Elsevier & IOP Still Fully Green & Angelic: Just Ignore Incoherent Distinctions

I am going to make this as brief and as simple as possible, in the fervent hope that it will be read, understood and acted upon by authors and their institutions:

A Green publisher is a publisher that endorses immediate self-archiving of their authors' accepted final drafts (but not necessarily the publisher's version of record) free for all on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That's all it takes for a publisher to be Green (and to be on the Side of the Angels).

In the new language that some Green publishers have jointly adopted for their copyright transfer agreements recently, some new conditions have been added, based on three distinctions. Not all Green publishers have added all three conditions (Elsevier, for example, has only added two of them, IOP all three), but it does not matter, because all three distinctions are incoherent: They have no legal, logical, technical nor practical substance whatsoever. The only thing that a sensible person can and should do with them is to ignore them completely.

Here they are. (The actual wording in the agreement will vary, but I am giving just the relevant gist.)

(1) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but you may only do it on your personal institutional website, not in your institutional repository.

This distinction is completely empty. Your institutional website and your institutional repository are just institutional disk sectors with different (arbitrary) names.

(2) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but you may not do it where there is "systematic distribution."

All websites are systematically harvested by google and other search engines, and that's how most users search and access them.

(I think what the drafters of this absurd condition may have had in mind is that you may not deposit your paper on a website that tries to systematically reconstruct the contents of the entire journal. They are perfectly right about that. But an institutional repository certainly does not do that; it simply displays its own authors' papers, which are an arbitrary fraction of any particular journal. If there is anyone that publishers can -- and should -- go after, it is 3rd party harvesters that reconstruct the contents of the entire journal.)

(3) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon acceptance for publication, free for all -- but not if you are mandated to do it (i.e., you may if you may but you may not if you must).

Authors are advised to advise their publishers, if ever asked, hand on heart, that everything they do, they do out of their own free will, and not out of coercion (and that includes the mandate to publish or perish).

If anyone is minded to spend any more time on this nonsense than the time it took to read this message, then they deserve everything that's coming (and not coming) to them.

Elsevier and IOP authors: Just keep self-archiving in your IRs, exactly as before, and ignore these three silly new clauses, secure in the knowledge that they contain nothing of substance.

Stevan Harnad
Enabling Open Scholarship