From: "Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF)" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2015 16:49:31 +0000

Hello Everyone –

After a week of listening to, and conversing with, a number of
researchers, librarians, and other stakeholders, we’ve honed in on the
following points that seem to be causing the most confusion and angst.
Our responses on each point are spread across comment threads and
listservs, and I felt it might be helpful to post some key points
here:

1.      Embargoes: These are neither new, nor unique, to Elsevier.
Publishers require them because an appropriate amount of time is
needed for subscription journals to deliver value to customers before
the full-text becomes available for free.  Confusion has arisen
because we haven’t always enforced our embargos, preferring to work
with Institutional Repositories (IRs) directly to develop
institution-specific agreements.  Our new policy eliminates the need
for repositories to have agreements with us.  Instead we are now
communicating our embargoes more clearly.

2.      Embargo Lengths: Our embargo periods are typically between 12
and 24 months, with some longer or shorter exceptions.  We are now
hearing that it is the length of our embargo periods that is of
concern rather than the fact of their existence. Generally embargos
should be set on a title-by-title basis by publishers, however we
recognize that other stakeholders seek influence over embargo lengths
too and this is reasonable. We have already been planning a review of
our embargo periods in 2015.  While I cannot pre-judge the outcome of
this review, we are very conscious of the many new funding body
policies that have emerged in the last year with 12 month embargo
periods all of which we will factor in.

3.      Author’s rights to self-archive in their IR: We have removed
the need for an institution to have an agreement with us before any
systematic posting can take place in its institutional repository.
Authors may share accepted manuscripts immediately on their personal
websites and blogs, and they can all immediately self-archive in their
institutional repository too.  We have added a new permission for
repositories to use these accepted manuscripts immediately for
internal uses and to support private sharing, and after an embargo
period passes then manuscripts can be shared publicly as well.

4.      Retrospective Action: Based on helpful conversations over the
last week we know we need to make it much more clear that we do not
expect IRs and other non-commercial repositories to take retrospective
action.

5.      New IR Services: We are developing protocols and technology to
help non-commercial sites implement this policy going forward, and
have been piloting tools and services to help automate this – for
example tagged manuscripts and APIs with metadata and other
information about articles published by researchers on your campuses.
To register for more information or to express interest in
participating in a pilot, please see this page.

6.      More clarity: Our new sharing and hosting policies are
intended to provide clarity to researchers so that they understand how
they can share their research, including on newer commercial sharing
sites, and to lift the old requirement for IRs to have agreements with
us.

I have also uploaded a slide to slideshare showing the differences
between our old and new policies and continue to encourage you all to
read these for yourselves:

http://www.slideshare.net/aliciawise/whats-changed-in-sharing-policy

see also:  http://www.elsevier.com/connect/elsevier-updates-its-policies-perspectives-and-services-on-article-sharing

We appreciate the feedback we have received, and wish to continue
these discussions.  We look forward to engaging with you – for example
at the upcoming Open Repositories conference and at library
conferences such as ALA.  You can also always email me directly at
[log in to unmask]

With kind wishes,

Alicia

Dr Alicia Wise
Director of Access and Policy
Elsevier I The Boulevard I Langford Lane I Kidlington I Oxford I OX5 1GB
E: [log in to unmask]