Making Papers Transparent
AACR once printed OA articles, and called them ads to comport with laws
The “Crimes and Criminal Procedures” section of US laws, Subsection 1734 (18 U.S.C. § 1734) reads:
Whoever, being an editor or publisher, prints in a publication entered as second class mail, editorial or other reading matter for which he has been paid or promised a valuable consideration, without plainly marking the same "advertisement" shall be fined under this title.
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has been historically scrupulous about disclosing funding of articles in its journals as a result — by the letter of the law, but perhaps not the spirit.
In the 1980s, when page charges were the norm, articles where page charges included this text:
The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
However, this is what that “marked advertisement” amounted to in print editions — no banner across the top of every page or major labeling, just this:
With the advent of Gold OA, this statement — modified appropriately — was applied to OA articles that were also delivered in print issues:
The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of publication fees. Therefore, and solely to indicate this fact, this article is hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 USC section 1734.
Online, the statement was included at the bottom of HTML articles in this manner:
The PDF labeling of these articles was as obscure as it has been previously in print:
In 2024, AACR ceased print publication, and suddenly these disclosures — which existed in both print and online — were no longer included.
Was print more transparent than digital? Or was it just token labeling to avoid trouble with the postmaster?