Open Access Archivangelism

Alessandro Sarretta asked:

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"In a blog post you said that 'Elsevier is fully green - Fully green means the refereed, revised, accepted final draft is openly accessible'

"This is correct reading this Elsevier web page that seems an old one._

"But reading the current Article Elsevier posting policy web page, it says:

Pre-print Definition: A preprint is an author’s own write-up of research results and analysis that has not been peer-reviewed, nor had any other value added to it by a publisher (such as formatting, copy editing, technical enhancement etc...).

Elsevier's Policy: An author may use the preprint for personal use, internal institutional use and for permitted scholarly posting.

In general, Elsevier is permissive with respect to authors and electronic preprints. If an electronic preprint of an article is placed on a public server prior to its submission to an Elsevier journal or where a paper was originally authored as a thesis or dissertation, this is not generally viewed by Elsevier as “prior publication” and therefore Elsevier will not require authors to remove electronic preprints of an article from public servers should the article be accepted for publication in an Elsevier journal.

"So the pre-print shall "not have been peer-reviewed"... Could you share your opinion on that?"

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What matters is the postprint (the "Accepted Author Manuscript [AAM]") not the unrefereed preprint.

Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs [Accepted Author Manuscripts] for their personal voluntary needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution’s repository, e-mailing to colleagues. However, our policies differ regarding the systematic aggregation or distribution of AAMs... Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the publisher’s policies concerning such repositories. Voluntary posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted.

Please see my prior analyses of this Elsevier double-talk about authors retaining the right to make their AAMs OA in their institutional repositories "voluntarily," but not if their institutions mandate it "systematically." Here's a summary:

1. The author-side distinction between an author's self-archiving voluntarily and mandatorily is pseudo-legal nonsense: All authors can assert, safely and truthfully, that whatever they do, they do "voluntarily."

2. The institution-side distinction between voluntary and "systematic" self-archiving by authors has nothing to do with rights agreements between the author and Elsevier: It is an attempt by Elsevier to create a contingency between (a) its "Big Deal" journal pricing negotiations with an institution and (b) that institution's self-archiving policies. Institutions should of course decline to discuss their self-archiving policies in any way in their pricing negotiations with any publisher.

3. "Systematicity" (if it means anything at all) means systematically collecting, reconstructing and republishing the contents of a journal -- presumably on the part of a rival, free-riding publisher hurting the original publisher's revenues; this would constitute a copyright violation on the part of the rival systematic, free-riding publisher, not the author: An institution does nothing of the sort (any more than an individual self-archiving author does). The institutional repository contains only the institution's own tiny random fragment of any individual journal's annual contents. (ArXiv, in contrast, unlike an institutional repository, is indeed a systematic collection of all or almost all the articles in a number of physics and maths journals: Elsevier hence endorses Green OA self-archiving in arXiv, because although it is systematic, it is "voluntary." The pseudo-distinction is hence that although Green OA self-archiving in a mandated institutional repository is not systematic, it can be embargoed despite the fact that all Elsevier authors retain the right to self-archive in their institutional repositories, because it is not "voluntary.")

All of the above is in any case completely mooted if an institution adopts the ID/OA mandate, because that mandate only requires that the deposit be made immediately, not that it be made OA immediately. (If the author wishes to comply with a publisher OA embargo policy -- which Elsevier does not have -- the repository's "Almost-OA" eprint-request Button can tide over researcher needs during any OA embargo with one click from the requestor and one click from the author.)