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Budapest Open Access Initiative: BOAI Forum Archive [BOAI] [Forum Home] [index] [prev] [next] [options] [help]boaiforum messages[BOAI] Re: Elsevier Still Onside of Angels on Immediate, Unembargoed Green OA Self-Archiving By Its AuthorsFrom: Stevan Harnad <harnad AT ecs.soton.ac.uk>
On 2013-05-02, at 3:17 AM, Andras Holl <holl AT konkoly.hu> wrote: > Dear Stevan, > > Regardless however right you are, Elsevier's play with words succesfully ↵ confuses > a large number of authors, who do not deposit because of this. Dear Andras, You are quite right. But word-play is word-play, and the only way to defeat it ↵ is to use one's brains. That's what authors, their institiutions and their funders need to do, with ↵ mandates that are clear, effective, monitored and verified. Elsevier policy allowing immediate, unembargoed self-archiving by authors is ↵ identical to Springer's policy, but the way, apart from all the formal FUD. Springer is ↵ perfectly straightforward about it. So ignore the FUD, deposit immediately, and make the immediate-deposit OA ↵ immediately. Leave the FUD for those who are fatuous enough to be taken in by it. Below is a recent posting I did on this very point on another list. Best wishes, Istvan ELSEVIER VS ACADEMIC SLOW-WITTEDNESS Elsevier has many very unsavoury practices: It overcharges for subscriptions; it tries [and succeeds] to make confidential contingency deals with ↵ universities, linking subscription prices to university OA policy agreements; it lobbies ↵ against OA mandates; and it hedges its policy on Green OA with so much unspeakable nonsense that it is hard to sort out the signal from the noise. Yet the signal is clear for those with eyes to see and wits to filter out FUD: Elsevier authors all retain the right to make their refereed final drafts free ↵ online immediately upon acceptance for publication. For anyone with any common sense, that's all that's needed. Ignore all the accompanying double-talk about mandates and "systematicity." It's ↵ all just incoherent formalistic FUD. Deposit your final draft in your institutional ↵ repository and make it immediately OA and pay no attention to anything else Elsevier says about it. The trouble is, many people still do not have the sense to realize that. So they keep solemnly agonizing over absurd details like "You may only exercise the right to self-archive that all Elsevier authors retain if you are not required to exercise it" -- which makes as much sense as: "You ↵ may only exercise the right to self-archive that all Elsevier authors retain if you ↵ do not have a blue-eyed maternal uncle." Well I'm beginning to think that slow-wittedness deserves to learn its lesson the hard way. So let those so inclined keep solemnly agonizing over how to "comply" with Elsevier's hedged gibberish. (The physicists in Arxiv instantly intuited all of this nearly quarter century ago, and computer scientists, with anonymous FTP archives, even earlier. The rest of us have only ourselves to blame for our lost quarter-century of research access and impact...) > > Andras > > On Wed, 1 May 2013 20:24:46 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote > > On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 5:10 PM, BISSET J. <james.bisset AT ↵ durham.ac.uk> wrote: > > > > > > > > > From our understanding of Elsevier policy this is not the case in two ↵ instances: > > > > 1) if the institution requires deposit in their institutional ↵ repository > > 2) if the funder requires open access. > > > > > Dear James, > > > > Elsevier rights agreements state that authors retains the right to ↵ make their final drafts OA immediately upon publication: no embargo. > > > > I will answer your more detailed questions below, but let me already ↵ give you a simple general answer from which all the specific ones can be ↵ deduced. > > > > If a contract says you have the right to do X, then it cannot go on ↵ to stipulate that you only have the "right to exercise" your right to ↵ do X if you are not required to exercise it. That is empty double-talk, and can ↵ and should be completely ignored as empty. A right is a right; you either have ↵ it or you don't. > > > > Moreover, Elsevier authors do not need Elsevier's permission to ↵ deposit in their IRs any more than they need Elsevier's permission to go to the ↵ WC! > > > > The only thing at issue is the right to make the deposit immediately ↵ OA (i.e., free online). And Elsevier (like Springer, and about 60% of all ↵ publishers) state that the author retains the right to make the final draft OA ↵ immediately upon publication: no OA embargo. > > > > So all authors with any sense should go ahead and exercise that ↵ formally endorsed right that they retain! > > > > > > > > > I have an email from Elsevier today confirming that in either of the ↵ two cases above, immediate deposit is permitted but open access is not ↵ permitted until [after] an embargo period... > > > > > > > Elsevier is just playing on words here. As I said, the right to ↵ deposit is not at issue. Elsevier does not have any say over where I put my ↵ final draft. > > > > The only right at issue is the right to make the deposit immediately ↵ OA (i.e., free online). > > > > > > > > > Additionally, Durham has reissued its mandate for self-archiving, ↵ including a requirement that only those deposited (not necessarily open access) ↵ can be used for consideration in promotion or probation (the 'how' this will ↵ work us still being looked at - So this has not yet been registered anywhere). > > > > > > > Bravo on adopting the optimal institutional OA mandate. Soon we can ↵ hope that the Durham mandate will be reinforced by the very same mandate from ↵ HEFCE/REF: only articles whose final drafts were deposited in the author's ↵ institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication will be ↵ eligible for submission to the next REF (2020). > > > > Institutional and HEFCE immediate-deposit mandates can then mutually ↵ reinforce one another, and institutions will be able to devise a simple ↵ mechanism for monitoring and verifying compliance. > > > > > > > Because we now mandate deposit, Elsevier have indicated we cannot ↵ make any publications open access until we sign an agreement with them - which ↵ includes restricting access from immediate upon publication (as it was without ↵ a mandate) to the embargo periods mentioned above. > > > > > > > This is very interesting: Have you asked yourself why Elsevier is ↵ asking for a second agreement? Isn't the author's signed agreement enough, if ↵ it is really sufficient to accord him a right yet prevent him from exercising ↵ that right? > > > > Well obviously not, because of the double-talk I just mentioned. In ↵ an agreement with the clause > > > > > > > > > Clause C1: "You retain the right to do X" > > > > > followed by the clause > > > > > > > > > Clause C2: "but you may not "exercise your right" to ↵ do X if you are required to do X" > > > > > you are sanctioning a contradiction. Logically speaking (and ↵ contracts must obey logic as surely as they must obey the law), this is pretty ↵ much the same as simply saying: > > > > > > > > > Clause C1: "You may do X" > > > > > and > > > > > > > > > Clause C2: "You may not do X." > > > > > With a logical contradiction, you can pretty much take your choice ↵ and do whatever you like, because anything (and the opposite of anything) ↵ follows from a contradiction. > > > > A good choice would be to read sequentially, follow Clause 1, and ↵ simply ignore Clause 2, which just says the opposite. If challenged, cite ↵ clause 1. > > > > And this is the real reason that Elsevier is not comfortable with ↵ relying on its signed author rights agreement with its authors as grounds for ↵ restraining them form doing what the retain the right to do if they are ↵ required to do it. So they instead try to get a signature to yet another ↵ agreement, from yet another party -- the university -- a further agreement tjat ↵ would have the (failed) intended effect of the author rights agreement: The ↵ institution must sign that it may not require the author to exercise his right ↵ to provide immediate OA. > > > > Solution? Simple: The university should not sign! > > > > If Elsevier really thinks its author agreement has already seen to it ↵ that mandated authors may not provide immediate OA if required by his ↵ university, then there is no call for the university to sign a thing. > > > > Of course, this is not quite the way Elsevier goes about trying to ↵ get the university to sign: It proposes a contingency, in confidential pricing ↵ negotiations, between the subscription deal it offers the university, and ↵ whether or not they require immediate OA. > > > > This would be unethical if it weren't so ludicrous. > > > > Of course the university should not sign away its right to mandate ↵ immediate-deposit because of a subscription-deal contingency. > > > > But the solution is even simpler than that. Not only should the ↵ university not sign any agreement with Elsevier over what it may or may not ↵ require its researchers do, but the university should not worry too much about ↵ embargoes; it should simply implement the "Almost OA" ↵ email-eprint-request Button. > > > > That way not only will the university's immediate-deposit mandate ↵ (with the help of the HEFCE/REF immediate-deposit mandate) ensure that all ↵ final drafts are immediately deposited and that at least 60% of those ↵ immediate-deposits (including all Elsevier deposits!) will be made immediately ↵ OA. But, in addition, even the those immediate-deposits that are from from the ↵ 40% of journals -- which (unlike Springer and Elsevier and APS and IOP and all ↵ the other publishers who are on the Side if the angels) try to embargo OA -- ↵ will be made "Almost OA", via the Button. > > > > And with the help of the eprint Button, the ID/OA mandate will go on ↵ to make OA embargoes as ineffectual as Clause 2, once the immediate-deposit ↵ mandate becomes universal. > > > > And a word about "systematicity": Systematically ↵ duplicating the contents of a journal would mean duplicating all of its ↵ contents. But a single institution just provides a tiny (and unsystematic) ↵ fraction of any journal's contents. > > > > Globally mandated OA will be another story: But Elsevier cannot hope ↵ to persuade all universities worldwide to desist from mandating OA! (And it is ↵ noteworthy that Elsevier is not even trying to get research funders to sign ↵ "agreements" not mandate OA, or to extend OA embargoes; Elsevier's ↵ strategy there is lobbying, since they don't have the subscription discount ↵ carrot with which it lures naive universities into signing over their mandating ↵ rights in exchange for a better subscription Big-Deal. > > > > > > > > > However, if Alicia is indicating this new stance is a move away from ↵ that which I was told by Elsevier earlier today, and is still less than clearly ↵ indicated on their web pages (which indicate an author can comply by ↵ self-archiving, but then go on to list embargo periods which do not meet RCUK ↵ policy) then that is great news. > > > > > > > Alicia is just re-stating the Clause 1. Take her at her word. > > > > Best wishes, > > > > Stevan > > > > > > > > > On 1 May 2013, at 14:49, "Stevan Harnad" <amsciforum AT ↵ gmail.com> wrote: > > > > >> >> >> > >> > Alicia Wise AT wisealic20h >> > AT AmSciForum Stevan - Elsevier's #oa agreement with RCUK, ↵ including gold & green options, is described here: ↵ http://www.elsevier.com/about/publishing-guidelines/policies/funding-body-agreements/research-councils-uk … >> > >> > Stevan Harnad AT AmSciForum8h >> > AT wisealic Simple Question: Is/isn't Elsevier-like ↵ Springer-still Green on immediate, unembargoed #oa self-archiving? ↵ http://j.mp/11B5gcg >> > >> > Alicia Wise AT wisealic19m >> > AT AmSciForum yes, Elsevier endorses immediate self-archiving of ↵ accepted final drafts free for all on the web immediately upon acceptance. >> > >> > Stevan Harnad AT AmSciForum3m >> > AT wisealic Thanks Alicia. Then Elsevier remains on Side of the ↵ Angels & I will continue to attest to that! > > > > ↵ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Andras Holl / Holl Andras e-mail: holl AT konkoly.hu > Konkoly Observatory / MTA CsFK CsI Tel.: +36 1 3919368 Fax: +36 1 ↵ 2754668 > IT manager / Szamitastechn. rendszervez. Mail: H1525 POBox 67, Budapest, ↵ Hungary > ↵ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > -- > To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page: > http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f [BOAI] [Forum Home] [index] [prev] [next] [options] [help]
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