the paralectotype, formerly HMN SII). Anatomical identifications of SII are underlined. Elements of SI could not be identified with certainty. From Heinrich (1999: figure 16), redrawn from an original field sketch by Werner Janensch.

For the preprint, as for this blog-post (and indeed the previous one), I just went right ahead and included it. But the formal version of the paper (assuming it passes peer-review) will by very explicitly under a CC By licence, so the right thing to do is get formal permission to include it under those terms. So I’ve been trying to get that permission.

What a stupid, stupid waste of time.

Heinrich’s paper appeared in the somewhat cumbersomely titled Mitteilungen aus dem Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, Geowissenschaftliche Reihe, published as a subscription journal by Wiley. Happily, that journal is now open access, published by Pensoft as The Fossil Record.?So?I wrote to the Fossil Record editors to request permission. They wrote back, saying:

We are not the right persons for your question. The Wiley Company holds the copyright and should therefore be asked. Unfortunately, I do not know who is the correct person.

I didn’t know who to ask, either, so I tweeted a question, and copyright guru Charles Oppenheim suggested that I?email?permissions@wiley.com. I did, only to get the following automated reply:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for your enquiry.

We are currently experiencing a large volume of email traffic and will deal with your request within the next 15 working days.

We are pleased to advise that permission for the majority of our journal content, and for an increasing number of book publications, may be cleared more quickly by using the RightsLink service via Wiley?s websites http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com and www.wiley.com.

Within the next fifteen working days? That is, in the next three weeks? How can it possibly take that long? Are they engraving their response on a corundum?block?

So, OK, let’s follow the automated suggestion and try RightsLink. I went to the?Wiley Online Library, and searched for journals whose names contain “naturkunde”. Only one comes up, and it’s not the right one. So Wiley doesn’t admit the existence of the journal.

Despite this, Google finds the article easily enough with a simple title search. From the article’s page, I can just click on the “Request Permissions” ?link on the right, and …

Well, there’s lots to enjoy here, isn’t there? First, and most important, it doesn’t actually work: “Permission to reproduce this content cannot be granted via the RightsLink service.” Then there’s that cute little registered-trademark symbol “?” on the name RightsLink, because it’s important to remind me not to accidentally set up my own rights-management service with the same name. In the same vein, there’s the “Copyright ? 2015 Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. All Rights Reserved” notice at the bottom — copyright not on the content that I want to reuse, but on the RightsLink popup itself. (Which I guess means I am in violation for including the screenshot above.) Oh, and there’s the misrendering of “Museum f?r Naturkunde” as “Museum für Naturkunde”.

All of this gets me precisely nowhere. As far as I can tell, my only recourse now is to wait three weeks for Wiley to get in touch with me, and hope that they turn out to be?in favour of science.

It’s Sunday afternoon. I could be watching Ireland play France in the Rugby World Cup. I could be out at Staverton, seeing (and hearing)?the world’s last flying Avro Vulcan overfly Gloucester Airport for the last time. I could be watching Return of the Jedi?with the boys, in preparation for the forthcoming Episode VII. Instead, here I am, wrestling with copyright.

How absolutely pointless. What a terrible waste of my life.

Is this what we want researchers to be spending their time on?

Promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts, indeed.

Update (13 October 2015): a happy outcome (this time)

I was delighted, on logging in this morning, to find I had email from?RIGHTS-and-LICENCES@wiley-vch.de with the subject “Permission to reproduce Heinrich (1999:fig. 16) under CC By licence” — a full thirteen working days earlier?than expected. They were apologetic and helpful. Here is key part of what they said:

We are of course happy to handle your request directly from our office ? please find the requested permission here:

We hereby grant permission for the requested use expected that due credit is given to the original source.

If material appears within our work with credit to another source, authorisation from that source must be obtained.

Credit must include the following components:

– Journals: Author(s) Name(s): Title of the Article. Name of the Journal. Publication? year. Volume. Page(s). Copyright Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. Reproduced with permission.

So this is excellent. I would of course have included all those elements in the attribution anyway, with the exception that it might not have occurred to me to state who the copyright holder is. But there is no reason to object to that.

So, two cheers for Wiley on this occasion.?I had to waste some time, but at least none of it was due to deliberate obstructiveness, and most importantly they?are happy for their figure to be reproduced under CC By.

References

• Heinrich, Wolf-Dieter. 1999. The taphonomy of dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Tendaguru, Tanzania (East Africa), based on field sketches of the German Tendaguru expedition (1909-1913). Mitteilungen aus dem Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, Geowissenschaftliche Reihe?2:25-61.

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