From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 1 May 2015 13:27:27 -0400

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF)
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Stevan –
>
> We continue to permit immediate self-archiving in an author’s institutional repository.  This is now true for all institutional repositories, not only those with which we have agreements or those that do not have mandates.

Hi again Alicia,

I am afraid you missed what I was pointing out:

The 2004 Elsevier OA self-archiving policy endorsed immediate-deposit
and immediate (unembargoed) OA.

The latest policy embargoes OA in institutional repositories.

You are using "self-archiving" ambiguously. No "permission" is needed
to deposit. What is at issue is when the deposit can be made OA.

Nor do institutional mandates to deposit have anything whatsoever to
do with anything. What is at issue is when the deposit can be made OA.

So, as I said in my prior posting, "Elsevier should state quite
explicitly that its latest revision of its policy on author OA
self-archiving has taken a very specific step backward from the policy
first adopted in 2004."

> You are correct that under our old policy, authors could post anywhere without an embargo if their institution didn’t have a mandate.

No, Elsevier's original 2004 policy (see below) made no mention of
mandates whatsoever (although there were a number of institutional and
funder mandates by that time).

Elsevier's attempt to create a link between the author's right to make
the final draft OA and their institution's OA policy was made in 2012,
after the prior Elsevier policy had been in effect for 8 years.

And then, as now, I maintained that the link with institutional OA
policy is absurd and meaningless, and authors should ignore it
completely.

> Our new policy is designed to be consistent and fair for everybody, and we believe it now reflects how the institutional repository landscape has evolved in the last 10+ years.

The current Elsevier policy now removes the absurd link with
institutional OA policy, which had been used as a pretext for
embargoing OA. Elsevier makes it "consistent" by embargoing OA in all
institutional repositories, whether or not they have an OA mandate.

In contrast, the equally absurd attempt to prevent Arxiv authors from
continuing to do what they have been doing since 1991 has now been
dropped, so unembargoed OA in Arxiv, previously "forbidden" (though
authors have been doing it uninterruptedly for nearly a quarter
century) is now offically "permitted" --  in Arxiv but not in
institutional repositories.

So neither consistency nor fairness is at issue -- quite the opposite.
This is back-pedalling from 2004 (and 2012) being disguised as
consistency and fairness, to make it look like a positive rather than
a negative step.

>  We require embargo periods because for subscription articles, an appropriate amount of time is needed for journals to deliver value to subscribing customers before the manuscript becomes available for free. Libraries understandably will not subscribe if the content is immediately available for free. Our sharing policy now reflects that reality.

Although there is still no objective evidence that OA self-archiving
reduces subscriptions, I am quite ready to believe that once all
journal articles (of all journal publishers) are accessible as
immediate OA, subscriptions will become unsustainable. That outcome is
inevitable -- and it will happen with or without OA mandates and with
or without publisher OA embargoes.

What Elsevier's OA policies are attempting to do is to delay the
inevitable for as long as possible, in order to sustain subscription
revenue for as long as possible, by embargoing OA.

Fine. There is a fundamental conflict of interest here, between what
is best for the publishing industry and what is best for the research
community, its institutions, its funders, and the tax-paying public
that funds the funders.

OA embargoes impede research. It's as simple as that. But they also
sustain subscription revenue. So publishers are simply impeding
research in order to sustain subscription revenue.

It would be nice if publishers stated that honestly, in justifying
their embargo policies, rather than trying to disguise it as trying to
help research and the research community in any way.

The attempt to embargo OA will of course fail -- although it will
succeed in slowing OA progress, as it has been doing so far.

What will undermine the attempts to sustain subscription revenue at
all costs will be the eventual realization by the research community
that all the essential functions of peer-reviewed journal publishing
can be provided at far, far lower cost to the research community than
either subscription fees or (today's) inflated Gold OA fees (which I
have come to call "Fools Gold").

And that is via "Fair-Gold" peer-review service fees, paid for out of
a fraction of institutions' windfall savings from cancelling all
subscriptions.

And what will make those subscription cancellations possible is
exactly what Elsevier and other publishers are trying to prevent, or
at least delay as long as possible, by embargoing it, namely
universal, immediate, unembargoed Green OA: precisely what the
research community is trying to mandate.

Harnad, S (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions
unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social
Sciences Blog 4/28
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/

[SNIP]

The outcome is inevitable, and optimal (for the research community and
the public); the only part that is not predictable (because human
rationality is not always predictable) is how long publishers will
succeed in delaying the optimal and inevitable...

Best wishes,

Stevan


> From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
> Sent: Friday, May 01, 2015 1:24 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Elsevier updates it article-sharing policies, perspectives and services
>
> On May 1, 2015, at 7:30 AM, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF) <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Stevan –
>
> Elsevier supports the need for researchers to share their research and collaborate effectively. In light of the recent STM consultation on the principles for article sharing, I wanted to reach out to you directly to let you know about some changes we are making which will enable Elsevier published content to be shared more widely. To underpin these efforts we have updated our approach – informed by very constructive input from institutions, authors and funders we work with - and are now launching new guidelines. I invite you to read our article hosting and article sharing guidelines on Elsevier.com.
>
> We have published an article on Elsevier Connect, our online communication platform to explain some further details behind the changes and the new technologies and exciting pilots we are deploying to facilitate sharing. As always, we welcome comments or suggestions, and are happy to discuss any questions or concerns.  Please do not hesitate to contact me.
>
> With very kind wishes,
>
> Alicia
>
> Key highlights
>
> We continue to support sharing of preprints, accepted manuscripts, and final publications and provide simple guidelines for authors about how they can share at each stage of their workflow.
>
> We are providing a range of options for researchers to share their work publicly, including a newShare Links service which provides 50 days free access to the final article on ScienceDirect.
>
> We are making it clear that we want to work with hosting platforms, such as institutional repositories, to make sharing easy and seamless for researchers.  We will no longer require an agreement with institutional repositories and instead clarify that self-archived accepted manuscripts can be used under a CC-BY-NC-ND license and that they can be hosted and shared privately during the embargo and publically shared after embargo.
>
> We are also providing a wider range of ways for researchers to share their work privately during the journal’s embargo period, such as in private workgroups on sites such as Mendeley and MyScienceWork.
>
>
> Dr Alicia Wise
> Director of Access and Policy
> Elsevier I The Boulevard I Langford Lane I Kidlington I Oxford I OX5 1GB
> M: +44 (0) 7823 536 826 I E: [log in to unmask]
> Twitter: @wisealic
>
>
> Dear Alicia,
>
> I've looked over the latest Elsevier revision of its policy on author OA self-archiving, as requested.
>
> The essential points of the latest policy revision are two:
>
> I. Elsevier still endorses both immediate-deposit and immediate-OA, for the pre-refereeing preprint, anywhere (author's institutional home page, author's institutional repository, Arxiv, etc.).
>
> II. Elsevier still endorses immediate-deposit and immediate-OA for the refereed postprint on the author's home page or in Arxiv, but not immediate-OA in the author's institutional repository, where OA is embargoed.
>
> You asked for my comments. Here they are:
>
> (1) Elsevier should state quite explicitly that its latest revision of its policy on author OA self-archiving has taken a very specific step backward from the policy first adopted in 2004:
>
> An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal web site and on his institution's web site (including its institutional respository).
>
> Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single, definitive archive for the formal published version.
>
> Elsevier has withdrawn its endorsement of immediate-OA in the author's institutional repository. It's best not to try to conceal this in language that makes it sound as if Elsevier is taking positive steps in response to the demand for OA.
>
> (2) The distinction between the author's institutional home page and the author's institutional repository is completely arbitrary and empty. Almost no one consults either a home page or a repository directly. The deposits and links are simply harvested by Google and Google Scholar (and other harvesters), and that's where users search and retrieve them. (Hence all an institution need do is designate the institutional disk sector containing the author's publicatiosn in the "repository" to be part of the author's "home page.")
>
> (3) If an author (foolishly) decides to comply with an Elsevier OA embargo, there is the automated copy-request Button, with which the author can provide a copy almost-immediately, with one click from the requestor and one click from the author. (Elsevier's reputation is not enhanced by the fact that many users and authors will now have to do two extra clicks to get a copy, because Elsevier was not happy to let them do it with one click.)
>
> My advice is accordingly to go back to the original 2004 policy. You had it right the first time. The rest has only muddied Elsevier's reputation.
>
> With best wishes,
>
> Stevan