Saturday, June 2. 2012Time for Elsevier to Improve Its Public Image
Elsevier has formally acknowledged its authors' right to self-archive their final drafts free for all online since 2004.
Under "What rights do I retain as a journal author?", Elsevier's "Authors' Rights & Responsibilities" document formally states that Elsevier authors retain the right to make their final, peer-reviewed drafts Open Access immediately upon publication (no embargo) by posting them on their institutional website (Green Gratis OA): "[As an Elsevier author you retain] the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes"More recently, however, an extra clause has been slipped into this statement of this retained right to self-archive: "but not in institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings."The distinction between an institutional website and an institutional repository is bogus. The distinction between nonmandatory posting (allowed) and mandatory posting (not allowed) is arbitrary nonsense. ("You retain the right to post if you wish but not if you must!") The "systematic" criterion is also nonsense. (Systematic posting would be the institutional posting of all the articles in the journal. But any single institution only contributes a tiny, arbitrary fraction of the articles in any journal, just as any single author does. So the mandating institution would not be a 3rd-party "free-rider" on the journal's content: Its researchers would simply be making their own articles OA, by posting them on their institutional website, exactly as described.) This "systematic" clause is hence pure FUD, designed to scare or bully or confuse institutions into not mandating posting, and authors into not complying with their institutional mandates. (There are also rumours that in confidential licensing negotiations with institutions, Elsevier has been trying to link bigger and better pricing deals to the institution's agreeing either to allow OA to be embargoed for a year or longer or not to adopt a Green OA mandate at all.) Along with the majority of publishers today, Elsevier is a Green publisher: Elsevier has endorsed immediate (unembargoed) institutional Green OA posting by its authors ever since 27 May 2004. Elsevier's public image is so bad today that rescinding its Green light to self-archive after almost a decade of mounting demand for OA is hardly a very attractive or viable option: And double-talk, smoke-screens and FUD are even less attractive It will be very helpful -- in making it easier for researchers to provide (and for their institutions and funders to mandate) Open Access -- if Elsevier drops its "you may if you wish but not if you must" clause, which is not only incoherent, but intimidates authors. (This would also help counteract some of the rather bad press Elsevier has been getting lately...) Stevan Harnad Friday, June 1. 2012Bankruptcy Balderdash: The Publisher Tail Again Trying to Wag the Research Dog
"Open access will bankrupt us,
publishers’ report claims" Times Higher Education Supplement 1 June 2012. It would be useful if those who negotiate with publishers could unite behind a simple response to this kind of publisher FUD about "bankruptcy": The survival of the publishing industry and of peer review are neither at issue nor at risk when Green OA self-archiving of their peer-reviewed research output is mandated by institutions and funders. What publishers are exercised about is insuring their current revenue streams and modus operandi from any risk of downsizing. Institutions and funders, in negotiating with publishers, should stop behaving as supplicants -- as if publishers were doing the research community a favour that we daren't risk provoking them into withdrawing from us. That's nonsense. Nor should institutions and funders negotiate with publishers as if it were the duty and responsibility of the research community to insure the sustainability of publishers' current revenue streams, come what may. Institutions and funders should go ahead and mandate Green OA, universally, for the sake of research and research access. Subscriptions are paying the full cost of publication, handsomely, today. If Green OA makes subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of covering the remaining costs of publication, publishers will adapt. And for those publishers who don't wish to adapt to a downsized business, their journal titles will migrate to publishers who do. That's all there is to it. No contingencies between subscription price negotiations and institutional Open Access policy; nor about embargo length. Institutions and funders: Don't discuss mandates with publishers. It's none of their affair. Just discuss subscription prices. Institutions and funders: Whether or not some publishers have a policy embargoing OA self-archiving, go ahead and mandate immediate deposit, decide how long an embargo on making the deposit OA you want to allow, and state that limit. Authors can do the rest for themselves, especially with the help of the institutional repository's email-eprint-request Button for individual users wishing to request an eprint of an embargoed deposit for research purposes during any OA embargo period. The worst possible thing for institutions or funders to do is to adapt their OA mandate to what publishers claim are their "needs" to ensure protection from bankruptcy: Publishers will survive OA. And the journal titles whose publishers pull out because they are not content with the downsized business will survive too. Research is not publicly funded, conducted and published in order to subsidize the revenue streams of the research publishing industry. Research publishing is a service-provider for research, researchers, their institutions and the funders for whose benefit the research is being done: the tax-paying public. And the "culprit" in the downsizing of research publishing -- who is at the same time the benefactor of which research productivity and progress are the beneficiary -- is the online medium and the economies and efficiencies it has made possible. In other words, Bell Labs, DARPA, Google and Tim Berners-Lee Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique. Stevan Harnad Thursday, May 24. 2012Hungarian Government Drops FUD Campaign (Without Apology)
The Hungarian government has ended (without apology) its FUD campaign against philosophers that had been critical of the government (the "Heller Gang"). Investigation over, no evidence of wrong-doing, all charges dropped, case closed. Yet the FUD campaign succeeded in doing its intended damage. That's what FUD is for...
And the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has suitably disgraced itself, for betraying its historic mandate and refusing to stand up for its members -- as announced by its President, Joseph Palinkas (former minister in the present Hungarian government). Saturday, May 19. 2012How to Maximize Compliance With Funder OA Mandates: Potentiate Institutional Mandates
Richard Poynder has raised some interesting questions in "Open Access Mandates: Ensuring Compliance". Here are some suggestions as to why neither NIH nor the Wellcome Trust (WT) has a compliance rate of 100% -- and what could be done to remedy that:
1. How To Comply. Both the NIH and WT mandates designate Gold OA publishing as one of the means of fulfilling the mandate, instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving as the sole means of compliance (whether or not the fundee publishes in a Gold OA journal. 2. Who Complies. Funder mandates only apply to fundees: only fundees are bound by them. Yet fulfillment can be done by either fundees or non-fundees (publishers, especially in the case of WT), instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving as the sole means of compliance. 3. When To Comply. The designated timing for compliance with both mandates is not immediately upon publication -- instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving immediately upon publication as the sole means of compliance (even if the self-archived draft is not made immediately OA). As noted, it is in publishers' interests to make compliance as delayed as possible, and to leave it in their hands rather than the fundees' hands. 4. What Version To Deposit. It contributes to the delay in compliance and the ambiguity as to who is fulfilling the mandate (the fundee or the publisher) if compliance can wait for the publisher's PDF instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving of the refereed final draft immediately upon publication as the sole means of compliance (even if the self-archived draft is not made immediately OA and the publisher's PDF is optionally deposited later). 5. Where To Deposit. Both NIH and WT mandates stress direct deposit in PubMed Central (PMC), instead of uniformly designating fundee self-archiving of the refereed final draft in the fundee's own institutional reposiitory immediately upon publication as the sole means of compliance (even if the self-archived draft is not made immediately OA and the publisher's PDF is optionally deposited later), thereby recruiting fundees' institutions to monitor and ensure compliance with the fulfillment conditions of the grant (as institutions are always very eager to do!). Institututional ID/OA Mandates Work. None of these delays, ambiguities or uncertainties applies to (effective) institutional mandates such as U. Liege's model ID/OA (immediate-deposit/optional-access) mandate. Not only can author self-archiving in the institutional repository be designated by institutions as the sole means of submitting research for institutional reporting and performance assessment (as Cameron Neylon correctly points out), but institutions are in a position to monitor deposits continuously, not just when a research project grant (which may last for years) has elapsed. Mutual Potentiation Between Institutional and Funder Mandates. In addition, designating institutional repository self-archiving as the means of compliance for both funder and institutional mandates motivates institutions to adopt self-archiving mandates of their own, for all of their research output, in all disciplines, not just NIH- or WT-funded research. (Institutions are the universal providers of all published research, funded and unfunded.) Funder mandates designating institutional deposit make institutional and funder mandates convergent and mutually reinforcing -- rather than divergent and competitive, as funder mandates requiring direct institution-external deposit in PMC (instead of just automated harvesting or export from institutional repositories) do. Effective Institutional Mandates Can Generate 100% OA Globally. The Liege model institutional ID/OA mandate really works. If funders and institutions worldwide collaborate, 100% OA can be reached not just for NIH and WT funded research but for all research. Wednesday, May 16. 2012Counterproductive "Advice" to Elsevier
In my opinion, it is not helpful to the cause of OA or the needs of the research community to use this opportunity to advise Elsevier to make the following extremely counterproductive recommendation -- a recommendation that, like Elsevier's own ambivalent self-archiving policy, starts positively, but then switches to the extreme negative, taking away with one hand what it had seemed to be giving with the other:
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Jan Velterop wrote on the Global Open Access List (GOAL): "One step [for Elsevier] could be to promote self-archiving instead of reluctantly allowing it and then only under certain circumstances. But given that immediacy is obviously not considered the most important feature of OA by many of its advocates (vide many mandates), and immediacy is perhaps the most understandable of the publishers' fears, there is an opportunity for Elsevier to make all the journal material it publishes available with full open access, CC-BY, after a reasonable embargo of a year, maybe two years in less fast-moving disciplines."First, Jan Velterop (JV) asks Elsevier to drop its ambivalence about Green OA self-archiving. So far, so good. But second, Jan makes a factually incorrect claim: that immediate OA is so unimportant to researchers and OA advocates that this is an opportunity for Elsevier to change its current policy (which has been Green since 2004 -- meaning immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving) -- back-pedalling instead to a "reasonable" embargo of a year or two (meaning no longer being Green, as now, on immediate, unembargoed Green Gratis OA self-archiving). Third, as justification for this startling recommendation to Elsevier to back-pedal on its longstanding immediate-Green policy, Jan cites the fact that many mandates allow an embargo -- forgetting the fact that the reason OA embargoes have been allowed by those OA mandates is precisely because the 40% of publishers that are not yet Green (as 60% of publishers, including Elsevier since 2004, already are) still insist on an embargo as a condition for allowing self-archiving at all. In other words, the reason some mandates allow embargoes is not at all because all researchers and all mandates don't consider immediate, unembargoed OA to be important, but because of the non-Green publishers that don't yet allow immediate, unembargoed OA. Jan is here suggesting to Elsevier that it should re-join their ranks. Fourth, Jan refers throughout this recommendation only to the Libre OA [Gratis OA plus CC-BY] from which he has been urging the OA community not to "lower the bar" to the Gratis OA [free online access to the author final draft] on which Elsevier has been Green since 2004, and about which OA advocates are here urging Elsevier to remove its recent self-serving and self-contradictory hedging clause about mandates. Immediate, unembargoed OA may be less important for Libre OA than for Gratis OA, but what is at issue here is Gratis OA. For the sake of both research progress and OA progress, I urge Jan to drop his conterproductive opposition to Green Gratis OA, just as I urge Elsevier to drop the self-contradictory hedging clause about Green Gratis OA in its author rights retention agreement. Stevan Harnad Monday, May 14. 2012Elsevier requires institutions to seek Elsevier's agreement to require their authors to exercise their rights?What rights do I retain as a journal author? "…the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes… (but not in... institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specificagreement with the publisher)..." I am grateful to Elsevier's Director for Universal Access, Alicia Wise, for replying about Elsevier's author open access posting policy. This makes it possible to focus very quickly and directly on the one specific point of contention, because as it stands, the current Elsevier policy is quite explicitly self-contradictory: ALICIA WISE (AW): "Stevan Harnad has helpfully summarized Elsevier’s posting policy for accepted author manuscripts, but has left out a couple of really important elements.I am afraid this is not at all clear. What does it mean to say that Elsevier has a different policy depending on whether an author is posting voluntarily or mandatorily? An author who wishes to comply with an institutional posting mandate is posting voluntarily. An author who does not wish to comply with an institutional posting mandate refrains from posting, likewise voluntarily. The Elsevier policy in question concerns the rights that reside with authors. Is Elsevier proposing that some author rights are based on mental criteria? But if an authors says, hand on heart, "I posted voluntarily" (even where posting is mandatory) is the author not to be believed? (It is true that in criminal court a distinction is made between the voluntary and involuntary -- but the involuntary there refers to the unintended or accidental: Even in mandated posting, the posting is no accident!) So it is quite transparent that the factor that Elsevier really has in mind here is not the author's voluntariness at all, but whether or not the author's institution has a mandatory posting policy - and whether that institutional mandate has or has not been "agreed" with Elsevier. But then what sort of an author right is it, to post if your institution doesn't require you to post, but not to post if your institution requires you to post (except if some sort of "agreement" has been reached with Elsevier that allows the institution to require its researchers to exercise their rights)? That does not sound like an author right at all. Rather, it sounds like an attempt by Elsevier to redefine the author right so as to prevent each author's institution from requiring the author to exercise it without Elsevier's agreement. By that token, it looks as if the author requires Elsevier's agreement to exercise the right that Elsevier has formally recognized to rest with the author. (What sort of right would the right to free speech be if one lost that right whenever one was required -- say, by a court of law, or even just an institutional committee meeting -- to exercise it? -- And what does it mean that an author's institution is required by a publisher to seek an agreement from the publisher for its authors to exercise a right that the publisher has formally stated rests with the author?) AW:We are talking here very specifically about authors posting in their own institutional repositories, not about institution-external deposit or proxy deposit by publishers. AW:Is it? So if institutions mandate depositing in Arxiv rather than institutionally, that would be fine too? (Some mandates already specify that as an option.) Or would Elsevier authors lose their right to exercise their right to post in Arxiv if their institutions mandated it...? AW:The point under discussion is Elsevier authors' right to exercise the right that Elsevier has formally stated rests with the author -- to post their accepted author manuscripts institutionally. What kind of further agreement is needed from the author's institution with Elsevier in order that the author should have the right to exercise a right that Elsevier has formally stated rests with the author? Again, Elsevier's target here is very obviously not author rights at all. Rather, the clause in question is an attempt to influence institutions' own policies, with their own research output, by trying to redefine the author's right to post an article online free for all as being somehow contingent on institutional research posting policy, and hence requiring Elsevier's agreement. It would seem to me that institutions would do well to refrain from making any agreement with Elsevier (or even entering into discussion with Elsevier) about institutional policy -- other than what price they are willing to pay for what journals (even if Elsevier reps attempt to make a quid-pro-quo deal). And it would seem to me that Elsevier authors should go ahead and post their accepted author manuscripts in their institutional repositories, voluntarily, exercising the right that Elsevier has formally recognized as resting with the author alone since 2004, and ignore any new clause that contains double-talk trying to make a link between the author's right to exercise that author right and the policy of the author's institution on whether or not the author should exercise that right. AW:I am not sure what this means. Accepted author manuscripts (of journal articles, from all institutions, in all disciplines) fit into all institutional repositories. That's all that's at issue here. No institution differences; no discipline differences. AW:Fortunately, only two details matter (and they can be made explicit without any danger to one's health!): 1. Does Elsevier formally recognize that "all [Elsevier] authors can post [their accepted author manuscripts] voluntarily to their websites and institutional repositories" (quoting from Alicia Wise here)? According to Elsevier formal policy since 2004, the answer is yes. 2. What about the "not if it is mandatory" clause? That clause seems to be pure FUD and I strongly urge Elsevier -- for the sake of its public image, which is right now at an all-time low -- to drop that clause rather than digging itself deeper by trying to justify it. Sunday, May 13. 2012How Elsevier Can Improve Its Public ImageWhat rights do I retain as a journal author? "…the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes… (but not in... institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specificagreement with the publisher)..." Along with the majority of refereed journal publishers today, Elsevier is a "Green" publisher, meaning Elsevier has formally endorsed immediate (unembargoed) institutional Green OA self-archiving by its authors ever since 27 May 2004. Recently, however, a new clause has been added to "Authors' Rights and Responsibilities," the document in which Elsevier formally recognizes its authors' right to make their final, peer-reviewed drafts Open Access immediately upon publication (no embargo) by posting them on their institutional website (Green Gratis OA). The new clause is: "but not in institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings."The distinction between an institutional website and an institutional repository is bogus. The distinction between nonmandatory posting (allowed) and mandatory posting (not allowed) is arbitrary nonsense. ("You retain the right to post if you wish but not if you must!") The "systematic" criterion is also nonsense. (Systematic posting would be the institutional posting of all the articles in the journal; but any single institution only contributes a tiny, arbitrary fraction of the articles in any journal, just as any single author does; so the mandating institution is not a 3rd-party "free-rider" on the journal's content: its researchers are simply making their own articles OA, by posting them on their institutional website, exactly as described.) This "systematic" clause is hence pure FUD, designed to scare or bully or confuse institutions into not mandating posting, and to scare or bully or confuse authors into not complying with their institutional mandates. (There are also rumours that in confidential licensing negotiations with institutions, Elsevier has been trying to link bigger and better pricing deals to the institution's agreeing not to adopt a Green OA mandate.) Elsevier's public image is so bad today that rescinding its Green light to self-archive after almost a decade of mounting demand for OA is hardly a very attractive or viable option. And double-talk, smoke-screens and FUD are even less attractive or viable. It will hence very helpful in helping researchers to provide -- and their institutions and funders to mandate -- Open Access if Elsevier drops its "you may if you wish but not if you must" clause. It will also help to improve Elsevier's public image. Stevan Harnad Saturday, May 12. 2012Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"What rights do I retain as a journal author? "…the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes… (but not in... institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher)..." Alice Wise (Elsevier, Director of Universal Access, Elsevier) asked, on the Global Open Access List (GOAL): Remedios Melero replied, on GOAL:"[W]hat positive things are established scholarly publishers doing to facilitate the various visions for open access and future scholarly communications that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized?" RM: I would recommend the following change in one clause of the What rights do I retain as a journal author? stated in Elsevier's portal, which says:That would be fine. Or even this simpler one would be fine:"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher. Click here for further information)"RM: By this one:"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal, institutional website, subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article"RM: I think this could be something to be encouraged, celebrated and recognized. "the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal, institutional website or institutional repositories or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article"The metadata and link can be harvested from the institutional repositories by institution-external repositories or search services, and the shameful, cynical, self-serving and incoherent clause about "mandates for systematic postings" ("you may post if you wish but not if you must"), which attempts to take it all back, is dropped. That clause -- added when Elsevier realized that Green Gratis OA mandates were catching on -- is a paradigmatic example of the publisher FUD and double-talk that has no legal sense or force, but scares authors (and their management). Dropping it would be a great cause for encouragement, celebration and recognition, and would put Elsevier irreversibly on the side of the angels (regarding OA). Stevan Harnad Thursday, May 3. 2012Open Access: Gratis and Libre
Mike Taylor writes (on Nature Blog):
"BOAI intended OA to mean much more than just the freedom to read an article online, and the term is used in this stronger sense by most of the people writing about open access today.... That’s not to say that “gratis OA” is not a good thing. Of course, it is. But..." The original BOAI statement -- drafted online collectively by the original BOAI 2001 attendees, but authored mostly by Peter Suber -- was something new that we were improvising as we went along. It became clear, as subsequent years went by, that practical developments since 2001 necessitated some rethinking, revising and updating. The revised, refined definition was formulated in 2008. I might add that I have been working toward (what we eventually dubbed) "OA" since the early 1990's, and for me the first and foremost goal had always been (and still is) immediate, permanent, toll-free online access to 100% of peer-reviewed journal articles, i.e., "Gratis OA". I also have to note that we did not have 100% Gratis OA in 1994, when I made my "Subversive Proposal" for providing it, and we still do not have 100% Gratis OA today, almost two decades later, even though it is fully within reach. We are only at about 20%, except where it is mandated, in which case it jumps to 60% and then climbs steadily toward 100% (if the mandate is effectively formulated and implemented!). Now, to ask for Libre OA (Gratis OA plus some re-use rights, not yet fully agreed upon) today is to ask for more than Gratis OA at a time when authors are not even providing Gratis OA (except if mandated). Libre OA also brings with it numerous unresolved complications, among them the fact that although all authors want users to have free access to their papers (even though they don't bother -- or dare -- to provide it unless mandated), not all authors want to grant users further re-use rights,; nor is it agreed yet what those further re-use rights should be. In addition, publishers, the majority of whom have given their green light to Gratis OA, are far from agreeing to Libre OA. Yes, further re-use rights are important, and desirable, in many (not all) cases. But they are even harder to agree on and provide than Gratis OA, and we have not yet even managed to mandate that in anywhere sufficient numbers. And access itself -- "mere" access -- is not just important, but essential, and urgent, for all peer-reviewed research. Yet 100% Gratis OA is fully within reach (and has been for years): All institutions and funders need do is grasp it, by mandating it. Instead, we have been over-reaching for years now -- for Libre OA, for Gold OA, for copyright reform, for publishing reform, for peer review reform -- and not even getting what is already fully within reach. So I appreciate your point, Mike, that getting much more than Gratis Green OA would be better than getting just Gratis Green OA. But I also think that it's time to stop letting the best get in the way of the better: Let's forget about Libre and Gold OA until we have managed to mandate Green Gratis OA universally. After that, all the other good things we seek will come into reach, and will come to pass. But not if we keep trying, like Stephen Leacock's horseman, to ride off in all directions, while we just keep getting next to nowhere…
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