From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2014 08:21:56 -0500

Digital Formality and Digital Reality

1. Sixty percent of journals (including Elsevier) state formally in
their copyright agreements that their authors retain the right to make
their final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted version (Green) Open
Access (OA) immediately, without embargo, by self-archiving them in
their institutional repositories.

2. The Elsevier take-down notices did not pertain to the author's
final version but to the publisher's version of record (and in the
case of 3rd party sites like academia.edu they concerned not only the
version but the location).

3. The IDOA (immediate-deposit, optional-access) mandate is formally
immune to take-down notices, because it separates deposit from OA.

4. For articles published in the 60% of journals in which authors
formally retain their right to provide immediate, unembargoed Green
OA, they can be self-archived immediately in the institutional
repository and also made OA immediately.

5. For articles published in the 40% of journals that formally embargo
OA, if authors wish to comply with the publisher's embargo, the final,
peer-reviewed, revised and accepted version can still be deposited
immediately in the institutional repository, with access set as Closed
Access (CA) during any embargo: only the title and abstract are
accessible to all users; the full text is accessible only to the
author.

6. For CA deposits, institutional repositories have an
email-eprint-request Button with which individual users can launch an
automated email request to the author for an individual copy for
research purposes, with one click; the author can then decide, on an
individual case by case basis, with one click, whether or not the
repository software should email a copy to that requestor.

7. It is the IDOA + Button Strategy that is the update of the
"Harnad-Oppenheim Prepint + Corrigenda" Strategy.

8. But of course even the IDOA + Button Strategy is unnecessary, as is
definitively demonstrated by what I would like to dub the "Computer
Science + Physics Strategy":

9. Computer scientists since the 1980's and Physicists since the
1990's have been making both their preprints and their final drafts
freely accessibly online immediately, without embargo (the former in
institutional FTP archives and then institutional websites, and the
latter in Arxiv, a 3rd-party website) without any take-down notices
(and, after over a quarter century, even the mention of the prospect
of author take-down notices for these papers is rightly considered
ludicrous).

10. I accordingly recommend the following: Let realistic authors
authors practice the Computer Science + Physics Strategy and let
formalistic authors practice the IDOA + Button Strategy -- but let them
all deposit their their final, peer-reviewed, revised and accepted
versions immediately.

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012)
Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair
Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren
Wershler, Eds.)




On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 6:44 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2014 11:09:47 +0000
>
> The recent decision by Elsevier to start sending take down notices to
> sites like Academia.edu, and to individual universities, demanding
> that they remove self-archived papers from their web sites has sparked
> a debate about the copyright status of different versions of a
> scholarly paper.
>
> Last week, the Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University in
> the US, Kevin Smith, published a blog post challenging a widely held
> assumption amongst OA advocates that when scholars transfer copyright
> in their papers they transfer only the final version of the article.
> This is not true, Smith argued.
>
> If correct, this would seem to have important implications for Green
> OA, not least because it would mean that publishers have greater
> control over self-archiving than OA advocates assume.
>
> However Charles Oppenheim, a UK-based copyright specialist, believes
> that OA advocates are correct in thinking that when an author signs a
> copyright assignment only the rights in the final version of the paper
> are transferred, and so authors retain the rights to all earlier
> versions of their work, certainly under UK and EU law. As such, they
> are free to post earlier versions of their papers on the Web.
>
> Charles Oppenheim explains his thinking here:
>
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/guest-post-charles-oppenheim-on-who.html