Open Access Archivangelism

Alicia Wise wrote:

Dear Stevan,

I admire your vision and passion for green open access – in fact we all do here at Elsevier - and for your tenacity as your definitions and concepts of green open access have remain unchanged for more than 15 years. We also recognize that the open access landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years, for example with the emergence of Social Collaboration Networks. This refresh of our policy, the first since 2004, reflects what we are hearing from researchers and research institutions about how we can support their changing needs. We look forward to continuing input from and collaboration with the research community, and will continue to review and refine our policy.

Let me state clearly that we support both green and gold OA. Embargo periods have been used by us – and other publishers – for a very long time and are not new. The only thing that’s changed about IRs is our old policy said you had to have an agreement which included embargos, and the new policy is you don’t need to do an agreement provided you and your authors comply with the embargo period policy. It might be most constructive for people to just judge us based on reading through the policy and considering what we have said and are saying.

With kind wishes and good night,
Alicia Wise, Elsevier

---

--- CHANGES ---
Dear Alicia,

You wrote:

"This refresh of our policy [is| the first since 2004... Embargo periods have been used by us... for a very long time and are not new. The only thing that’s changed about IRs is our old policy said you had to have an agreement which included embargos..."

Is this the old policy that hasn't changed since 2004 (when Elsevier was still on the "side of the angels" insofar as Green OA was concerned) until the "refresh"? (I don't see any mention of embargoes in it...):

---

Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 03:09:39 +0100
From: "Hunter, Karen (ELS-US)"
To: "'harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk'"
Cc: "Karssen, Zeger (ELS)" , "Bolman, Pieter (ELS)" , "Seeley, Mark (ELS)"
Subject: Re: Elsevier journal list

Stevan,

[H]ere is what we have decided on post-"prints" (i.e. published articles, whether published electronically or in print):

An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal web site and on his institution's web site (including its institutional respository). Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single, definitive archive for the formal published version.

We will be gradually updating any public information on our policies (including our copyright forms and all information on our web site) to get it all consistent.

Karen Hunter
Senior Vice President, Strategy
Elsevier
+1-212-633-3787
k.hunter_at_elsevier.com

---

Yes Alicia, the definition of authors providing free, immediate online access (Green OA self-archiving) has not changed since the online medium first made it possible. Neither has researchers’ need for it changed, nor its benefits to research.

What has changed is Elsevier policy -- in the direction of trying to embargo Green OA to ensure that it does not put Elsevier's current revenue levels at any risk.

Elsevier did not try to embargo Green OA from 2004-2012 — but apparently only because they did not believe that authors would ever really bother to provide much Green OA, nor that their institutions and funders would ever bother to require them to provide it (for its benefits to research).

But for some reason Elsevier is not ready to admit that Elsevier has now decided to embargo Green OA purely to ensure that it does not put Elsevier's current subscription revenue levels at any risk.

Instead, Elsevier wants to hold OA hostage to its current revenue levels -- by embargoing Green OA, with the payment of Fools-Gold OA publication fees the only alternative if an author wishes to provide immediate OA. This ensures that Elsevier's current revenue levels either remain unchanged, or increase.

But, for public-relations reasons, Elsevier prefers to try to portray this as all being done out of “fairness,” and to facilitate “sharing” (in the spirit of OA).

The “fairness” is to ensure that no institution is exempt from Elsevier’s Green OA embargoes.

And the “sharing” is the social sharing services like Mendeley (which Elsevier owns), about which Elsevier now believes (for the time being) that authors would not bother to use them enough (and their institutions and funders cannot mandate that they use them) -- hence that that they would not pose a risk to Elsevier's current subscription revenue levels.

Yet another one of the “changes” with which Elsevier seems to be trying to promote sharing is by trying to find a way to outlaw the institutional repositories’ "share button" (otherwise known as the “Fair-Dealing” Button).

So just as Elsevier is trying to claim credit for “allowing” authors to do “dark” (i.e., embargoed, non-OA) deposits, for which no publisher permission whatsoever is or ever was required, Elsevier now has its lawyers scrambling to find a formalizable way to make it appear as if Elsevier can forbid its authors to use the Share Button to provide individual reprints to one another, as authors have been doing for six decades, under yet another new bogus formal pretext to make it appear sufficiently confusing and threatening to ensure that the responses to Elsevier author surveys (for its "evidence-based policy") continue to be sufficiently perplexed and meek to justify any double-talk in either Elsevier policy or Elsevier PR.

The one change in Elsevier policy that one can applaud, however (though here too the underlying intentions were far from benign), is the CC-BY-NC-ND license (unless Elsevier one day decides to back-pedal on that too too). That license is now not only allowed but required for any accepted paper that an author elects to self-archive.

Let me close by mentioning a few more of the howlers that keep making Elsevier's unending series of arbitrary contractual bug-fixes logically incoherent (i.e., self-contradictory) and technically nonsensical, hence moot, unenforceable, and eminently ignorable by anyone who takes a few moments to think instead of cringe. Elsevier is trying to use pseudo-legal words to squeeze the virtual genie (the Web) back into the physical bottle (the old, land-based, print-on-paper world):

Locus of deposit: Elsevier tries to make legal distinctions on "where" the author may make their papers (Green) OA on the Web: "You may post it here but not there." "Here" might be an institutional website, "there" may be a central website. "Here" might be an institutional author's homepage, "there" might be an institutional repository.

But do Elsevier's legal beagles ever stop to ask themselves what this all means, in the online medium? If you make your paper openly accessible anywhere at all on the web, it is openly accessible (and linkable and harvestable) from and to anywhere else on the Web. Google and google scholar will pick up the link, and so will a host of other harvesters and indexers. And users never go to the deposit site to seek a paper: They seek and find and link to it via the link harvesters and indexers. So locus restrictions are silly and completely empty in the virtual world.

The silliest of all is the injunction that "you may post it on your institutional home page but not your institutional repository." What nonsense! The institutional home page and the institutional repository are just tagged disk sectors and software functions, of the self-same institution. They are virtual entities, created by definition; one can be renamed as the other at any time. And their functionalities are completely swappable or integrable too. That too is a feature of the virtual world.

So all Elsevier is doing by treating these virtual entities as if they were physical ones (besides confusing and misleading their authors) is creating terminological nuisances, forcing system administrators to keep re-naming and re-assigning sectors and functions, needlessly, and vacuously, just to accommodate vacuous nuisance terminological stipulations.

(The same thing applies to "systematicity" and "aggregation," which I notice that Elsevier has since dropped as futile: The attempt had been to outlaw posting where the contents of a journal were being systematically aggregated, by analogy with a rival free-riding publisher systematically gathering together all the disparate papers in a journal so as to re-sell them at a cut-rate. Well not only is an institution no free-riding aggregator: all it is gathering is its own paper output, published in multiple disparate journals. But, because of the virtual nature of the medium, it is in fact the Web itself that is systematically gathering all disparate papers together, wherever they happen to be hosted, using their metadata tags: author, title, journal, date, URL. The rest is all just software functionality. And if the full-text is out there, somewhere, anywhere, and it is OA, then there is no way to stop the rest of this very welcome and useful functionality.)

The Arxiv exception. In prior iterations of the policy, Elsevier tried (foolishly) to outlaw central deposit. They essentially tried to tell authors who had been making their papers OA in Arxiv since 1991 that they may no longer do that. Well, that did not go down very well, so those "legal" restrictions have now been replaced by the "Arxiv exception": Authors making their papers OA there (or in RePeC) are now officially exempt from the Elsevier OA embargo.

Well here we are again: an arbitrary Elsevier restriction on immediate-OA, based on locus of deposit. The Pandora's box that this immediately opens is that all a mandating institution need do in order to detoxify Elsevier's OA embargo completely is to mandate immediate (dark) deposit of all institutional output in the institutional repository alongside remote deposit in Arxiv (which is already automated through the SWORD software). That completely moots all Elsevier OA embargoes. Yet another example of Elsevier's ineffectual nuisance stipulations consisting of ad-hoc, pseudo-legal epicycles, all having one sole objective: to try to scare authors off doing anything that might possibly pose a risk to Elsevier's current revenue streams, using any words that will do the trick, even if only for a while, and even if they make no sense.

What's next, Elsevier? "You may use this software but not this software"?

The Share Button. Although it never defines what it means by "Share Button" (nor why it is trying to outlaw it), if what Elsevier means is the Institutional Repository's copy-request Button, intended to provide individual copies to individual copy-requestors, then this too is just a software-facilitated eprint request.

Whenever a user seeks an embargoed deposit, they can click the Button to send an email to the author to request a copy. The author need merely click a link in the email to authorize the software to send the copy.

So does Elsevier now want to make yet another nuisance stipulation, so the Button cannot be called a "Share Button," so instead the name of the author of the embargoed paper has to be made into an email link that notifies the author that the requestor seeks a copy, with the requestor's email alive, and clickable, so that inserting the embargoed paper's URL will attach one copy to the email?

Elsevier is not going to make many friends by trying to force its authors to jump through gratuitous hoops in order to accommodate Elsevier's ever more arbitrary and absurd attempts to contain the virtual ether with arbitrary verbal hacks.

There are more. There are further nuisance tactics in the current iteration of Elsevier's charm initiative, in which self-serving restrictions keep being portrayed as Elsevier's honest attempts to facilitate rather than hamper sharing. One particularly interesting one that I have not yet deconstructed (but that the attentive reader of the latest Elsevier documentation will have detected) likewise moots all Elsevier OA embargoes even more conveniently than depositing all papers in Arxiv -- but I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

So Alicia, if Elsevier "admires [my] vision," let me invite you to consult with me about present and future OA policy conditions. I'll be happy to share with you which ones are logically incoherent and technically empty in today's virtual world. It could save Elsevier a lot of futile effort and save Elsevier authors from a lot of useless and increasingly arbitrary and annoying nuisance-rules.

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad

[drawing by Judith Economos]

I will not do yet another detailed, point-by-point rebuttal in response to Alicia/Elsevier's latest tergiversations ("COAR-recting the record"), just to have it all once again ignored, and instead replied to yet again with nothing but empty jargon and double talk:

"At each stage of the publication process authors can share their research: before submission, from acceptance, upon publication, and post publication."

This “share” is a weasel word. It does not mean OA. It means what authors have always been able to do, without need of publisher permission: They can share copies — electronic or paper — with other individuals. That’s the 60-year old practice of mailing preprints and reprints individually to requesters. OA means free immediate access online to all would-be users.

"For authors who want free immediate access to their articles, we continue to give all authors a choice to publish gold open access with a wide number of open access journals and over 1600 hybrid titles “

In other words, now, the only Elsevier-autthorized way authors can provide OA is to pay extra for it (“Gold OA”).

Since 2004 Elsevier had endorsed authors providing free immediate (un-embargoed) access (“Green OA”) by self-archiving in their institutional repositories. The double-talk began in 2012.

Elsevier can’t seem to bring itself to admit quite openly (sic) that they have (after a lot of ambiguous double-talk) back-pedalled and reneged on their prior policy, instead imposing embargoes of various lengths. They desperately want to be perceived as having taken a positive, progressive step forward. Hence all the denial and double-talk.

Elsevier tries to argue that their decision is “fair” and “evidence based” — whereas in fact it is based on asking some biassed and ambiguous questions to some librarians, authors and administrators after having first used a maximum of ever-changing pseudo-legal gibberish to ensure that they can only respond with confusion to the confusion that Elsevier has sown. In reality all Elsevier is doing is trying to make authors and their institutions hostage to either subscriptions or (Fools) Gold OA fees by embargoing Green OA. Anything that will sustain Elsevier's current revenue streams and M.O.

We cannot get Elsevier to retain a fair, clear policy (along the lines of their original 2004 policy) but we should certainly expose, name and shame them as loudly and widely as possible for the disgraceful and tendentious spin with which they are now trying to sell their unfair, unclear and exploitative back-pedalling.

Stevan Harnad

On May 1, 2015, at 7:30 AM, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF) wrote:

"Dear Stevan –

"Elsevier supports the need for researchers to share their research and collaborate effectively. In light of the recent STM consultation on the principles for article sharing, I wanted to reach out to you directly to let you know about some changes we are making which will enable Elsevier published content to be shared more widely. To underpin these efforts we have updated our approach – informed by very constructive input from institutions, authors and funders we work with - and are now launching new guidelines. I invite you to read our article hosting and article sharing guidelines on Elsevier.com.

"We have published an article on Elsevier Connect, our online communication platform to explain some further details behind the changes and the new technologies and exciting pilots we are deploying to facilitate sharing. As always, we welcome comments or suggestions, and are happy to discuss any questions or concerns. Please do not hesitate to contact me."

with very kind wishes,

Alicia

"Key highlights:

"We continue to support sharing of preprints, accepted manuscripts, and final publications and provide simple guidelines for authors about how they can share at each stage of their workflow.

"We are providing a range of options for researchers to share their work publicly, including a new Share Links service which provides 50 days free access to the final article on ScienceDirect.

"We are making it clear that we want to work with hosting platforms, such as institutional repositories, to make sharing easy and seamless for researchers. We will no longer require an agreement with institutional repositories and instead clarify that self-archived accepted manuscripts can be used under a CC-BY-NC-ND license and that they can be hosted and shared privately during the embargo and publically shared after embargo.

"We are also providing a wider range of ways for researchers to share their work privately during the journal’s embargo period, such as in private workgroups on sites such as Mendeley and MyScienceWork."

Dr Alicia Wise
Director of Access and Policy
Elsevier I The Boulevard I Langford Lane I Kidlington I Oxford I OX5 1GB
M: +44 (0) 7823 536 826 I E: a.wise@elsevier.com
Twitter: @wisealic

---

Dear Alicia,

I've looked over the latest Elsevier revision of its policy on author OA self-archiving, as requested.

The essential points of the latest policy revision are two:

I. Elsevier still endorses both immediate-deposit and immediate-OA, for the pre-refereeing preprint, anywhere (author's institutional home page, author's institutional repository, Arxiv, etc.).

II. Elsevier still endorses immediate-deposit and immediate-OA for the refereed postprint on the author's home page or in Arxiv, but not immediate-OA in the author's institutional repository, where OA is embargoed.

(1) Elsevier should state quite explicitly that its latest revision of its policy on author OA self-archiving has taken a very specific step backward from the policy first adopted in 2004:

An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal web site
and on his institution's web site (including its institutional respository).
Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the
journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our
permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository
elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring
to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect -
but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the
refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single,
definitive archive for the formal published version.

Elsevier has withdrawn its endorsement of immediate-OA in the author's institutional repository. It's best not to try to conceal this in language that makes it sound as if Elsevier is taking positive steps in response to the demand for OA.

(2) The distinction between the author's institutional home page and the author's institutional repository is completely arbitrary and empty. Almost no one consults either a home page or a repository directly. The deposits and links are simply harvested by Google and Google Scholar (and other harvesters), and that's where users search and retrieve them.

[Hence the worries of Elsevier's market analysts and legal beagles about "systematic aggregation" (now revised to just "aggregation") by mandatory institutional repositories are completely misplaced! The aggregation occurs at the level of the harvester (Google, etc.), not at the level of the source (the institution -- whether home page or repository). Besides, all an institution need do to oblige and become compliant with Elsevier's empty distinction is to designate the institutional disk sector containing the author's publications in the "repository" to be part of the author's "home page." -- Here's a clue for the technologically phase-lagged: Aggregation in cyberspace is no longer a matter of physical locus but of metadata tagging. This moots all of Elsevier's pseudo-distinctions for all practical as well as legal purposes.]

(3) If an author (foolishly) decides to comply with an Elsevier OA embargo, there is the automated copy-request Button, with which the author can provide a copy almost-immediately, with one click from the requestor and one click from the author. (Elsevier's reputation is not enhanced by the fact that many users and authors will now have to do two extra clicks to get a copy, because Elsevier was not happy to let them do it with one click.)

My advice is accordingly to go back to the original 2004 policy. You had it right the first time. The rest has only muddied Elsevier's reputation.

With best wishes,

Stevan

---

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF) wrote:

Hi Stevan –

"We continue to permit immediate self-archiving in an author’s institutional repository. This is now true for all institutional repositories, not only those with which we have agreements or those that do not have mandates."

Hi again Alicia,

I am afraid you missed what I was pointing out:

The 2004 Elsevier OA self-archiving policy endorsed immediate-deposit and immediate (unembargoed) OA.

The latest policy embargoes OA in institutional repositories.

You are using "self-archiving" ambiguously. No "permission" is needed to deposit. What is at issue is when the deposit can be made OA.

Nor do institutional mandates to deposit have anything whatsoever to do with anything. What is at issue is when the deposit can be made OA.

So, as I said in my prior posting, "Elsevier should state quite explicitly that its latest revision of its policy on author OA self-archiving has taken a very specific step backward from the policy first adopted in 2004."

"You are correct that under our old policy, authors could post anywhere without an embargo if their institution didn’t have a mandate."

No, Elsevier's original 2004 policy (see below) made no mention of mandates whatsoever (although there were a number of institutional and funder mandates by that time).

Elsevier's attempt to create a link between the author's right to make the final draft OA and their institution's OA policy was made in 2012, after the prior Elsevier policy had been in effect for 8 years.

And then, as now, I maintained that the link with institutional OA policy is absurd and meaningless, and authors should ignore it completely.

"Our new policy is designed to be consistent and fair for everybody, and we believe it now reflects how the institutional repository landscape has evolved in the last 10+ years."

The current Elsevier policy now removes the absurd link with institutional OA policy, which had been used as a pretext for embargoing OA. Elsevier makes it "consistent" by embargoing OA in all institutional repositories, whether or not they have an OA mandate.

In contrast, the equally absurd attempt to prevent Arxiv authors from continuing to do what they have been doing since 1991 has now been dropped, so unembargoed OA in Arxiv, previously "forbidden" (though authors have been doing it uninterruptedly for nearly a quarter century) is now offically "permitted" -- in Arxiv but not in institutional repositories.

So neither consistency nor fairness is at issue -- quite the opposite. This is back-pedalling from 2004 (and 2012) being disguised as consistency and fairness, to make it look like a positive rather than a negative step.

"We require embargo periods because for subscription articles, an appropriate amount of time is needed for journals to deliver value to subscribing customers before the manuscript becomes available for free. Libraries understandably will not subscribe if the content is immediately available for free. Our sharing policy now reflects that reality."

Although there is still no objective evidence that OA self-archiving reduces subscriptions, I am quite ready to believe that once all journal articles (of all journal publishers) are accessible as immediate OA, subscriptions will become unsustainable. That outcome is inevitable -- and it will happen with or without OA mandates and with or without publisher OA embargoes.

What Elsevier's OA policies are attempting to do is to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, in order to sustain subscription revenue for as long as possible, by embargoing OA.

Fine. There is a fundamental conflict of interest here, between what is best for the publishing industry and what is best for the research community, its institutions, its funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders.

OA embargoes impede research. It's as simple as that. But they also sustain subscription revenue. So publishers are simply impeding research in order to sustain subscription revenue.

It would be nice if publishers stated that honestly, in justifying their embargo policies, rather than trying to disguise it as trying to help research and the research community in any way.

The attempt to embargo OA will of course fail -- although it will succeed in slowing OA progress, as it has been doing so far.

What will undermine the attempts to sustain subscription revenue at all costs will be the eventual realization by the research community that all the essential functions of peer-reviewed journal publishing can be provided at far, far lower cost to the research community than either subscription fees or (today's) inflated Gold OA fees (which I have come to call "Fools Gold").

And that is via "Fair-Gold" peer-review service fees, paid for out of a fraction of institutions' windfall savings from cancelling all subscriptions.

And what will make those subscription cancellations possible is exactly what Elsevier and other publishers are trying to prevent, or at least delay as long as possible, by embargoing it, namely universal, immediate, unembargoed Green OA: precisely what the research community is trying to mandate.

Harnad, S (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (1997) How to Fast-Forward Serials to the Inevitable and the Optimal for Scholars and Scientists. Serials Librarian 30: 73-81. (Reprinted in C. Christiansen & C. Leatham, Eds. Pioneering New Serials Frontiers: From Petroglyphs to CyberSerials. NY: Haworth Press, and in French translation as Comment Accelerer l'Ineluctable Evolution des Revues Erudites vers la Solution Optimale pour les Chercheurs et la Recherche

The outcome is inevitable, and optimal (for the research community and the public); the only part that is not predictable (because human rationality is not always predictable) is how long publishers will succeed in delaying the optimal and inevitable...

Best wishes,

Stevan

Comments on "What would be the implications of a ‘gold’ Open Access REF policy?" (Ben Johnson, HEFCE)

---

Ben Johnson “this post ignores … the commonly heard prediction that universal green OA will somehow deliver a sustainable gold OA future all on its own…

Let me spell out that commonly heard prediction, explaining exactly how and why today's pre-green gold OA is fool’s gold -- unaffordable and unsustainable -- and exactly how and why universal green OA, on its own, will deliver a sustainable gold OA future, in the form of post-green fair-gold:

0. Lost Impact: Journal subscriptions are costly, unaffordable and growing, research funds are scarce, hard to come by and shrinking, and research access, usage, impact, productivity and progress are being needlessly lost every day that we fail to provide OA.

1. Over-Pricing: Pre-green gold OA publication fees are arbitrarily and hugely over-priced. (We will see how much, and why, shortly.)

2. Double-Payment: Payment for pre-green gold is double payment: (i) subscription fees for incoming papers plus (ii) gold fees for outgoing papers. (Must-have subscription journals cannot be cancelled by an institution until those same articles are accessible to users in some other way.)

3. Double_Dipping: On top of that, paying the same "hybrid gold" journal (both subscription and optional gold) for pre-green hybrid gold also allows publisher double-dipping.

4. "Rebates": Even if the pre-green hybrid gold publisher promises all N of its subscribing institutions a full, 100% rebate on all hybrid gold income received, that only means that (N-1)/N of whatever hybrid gold any institution pays for its own outgoing hybrid gold papers becomes a subsidy to all the other N-1 subscribing institutions: The institution only gets back 1/Nth of its hybrid gold outlay. (The UK, for example, would get back a 6% subscription rebate for its hybrid gold outlay; the rest of the UK hybrid gold outlay would become a rebate to the other 94% of subscribing institutions in the countries that were not foolish enough to pay pre-emptively for pre-green gold.) Unless the full gold OA rebate goes to the same institution that paid for the gold (by deducting it from the subscription fee), it is still double-payment.

5. Repositories: Research funds are scarce, subscriptions are barely affordable, and pre-green gold payment is completely unnecessary, because green OA can be provided at no extra cost. (Institutional repositories already exist anyway, for multiple purposes, so their cost per paper is negligible, particularly compared to the grotesque cost per paper for pre-green gold.)

6. CC-BY: CC-BY is most definitely not so urgent today, compared to access itself, as to be worth the extra cost of pre-green gold today: CC-BY will come quite naturally of its own accord soon after universal green prevails, and at no extra cost. (We will see how and why shortly.)

7. Embargoes: Publisher embargoes on green are ineffectual because of the repositories’ copy-request Button -- if, but only if the paper was mandatorily deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, exactly as HEFCE requires). The sole purpose of publishers' OA embargoes today is to try to ensure that -- come what may -- their current level of revenue per paper published, whether via subscriptions or via fool's gold, is sustained. (Please pause for a moment to think this through. It says it all.)

8. Cancelation: So post-green — i.e., once immediate-deposit green has been mandated and provided universally, by all institutions and funders, as HEFCE has done -- institutions can at last cancel their journal subscriptions, because then their users can access the content another way.

9. Obsolete Costs: The post-green unsustainability of subscriptions will force publishers to cut all publishing costs that have been made obsolete by the post-green OA era: Publishers will be forced to phase out the print edition, the online edition, access-provision and archiving: these functions will now be offloaded onto the distributed global network of green OA institutional repositories. And publishers current level of revenue per article will not be sustained.

10. Fair Gold: To cover the remaining post-green cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing — which is just the cost of managing peer review itself — post-green journals will convert to affordable, sustainable fair gold. Institutions will easily pay this service fee, per outgoing paper, out of a fraction of their windfall subscription cancelation savings on incoming papers.

In other words, post-green, subscriptions will be gone, embargoes will be gone, and all OA will be CC-BY (where desired).

Ben Johnson: “Would repositories disappear in a gold OA world? No, they’re still useful for theses etc. Monitoring would continue to be necessary for any OA policy.”

In the Post-green fair-gold OA world there will no longer be any need to monitor OA policy. Everything published will be fair-gold OA! But there will certainly be a need for the worldwide network of green OA repositories — to provide access and archving in place of the pre-green subscription journals: For it will have been the cancelation pressure generated by universally mandated-and-provided green OA that drove the entire downsizing and transition to fair gold.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

______ (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

______ (2013) The Postgutenberg Open Access Journal (revised). In, Cope, B and Phillips, A (eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal (2nd edition). 2nd edition of book Chandos.

______ (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

---

Ben Johnson:
December 8, 2014 at 10:16 pm

Stevan, you make an excellent set of points. Particularly interesting to me is the notion that ‘offsetting’ schemes, even those that look quite generous on the face of it (like RSC, who offer APC vouchers equal to the full subscription rate of a given institution), are still set up to replace subscriptions with APCs at the 100% level.

While it isn’t a professional mission of mine to drive down the cost of scholarly communication at the expense of all else, clearly one of the most compelling advantages of your 100% green-leveraged transition idea is that it offers an opportunity to make the whole of scholarly publishing much cheaper than it is now. We should always be mindful that the price of OA publishing in ‘top’ journals can reach into the £000’s but the cost of posting in a repository is £33, and posting on the arXiv costs just $7 (as I read somewhere the other day). A case for the marginal benefit of spending those extra thousands of pounds on gold fees has, as far as I’m aware, not been made – even if that marginal benefit includes CC BY.

As I’ve argued before in this blog, I’m not convinced that journal publishing need do much more than referee articles and stamp them with their brand sticker. So, while the system probably won’t ever get down to being just $7 per article, there are strong public policy reasons why funders of research would not be averse to an outcome that managed to do away with a lot of the superfluities that surround that most highly affected of artefacts, the “version of record”. (I do think there is a good strategic argument for wanting CC BY, though, if perhaps there is no economic or financial case.)

Most interestingly for the neutral, the success criterion of such a green-leveraged transition is identical to the success criterion of a gold future: both require ~100% uptake, globally. So this makes for an interesting fight, doesn’t it?

Here they are:

Cornée, Nathalie and Madjarevic, Natalia (2014) The London School of Economics and Political Science 2013/2014 RCUK open access compliance report. The London School of Economics and Political Science, Library, London, UK.

Abstract: In September 2014, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) reported to Research Councils UK on the School’s compliance with the recently introduced RCUK Policy on Open Access (OA). This reports provides detail around the article processing charges (APC) data and RCUK Call for Evidence report. Background In April 2013, the revised RCUK Policy on Open Access came into effect. The policy requires journal articles or conference proceedings arising from research funded wholly or partially by a RCUK grant should be made freely available online (or “Open Access”). There are two main routes to make papers open access: a) the Green route, which is the LSE preferred route, when the full text of papers are deposited into an institutional repository such as LSE Research Online. To select this route, embargo periods must be no longer than the 12 months permitted by RCUK (no charge applies); b) the Gold route, which provides immediate, unrestricted access to the final version of the paper via the publisher's website, often using a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence - it may involve payment of an APC to the publisher. In 2013, we received the RCUK OA block grant for 2013/14 of £62,862. We set up the LSE Institutional Publication Fund using this grant and this was managed by the Library, allowing eligible RCUK-funded researchers to apply for APC funds. Additionally, the School was awarded a pump-prime funding allocation from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for open access, which was also added to the fund. Of the 141 papers we identified as RCUK-funded for Year 1, 50 papers are open access via the Green route and 73 via the Gold, resulting in an 87% compliance rate.

Seventy-three (73) OA articles, at about £1,000 a shot via Gold -- vs. fifty (50) at no cost via Green!

That RCUK £62,862 could have funded 4 doctoral research students or 2 postdoctoral researchers. Instead, it is paying publishers even more than they are already being paid for subscriptions (and for hybrid Gold publishers it's even double-paying them).

For 73 articles!

And 73 articles that could have been provided for free via Green -- if instead of dangling scarce money in front of authors RCUK had simply insisted on immediate deposit, irrespective of embargo length.

One can only hope that the spot-on and timely new HEFCE policy of requiring immediate deposit, now, in order to be eligible for REF2020, will stanch this gratuitous, obdurate Finch/RCUK profligacy.

And that the EU's similar policy will help reinforce it.

Meanwhile there's nothing stopping institutions from being more sensible, by requiring immediate deposit and using the RCUK windfall to better purpose (till it is sensibly redirected to research).

On Tue, May 27, 2014, Alicia Wise (ELS-OXF)  wrote:

Alicia Wise (Elsevier):

Hi Stevan,

I must confess to being utterly perplexed by this email. Elsevier's policies have not changed (though we are reflecting and reviewing, as always) so is it that Romeo has changed the way it classifies our existing policies?  Very interested in learning  more...

With kind wishes,

Alicia

Dr Alicia Wise
Director of Access and Policy
Elsevier

---

Stevan Harnad:

Hi Alicia,

I agree completely that Elsevier's Green OA No-Embargo Policy has not changed at all from the way Karen formulated it 10 years ago:

"An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal web site and on his institution's web site (including its institutional respository). Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single, definitive archive for the formal published version."  

But SHERPA Romeo is classifying the Policy correctly as Green (and for some Elsevier journals "Blue," which actually also means Green! But because of Romeo's absurd colour scheme, "Romeo Blue" means that the refereed final draft can be immediately self-archived without embargo, whereas "Romeo Green" is reserved for when both the refereed final draft and the pre-refereeing draft can be immediately self-archived -- which is utterly irrelevant for OA, and causes needless and endless confusion, being at odds with the way "Green OA" is now universally used!)



But I also have to add that some of the confusion is caused by Elsevier's more recent attempts to add some pseudo-legal hedges to its Green OA policy, to the effect that Elsevier's authors retain the right to do everything Karen specified in 2004 except if they are required to exercise that right (by their institutions), in which case they may not do it.

That is every bit as absurd as SHERPA's green/blue distinction, and can and should also be ignored by all authors. But you wanted to learn more...

I think that today, the 10th anniversary of the Elsevier Green OA Policy, would be an excellent day to publicly scrap the empty hedges and re-assert the very progressive and constructive Elsevier Policy as it was and is. The hedges just cause gratuitous confusion and are very bad for Elsevier's image...

With best wishes,

Stevan Harnad

Elsevier Keeps Revising Its Double-Talk (But Remains Fully Green)
How Elsevier Can Improve Its Public Image
Elsevier's Public Image Problem
Institutions & Funders: Ignore Elsevier Take-Down Notices (and Mandate Immediate-Deposit)
Some Quaint Elsevier Tergiversation on Rights Retention
Publisher Double Dealing on OA
Free Will and Systematicity
Elsevier requires institutions to seek Elsevier's agreement to require their authors to exercise their rights?

---

Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 23:51:58
From: Stevan Harnad  

Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving

Elsevier has just gone from being a Romeo "Pale-Green" publisher to a full Romeo Green publisher: Authors have the publisher's official green light to self-archive both their pre-refereeing preprints and their refereed postprints. 

Elsevier has thereby demonstrated that -- whatever its pricing policy may be -- it is a publisher that has heeded the need and the expressed desire of the research community for Open Access (OA) and its benefits to research productivity and progress. 
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html 

There will be the predictable cavils from the pedants and those who have never understood the real meaning and nature of OA: "It's only the final refereed draft, not the publisher's PDF," "It does not include republishing rights," "Elsevier is still not an OA publisher." 

I, for one, am prepared to stoutly defend Elsevier on all these counts, and to say that one could not have asked for more, and that the full benefits of OA require not one bit more -- from the publisher. 

For now it's down to you, Dear Researchers! Elsevier (and History) is hereafter fully within its rights to say: 

"If Open Access is truly as important to researchers as they claim it is -- indeed as 30,000+ signatories to the PLoS Open Letter attested that it was http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/cgi-bin/plosSign.pl -- then if researchers are not now ready to provide that Open Access, even when given the publisher's official green light to do so, then there is every reason to doubt that they mean (or even know) what they are saying when they clamour for Open Access." 

Elsevier publishes 1,700+ journals. That means at least 200,000 articles a year. Eprints.org will be carefully quantifying and tracking what proportion of those 200,000 articles is made OA by their authors through self-archiving across the next few months and years. Indeed we will be monitoring all of the over 80% of journals sampled by Romeo that are already green. 

(The following Romeo summary stats are already out of date, because 1700 pale-green journals have now become bright green! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html but we will soon catch up at: http://romeo.eprints.org/ [which is under construction, waiting for full journal lists from each of the 93 publishers sampled so far].) 

The OA ball is now clearly in the research community's court (not the publishing community's, not the library community's). Let researchers and their employers and funders now all rise to the occasion by adopting and implementing institutional OA provision policies. Don't just sign petitions for publishers to provide OA, but commit your own institution to providing it: 

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php 

Stevan Harnad 

---

Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 03:09:39 +0100 
From: "Hunter, Karen (ELS-US)"  
To: "'harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk'"  
Cc: "Karssen, Zeger (ELS)" , "Bolman, Pieter (ELS)" , "Seeley, Mark (ELS)"  
Subject: Re: Elsevier journal list 

Karen Hunter (Elsevier):

Stevan, 

[H]ere is what we have decided on post-"prints" (i.e. published articles, whether published electronically or in print): 

An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal web site and on his institution's web site (including its institutional respository). Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single, definitive archive for the formal published version. 

We will be gradually updating any public information on our policies (including our copyright forms and all information on our web site) to get it all consistent. 

Karen 

Karen Hunter 
Senior Vice President, Strategy 
Elsevier 
+1-212-633-3787 
k.hunter--elsevier--com 

The only effective way to make inflated subscriptions unsustainable is for funders and institutions to mandate Green OA self-archiving.

Tim Gowers is quite right that “the pace of change is slow, and the alternative system that is most strongly promoted — open access articles paid for by article processing charges [“Gold OA”] — is one that mathematicians tend to find unpalatable. (And not only mathematicians: they are extremely unpopular in the humanities.)… there is no sign that they will help to bring down costs any time soon and no convincing market mechanism by which one might expect them to.”

This is all true as long as the other form of OA (“Green OA” self-archiving by authors of published articles in OA repsositories, mandated by funders and institutions) has not prevailed. Pre-Green Gold is "Fool's-Gold." Only Post-Green Gold is Fair-Gold.

The current Finch/RCUK policy, preferring Gold OA, has had its predictable perverse effects:

1. sustaining arbitrary, bloated Gold OA fees
2. wasting scarce research funds
3. double-paying publishers [subscriptions plus Gold]
4. handing subscription publishers a hybrid-gold-mine
5. enabling hybrid publishers to double-dip
6. abrogating authors' freedom of journal-choice [based on cost-recovery model, embargo or licence instead of on quality]
7. imposing re-mix licenses that many authors don't want and most users and fields don't need
8. inspiring subscription publishers to adopt and lengthen Green OA embargoes [to maxmize hybrid-gold revenues]
9. handicapping Green OA mandates worldwide [by incentivizing embargoes]
10. allowing journal-fleet publishers to confuse and exploit institutions and authors even more

But the solution is also there, as already adopted by University of Liege and FRS-FNRS (the Belgian Francophone research funding council), EC Horizon2020 and now also by HEFCE for REF2020.

a. funders and institutions mandate immediate-deposit
b. of the peer-reviewed final draft
c. in the author's institutional repository
d. immediately upon acceptance for publication
e. whether journal is subscription or Gold
f. whether access to the deposit is immedate-OA or embargoed
g. whether license is transfered, retained or CC-BY;
h. institutions implement repository's facilitated email eprint request Button;
i. institutions designate immediate-deposit the mechanism for submitting publications for research performance assessment;
j. institutions monitor and ensure immediate-deposit mandate compliance

This policy restores author choice, moots publisher embargoes, makes Gold and CC-BY completely optional, provides the incentive for author compliance and the natural institutional mechanism for verifying it, consolidates funder and institutional mandates; hastens the natural death of OA embargoes, the onset of universal Green OA, and the resultant institutional subscription cancellations, journal downsizing and transition to Fair-Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable price, paid out of institutional subscription cancellation savings instead of over-priced, double-paid, double-dipped Fool's-Gold. And of course Fair-Gold OA will license all the re-use rights users need and authors want to allow.

In summary, plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Gold OA today are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.

______ (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

______ (2013) Comments on HEFCE/REF Open Access Mandate Proposal. Open access and submissions to the REF post-2014

______ (2013) Finch Group reviews progress in implementing open access transition amid ongoing criticisms. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog November 18th 2013

______ (2013) “Nudging” researchers toward Gold Open Access will delay the shift to wider access of research. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog December 5th, 2013

"For U.K. journals or those which publish U.K.-authored research, this new policy means that we now have “Green” status on SHERPA ROMEO (its highest ranking)"

Taylor & Francis Green OA Self-Archiving Policy is just fine for OA needs:

3.2 Retained rights. In assigning Taylor & Francis or the journal proprietor copyright, or granting an exclusive license to publish, you retain: the right to post your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) on your departmental or personal website at any point after publication of your article.

I.e., no OA embargo.

As for the later hedge:

Embargoes apply… if you are posting the AAM to an institutional... repository.

Ignore this completely.

The author’s institutional repository (IR)is the author’s institutional website. Period.

Authors and institutions: Please don’t prolong the needless, empty, pseudo-legal nonsense and subterfuge that has been holding back OA for decades. Ignore the phoney, groundless distinction among labelled disk-sectors in your institutional website and self-archive your final draft in your IR immediately upon acceptance (as HEFCE/REF2020 & EC/Horizon2020 require), and make it OA immediately.

Your Wizened & Weary Archivangelist

Wouter Gerritsma, wrote in GOAL:

"For two working groups of the Dutch University libraries I was asked to make a calculation for the costs of a 100% Gold open access model. It will only costs 10.5 million euro extra was my conclusion. Blogged at http://wowter.net/2014/03/05/costs-going-gold-netherlands/"

Unless I have misunderstand, this "10.5 million euro extra” for Dutch University Libraries means 10.5 million euro extra over and above what Dutch University Libraries are paying for subscriptions (34 million euros).

In other words, for a surcharge of 10.5 million dollars, Dutch University libraries can purchase gold OA for Dutch research output (assuming that suitable gold OA journals exist for all Dutch research output, and that all Dutch researchers are willing to publish in them).

But, at the same time, Dutch University libraries also have to continue to pay to subscribe to the research input from all other universities and research institutions worldwide, as long as the latter publish in subscription-based journals rather than gold OA journals (or are unwilling or unable to pay for gold OA).

This pre-emptive double-payment for gold OA I have come to call “Fool’s Gold."

What is being left out of this calculation, of course, is that the Netherlands, like all countries, can have OA at no extra cost at all by mandating green OA self-archiving of all of its research output in Dutch universities’ institutional repositories.

In other words, Wouter's calculations sound like a response to Sander Dekker's Dutch echo of the UK Finch Committee recommendations to pay extra for gold OA instead of just mandating green OA.

Such recommendations originate, not coincidentally, from the two countries with the heaviest concentration of the journal publishing industry, and hence the journal publishing industry lobby, as repeatedly voiced in the Netherlands by Sander Dekker, Netherlands State Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

All the published objections to the Finch recommendations would apply to Dekker’s Dutch recommendations if they were ever to become a policy (mandate). Fortunately they are not mandatory and can and should be ignored in favor of mandating green OA, as the European Commission has done. The UK mandate will also (it is to be hoped) shortly shored up with an immediate-deposit requirement from HEFCE.

To understand why green OA needs to be mandated first, and how it will first provide OA, and then make subscriptions unsustainable, inducing publishers to cut costs and convert to Fair Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable price by offloading all archiving and access provision onto the worldwide network of mandatory green OA institutional repositories, see:

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

---

Wouter Gerritsma replied:

Stevan,
 
Yes we could have green with the current subscription models and repository infrastructure. But still some important players don’t allow green (Wiley, Nature and ACS to mention a few)
 
But all I wanted to do, and was requested to do, to make a calculation to see what it would cost if our junior minister Sander Dekker would get what he wanted. Complete Gold OA for the Netherlands.
 
It would cost us 43 instead of 34 million euro.
Currently we are spending already 34 (subscriptions) plus 4 million (OA APC). So we are rapidly falling into a trap of paying twice http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/30/paying-twice-or-paying-thrice-brienza/
 
Wouter  

Wouter,

Yes, of course I knew that you were only the messenger, and doing the calculation! It is the pressure from Sander Dekker (or, rather, from those who are putting the pressure on Sander Dekker!) that is behind the foolish idea of increasing the already overstretched Dutch research publication budget by 30% from 34M euros for subscriptions to 43M by adding payment for pre-emptive, over-priced, double-paid Fool's Gold OA!

But there is a solution for green OA embargoes: In the case of Elsevier, they're no problem, because Elsevier does not have a green OA embargo -- just a lot of empty, non-binding pseudo-legalistic double-talk about authors retaining the right to self-archive unembargoed "except if they are required [mandated] to exercise that retained right." 

That is of course patent nonsense. But for those timid authors who don't realize it, they can still be mandated to deposit the final refereed draft of their articles in their IR immediately upon acceptance for publication, but to keep it under "Closed Access" if they wish to comply with an embargo. The author can then provide individual access on a case-by-case basis: Users click the IR's eprint-request Button to request an individual copy, and the author can then comply with the request with one click.

Needless extra clicks for the (timid) author, but extra access too, and extra usage, uptake, and impact. (And a lot better than paying a needless extra 10M!)

And of course the result after a few years of mandatory immediate deposit, providing 60% immediate OA for the unembargoed deposits and 40% Button-mediated access will be that embargoes will quietly die their inevitable, well-deserved deaths, as more and more authors provide immediate OA instead of clicks.

Green OA embargoes, in other words, are illusory impediments, bits of FUD to confound timid authors. No sensible person on the planet believes they have any chance of actually holding back the Green OA dam (something the citizens of the Netherlands should understand!).

Best wishes,

Stevan

See Exchange on Elsevier Website regarding Elsevier Take-Down Notices (and please note that this concerns only authors' final drafts, not Elsevier's PDF version-of-record):

December 17, 2013 at 9:05 pm
Stevan Harnad: Tom, I wonder if it would be possible to drop the double-talk and answer a simple question: Do or do not Elsevier authors retain the right to make their peer-reviewed final drafts on their own institutional websites immediately, with no embargo? Just a Yes or No, please… Stevan

December 18, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Tom Reller (Elsevier): Hello Dr. Harnad. I don’t agree with your characterization of our explanation here, but nevertheless as requested, there is a simple answer to your question – yes. Thank you.

December 20, 2013
Stevan Harnad: Tom, thank you. Then I suggest that the institutions [and funders] of Elsevier authors ignore the Elsevier take-down notices (and also adopt an immediate-deposit mandate that is immune to all publisher take-down notices by requiring immediate deposit, whether or not access to the immediate-deposit is made immediately OA)… Stevan 

Do follow Peter Suber's wise advice to authors to try to retain their right to self-archive with OA un-embargoed -- but also deposit your final draft immediately upon acceptance whether or not you make your deposit OA immediately; and make sure your institution and funder both adopt an immediate institutional deposit mandate to ensure that all researchers deposit immediately. (And remember that this all concerns the author's final draft, not the publisher's PDF version-of-record.)

Paradoxically, publisher take-down notices for the publisher's proprietary PDF version-of-record are a good thing for the adoption of sensible, effective OA policies and practices: Sleep-walking authors and their institutions need to be awakened to the pragmatics and implications of the difference between the author's final, peer-reviewed, revised, accepted version and the publisher's PDF version-of-record: Green OA mandates are all about the former, not the latter.

Stevan Harnad