Open Access Archivangelism

Preamble: If you wish to sample some of the most absurd, incoherent, pseudo-legal gibberish on the subject of "rights" retention, "systematicity" and free will, please have a look at what follows under "Elsevier Article Posting Policies" below. (And bear in mind that an institution only provides a tiny fraction of any journal's content.)

Any author foolish enough to be intimidated by this kind of garbled double-talk deserves everything that's coming to him.

My Advice to Authors: Ignore this embarrassing, self-contradictory nonsense completely and exercise your retained "right" to post your final refereed draft ("AAM") in your institutional repository immediately upon acceptance, whether or not it is mandatory, secure in the knowledge that from a logical contradiction anything and everything (and its opposite) follows! (And be prepared to declare, with hand on heart, that as an adult, every right you exercise with your striate musculature is exercised "voluntarily.")

[By the way, as long as Elsevier states that its authors retain the right to post "voluntarily", Elsevier, too, remains on the Side of the Angels insofar as immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving is concerned. It's just that the Angels are a bit glossolalic...]

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Elsevier Article Posting Policies

Accepted author manuscripts (AAMs)

Definition: An accepted author manuscript (AAM) is the author's version of the manuscript of an article that has been accepted for publication and which may include any author-incorporated changes suggested through the processes of submission processing, peer review, and editor-author communications. AAMs do not include other publisher value-added contributions such as copy-editing, formatting, technical enhancements and (if relevant) pagination.

Policy: Authors retain the right to use the accepted author manuscript for personal use, internal institutional use and for permitted scholarly posting provided that these are not for purposes of commercial use or systematic distribution...

Permitted scholarly posting: Voluntary [emphasis added] posting by an author on open websites operated by the author or the author's institution for scholarly purposes, as determined by the author, or (in connection with preprints) on preprint servers...

...Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary [emphasis added] 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 to ensure the sustainability of the journals to which AAMs are submitted [emphasis added]. Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates [emphasis added] 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 [emphasis added] posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted.

Systematic distribution means: policies or other mechanisms designed to aggregate and openly disseminate, or to substitute for journal-provided services, including:

--- The systematic distribution to others via e-mail lists or list servers (to parties other than known colleagues), whether for a fee or for free...

--- Institutional, funding body or government manuscript posting policies or mandates that aim to aggregate and openly distribute the work by its researchers or funded researchers...

This is a comment on
"Horizon 2020:
A €80 Billion Battlefield for Open Access"
an article in AAAS's ScienceInsider which notes that:

"Elsevier's embargoes for green open access currently range from 12 to 48 months"

First, it has to be clearly understood that the existing EU mandate (i.e., requirement) that the EU is now proposing to extend to all of the EU's €80 Billion's worth of funded research -- while something similar is being proposed for adoption in the US by the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) as well as by the currently ongoing petition to the White House (rapidly nearing the threshold of 25,000 signatories) -- is a mandate for the Green OA self-archiving, by researchers, of the final drafts of articles published in any journal. (What is to be mandated is not Gold OA publishing: You cannot require researchers to publish other than in their journals of choice, nor require them to pay to publish.)

And although some publishers do over-charge, and do lobby against Green OA mandates, the majority of journals (including almost all the top journals) have already formally confirmed that their authors retain the right to self-archive their final drafts immediately upon publication -- not just after an embargo period has elapsed.

Moreover, that majority of journals that have formally endorsed immediate, un-embargoed Green OA include all the journals published by the two biggest journal publishers, Springer and Elsevier! The only difference is that unlike Springer, Elsevier has just recently tried to hedge its author rights-retention policy with a clause to the effect that authors retain the right to self-archive if they wish but not if they must (i.e., not if it is mandated!). (See Elsevier's "Authors' Rights & Responsibilities")

(Curious "right," that one may exercise if one wishes, but not if one must! Imagine if citizens had the right to free speech but not if it is required (e.g., in a court of law). But strange things can be said in contracts...)

Elsevier is having an increasingly severe public image problem: It is already widely resented for its extortionately high prices, hedged with "Big Deals" that sweeten the price package by adding journals you don't want, at no extra charge. Elsevier is also itself the subject of an ongoing boycott petition (with over 10,000 signatories) because of its pricing policy.

So Elsevier cannot afford more mud on its face. Elsevier has accordingly taken a public, formal stance alongside Springer, on the side of the angels regarding Elsevier authors' retained right to do un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving of their final drafts on their institutional websites -- but Elsevier alone has tried to hedge its progressive-looking stance with the clause defining the authors' right to exercise their retained right only if they are not required to exercise it..

Elsevier's cynical attempt to hedge its green rights-retention policy against OA mandates will no doubt be quietly jettisoned once it is publicly exposed for the cynical double-talk it is. Meanwhile, Elsevier authors can continue to exercise their immediate, un-embargoed self-archiving rights, enshrined in Elsevier's current rights agreement, with hand on heart, declaring that they are self-archiving because they wish, not because they must, even if it is mandated. A mandate, after all, can either be complied with or not complied with; both choices are exercises of free will, yet another basic right…

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

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

Elsevier Authors' Rights & Responsibilities

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)..."

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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.

"He is correct that all our authors can post voluntarily to their websites and institutional repositories.  Posting is also fine where there is a requirement/mandate AND we have an agreement in place.  We have a growing number of these agreements."

 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:
"An overview of our funding body agreements can be read here.  These agreements, for example, mean that we post to UKPMC for authors who receive funding from a number of funding agencies including the Wellcome Trust.  We deposit manuscripts into PMC for NIH-funded authors."

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:
"Posting in the arXiv is fine too."

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:
"We are also piloting open access agreements with a growing number of institutions, including posting in institutional repositories."

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:
"It is already clear that one size does not fit all institutions, and we are keen to continue learning, listening, and partnering."

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:
"Our access policies can be read in full [here] (health warning: they are written for those who really enjoy detail) and we’ve been working on a more friendly and succinct summary too (but this is still a work in "

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.

The goal of the strategy is transparent:

"We wish to appear to be supportive of open access, formally encoding in our author agreements our authors' right to post their accepted author manuscripts to their institution's open access repository -- but [to ensure that publication remains sustainable,' we wish to prevent institutions from requiring their authors to exercise that right unless they make a side-deal with us."

Not a commendable publisher strategy, at a time when the worldwide pressure for open access is mounting ever higher, and subscriptions are still paying the cost of publication, in full, and handsomely.

If there is eventually to be a transition to hybrid or Gold OA publishing, let that transition occur without trying to hold hostage the authors' right to provide Green OA to their author accepted manuscripts by posting them free for all in their institutional repositories, exercising the right that Elsevier has formally agreed rests with the author.

Stevan Harnad

Elsevier Authors' Rights & Responsibilities

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)..."

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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

Elsevier Authors' Rights & Responsibilities

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)..."

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Alice Wise (Elsevier, Director of Universal Access, Elsevier) asked, on the Global Open Access List (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?"

Remedios Melero replied, on GOAL:

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:

"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.

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, 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

Dana Roth (CalTech Library) wrote:

"Stevan: In fairness to responsible publishers, I think it would be appropriate to call George Monbiot to task for not differentiating between commercial and society journals. Wiley is especially egregious in increasing prices while publishing fewer and fewer articles (e.g. Biopolymers)."

Dana, I think it's wrong to demonize publishers at all, whether commercial or learned-society. Let them charge whatever subscription prices they can get.

The real culprits (to paraphrase Pogo) are researchers -- the 80% of them that don't yet make their refereed final drafts freely accessible online immediately upon acceptance for publication.

It's for that reason that "green" open-access self-archiving mandates from institutions and funders are the natural solution to the problem of making sure that refereed research is accessible to all potential users, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they are published.

But apart from not demonizing publishers, it's also important to name and laud those publishers that have endorsed immediate, un-embargoed green open-access self-archiving. On the side of the angels in this respect are most of the major commercial publishers: Elsevier, Springer and, yes, Wiley.

(In contrast, some of the major society publishers -- notably the American Chemical Society -- are not yet on the side of the angels, and for that they deserve to be named and shamed. -- There are, however, work-arounds, even for such regressive cases.)

No, green OA self-archiving does not solve the journal affordability/over-pricing problem. But what gives that problem its urgency -- what makes it indeed a serials crisis -- will be completely remedied once green OA self-archiving is universally mandated by institutions and funders worldwide: For once the final drafts are accessible free for all, it becomes a far less critical matter to a university whether it can still afford to subscribe to any particular journal. What they cannot afford, their users can access in its green OA version. The real underlying problem -- research accessibility -- is completely solved by mandating green OA, even if the problem of journal affordability is not.

Let me close with the pre-emptive re-posting of the abstract of the paper that answers the habitual rebuttal to what I have just said, namely, that green OA self-archiving is "parasitic" on journal publishers:

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access Is a Research Community Matter, Not a Publishing Community Matter. Lifelong Learning in Europe, XVI (2). pp. 117-118.

ABSTRACT: It is ironic that some publishers are calling Green OA self-archiving “parasitic” when not only are researchers giving publishers their articles for free, as well as peer-reviewing them for free, but research institutions are paying for subscriptions in full, covering all publishing costs and profits. The only natural and obvious source of the money to pay for Gold OA fees – if and when all journals convert to Gold OA -- is hence the money that institutions are currently spending on subscriptions -- if and when subscriptions eventually become unsustainable.

Dixit,

Your Weary Archivangelist (gone quite long of tooth during the past two wasted decades of inaction),
Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

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

SUMMARY: Calling for Green Gratis OA Mandates makes sense. Calling for Libre OA, extra Gold OA funds, or double-standards for journal quality does not. Call for the reasonable. Grasp the reachable. And trust nature to take care of the rest.

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SPARC Europe's OA suggestions to the EC are part sense, part nonsense, part irrelevance:

Sense:

- Open Access means immediate access, without delaying mechanisms

- strive for the shortest embargo period possible

- help in increasing awareness among researchers

- Open Access via Institutional Repositories (green road) and Open Access via publishing (gold road) are complementary strategies

- extend the [EC] Open Access policies to all research areas

[assuming that what is meant here is to extend the EC Green OA self-archiving mandates]

Nonsense:

- Open Access in Institutional Open Access Policies should refer to “Libre” Open Access: free to access and free to re-use

[Libre OA asks for much more than Gratis OA (free online access) and we are nowhere near having Gratis OA yet. It is counter-productive to over-reach and ask for more when you don't even have the less. Mandating Green Gratis OA will eventually lead to Libre OA too, but demanding Libre OA now will lead nowhere for many more years to come.]

- communicate that the quality of Open Access peer-reviewed journals is equal to the quality of subscription peer-reviewed journals

[Utter, utter nonsense, parroted year in and year out by an endless succession of well-meaning know-naughts: The quality of a peer-reviewed journal is what it is, regardless of its cost-recovery model. Is the EC supposed to give a-priori quality bonuses to journals, based on whether or not they happen to be OA, rather than letting them earn it, with their peer-review standards and quality track-records, like all other journals?]

- call for subscription-based publishers to allow authors and institutions to deposit metadata into Open Access repositories and to support Creative Commons licensing of these materials

[Why call for this, since authors can already deposit their metadata? What publishers should be called upon to do is simply to endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving of the author's final draft, as over 60% of journals already do ("being on the side of the angels"]

Irrelevance:

- make funding available to cover the costs of Open Access publishing

[Does the EC have spare funds for this? What is needed is OA, not more money to pay publishers. Institutional subscriptions are paying for publication already. What is needed is to mandate Green Gratis OA self-archiving. If and when funds are needed to pay for Gold OA publishing, they will come from the release of the institutional subscription funds through cancelation.]

- call for subscription-based publishers to start the transition of subscription journals towards Open Access

["Calling on publishers to start the transition" will have no effect and is hence irrelevant. Mandating Green OA, in contrast, will generate OA, and then the publishers will start planning for a transition of their own accord as a natural matter of course if and when mandated Green OA begins causing cancelation pressure.]

- provide an infrastructure enabling publisher content to be harvested and deposited into institutional repositories

[What is needed is not an infrastructure. What is needed is a mandate to deposit.]

Stevan Harnad
Enabling Open Scholarship