From: "Jean-Claude Guédon" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 23 May 2015 12:24:51 -0400

Entirely agreed with Stevan Harnad, except for one point:

Paying extra to obtain OA is not Gold OA; it is APC-Gold OA. Gold OA
includes many journals that are gratis to authors and libre to
readers.

But Stevan is entirely right in chastising the use of the word
"sharing" by A. Wise. This attempt to shift vocabulary, to provide
slightly changed meanings to old words, is classical in producing
propaganda.

Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal



Le jeudi 21 mai 2015 à 19:43 -0400, LIBLICENSE a écrit :

From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 13:31:58 -0400

I will not do yet another-by-point rebuttal, just to have it all once
again ignored by Alicia/Elsevier, responding yet again with nothing
but empty jargon and double talk:

"At each stage of the publication process authors can share their
research: before submission, from acceptance, upon publication, and
post publication."

This “share” is a weasel word. It does not mean OA. It means what
authors have always been able to do, without need of publisher
permission: They can share copies — electronic or paper — with other
individuals. That’s the 60-year old practice of mailing preprints and
reprints individually to requesters. OA means free immediate access
online to all would-be users.

"For authors who want free immediate access to their articles, we
continue to give all authors a choice to publish gold open access with
a wide number of open access journals and over 1600 hybrid titles “

In other words, now, the only Elsevier-autthorized way authors can
provide OA is to pay extra for it (“Gold OA”).

Since 2004  Elsevier had endorsed authors providing free immediate
(un-embargoed) access (“Green OA”) by self-archiving in their
institutional repositories. The double-talk began in 2012.

Elsevier can’t seem to bring itself to admit quite openly (sic) that
they have (after a lot of ambiguous double-talk) back-pedalled and
reneged on their prior policy, instead imposing embargoes of various
lengths. They desperately want to be perceived as having taken a
positive, progressive step forward. Hence all the denial and
double-talk.

They try to say that their decision is “fair” and “evidence based” —
whereas in fact it is based on asking some biassed and ambiguous
questions to some librarians, authors and administrators after having
first used a maximum of ever-changing pseudo-legal gibberish to ensure
that they can only respond with confusion to the confusion that
Elsevier has sown.

We cannot get Elsevier to adopt a fair, clear policy (along the lines
of their original 2004 one) but we should certainly publicize as
loudly and widely as possible the disgraceful and tendentious spin
with which they are now trying to sell their unfair, unclear and
exploitative back-pedalling.

Stevan Harnad