From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 13:49:32 +0100

Last month Danny Kingsley — Manager for Scholarly Communications &
ePublishing at the Australian National University (ANU) — highlighted
a number of publishers that have recently changed their self-archiving
(Green OA) policies.

Amongst the publishers named by Kingsley was Springer — the world’s
second-largest journal publisher — which changed its self-archiving
policy earlier this year.

While Springer had previously insisted that where a funder required
papers to be deposited in a central repository like PubMed Central
this could only be done after a 12-month embargo, it allowed authors
to post their papers in institutional repositories immediately. Under
the new policy, however, the 12-month embargo has been extended to
cover papers posted in institutional repositories as well. (Although
authors can still post copies of their accepted manuscripts on their
personal web sites without embargo).

Kingsley concluded that the change was likely a response to the new UK
OA policy introduced by Research Councils UK (RCUK) on April 1st.
Elsewhere, OA advocate Stevan Harnad has described the change as
“Springer Silliness”, and a Springer author has expressed “confusion”
over what the policy actually means.

In the hope of clarifying matters I sent a list of questions to
Springer. I have now published the answers to those questions, and
they can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.ca/2013/06/open-access-springer-tightens-rules-on.html