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Budapest Open Access Initiative: BOAI Forum Archive [BOAI] [Forum Home] [index] [options] [help]boaiforum messages[BOAI] Elsevier: Trying to squeeze the virtual genie back into the physical bottleFrom: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum AT gmail.com>
--001a11357bd08e1c610516ec234c Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable *Alicia Wise wrote* <http://www.elsevier.com/connect/coar-recting-the-record#comment-2037996108= > : *Dear Stevan,* *I admire your vision and passion for green open access =E2=80=93 in fact w= e 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 =E2=80=93 and other publishers =E2=80=93 for a= very long time and are not new. The only thing that=E2=80=99s changed about IRs is our old= policy said you had to have an agreement which included embargos, and the new policy is you don=E2=80=99t need to do an agreement provided you and your a= uthors 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* 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=E2=80=99s changed about IRs is our old policy said you had to ha= ve an agreement which included embargos..."* Is this the old policy that hasn't changed changed since 2004 (when Elsevier was still on the "side of the angels ↵ <http://j.mp/OAngelS>" 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 ↵ <http://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 <http://k.hunter_at_elsevier.com>* Yes, 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=E2=80=99 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 Elsevier's current revenue levels at any risk. Elsevier did not try to embargo Green OA from 2004-2012 =E2=80=94 but appar= ently 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 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 <https://www.google.ca/search?num=3D20&q=3Dsite%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.e= prints.org+%22fools+gold%22&oq=3Dsite%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org= +%22fools+gold%22&gs_l=3Dserp.3...339136.344145.0.345749.12.12.0.0.0.0.217.= 856.11j0j1.12.0.ckpsrh...0...1.1.64.serp..12.0.0._lRkTp5SLmk> publication fees the only alternative for 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 =E2=80=9Cfairness,=E2=80=9D and to facilitate =E2= =80=9Csharing=E2=80=9D (in the spirit of OA). The =E2=80=9Cfairness=E2=80=9D is to ensure that no institution is exempt f= rom Elsevier=E2=80=99s Green OA embargoes. And the =E2=80=9Csharing=E2=80=9D is the social sharing services like Mende= ley <http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/mendeley> (which Elsevier owns), about which Elsevier now believes (for the time being) that authors would not bother to use enough to put their current revenue levels at risk (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 =E2=80=9Cchanges=E2=80=9D with which Elsevier seems = to be trying to promote sharing seems to be by trying to find a way to outlaw the institutional repositories=E2=80=99 "share button <http://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/hosting#non-commercial-platforms>" (otherwise known as the =E2=80=9CFair-Dealing=E2=80=9D Button <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/>). So just as Elsevier is trying to claim credit for =E2=80=9Callowing=E2=80= =9D authors to do =E2=80=9Cdark=E2=80=9D (i.e., embargoed, non-OA) deposits, for which no pub= lisher 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 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-N= D license <http://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/article-posting-policy#accepted-man= uscript> (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 for 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-rising aggregator: all it is gathering* 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 <http://arxiv.org/help/submit_sword>). 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 of 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 <https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy>, 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 do 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* --001a11357bd08e1c610516ec234c Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <div dir=3D"ltr"> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial"><a = href=3D"http://www.elsevier.com/connect/coar-recting-the-record#comment-203= 7996108"><b><span ↵ style=3D"color:rgb(38,38,38)">Alicia Wise ↵ wrote</span></b= ></a><span ↵ style=3D"color:rgb(38,38,38)">:</span></span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><b><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" style=3D"font-family:Arial;c= olor:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></b></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Dear ↵ Stevan,<= /span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">I ↵ admire your= vision and passion for green open access =E2=80=93 in fact we all do here at Elsev= ier - and for your tenacity as your definitions and concepts of green open access hav= e remain unchanged for more than 15 years. We also recognize that the open ac= cess landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years, for example wit= h the emergence of Social Collaboration Networks. This refresh of our policy,= the first since 2004, reflects what we are hearing from researchers and researc= h institutions about how we can support their changing needs. We look forward= to continuing input from and collaboration with the research community, and wi= ll continue to review and refine our policy.</span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Let ↵ me state = clearly that we support both green and gold OA. Embargo periods have been used by u= s =E2=80=93 and other publishers =E2=80=93 for a very long time and are not new. The on= ly thing that=E2=80=99s changed about IRs is our old policy said you had to have an = agreement which included embargos, and the new policy is you don=E2=80=99t need to do= an agreement provided you and your authors comply with the embargo period poli= cy. 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.</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">With ↵ kind wis= hes and good night,</span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Alicia Wise, = Elsevier</span></i><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family= :Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)"></span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">Dear Alicia,</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">You wrote:</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">"This ↵ refresh of our po= licy [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=E2=80=99s changed about IRs is ou= r old policy said you had to have an agreement which included ↵ embargos..."</span></= i><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)"></sp= an></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">Is this the old policy that hasn't changed ↵ changed since 2004 (when Elsevier was still on the "<a ↵ href=3D"http://j.mp/OAn= gelS"><span style=3D"color:rgb(3,37,83)">side of the ↵ angels</span></a>"= ; insofar as Green OA was concerned) until the "refresh"? (I don't see any ↵ mention = of embargoes in it...):</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US= " ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Date:</spa= n></i></b><i><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial= ;color:rgb(38,38,38)"> Thu, 27 May 2004 03:09:39 +0100 ↵ </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US= " ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">From:</spa= n></i></b><i><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial= ;color:rgb(38,38,38)"> "Hunter, Karen (ELS-US)" ↵ </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US= " ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">To:</span>= </i></b><i><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;c= olor:rgb(38,38,38)"> "'<a ↵ href=3D"http://harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk= ">harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk</a>'" ↵ </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US= " ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Cc:</span>= </i></b><i><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;c= olor:rgb(38,38,38)"> "Karssen, Zeger (ELS)" , ↵ "Bolman, Piete= r (ELS)" , "Seeley, Mark (ELS)" </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US= " ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Subject:</= span></i></b><i><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Ar= ial;color:rgb(38,38,38)"> Re: Elsevier journal list ↵ </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Stevan, </spa= n></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">[H]ere is wha= t we have decided on post-"prints" (i.e. published articles, whether ↵ publis= hed electronically or in print): </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">An ↵ author may= post his version of the final paper on his personal web site and on his ↵ institution&= #39;s web site (including its institutional respository). Each posting should inc= lude the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page ↵ (or th= e article's DOI). The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other pos= ting (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 wi= ll continue to be the single, definitive archive for the formal published vers= ion. </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">We ↵ will be gr= adually updating any public information on our policies (including our copyright fo= rms and all information on our web site) to get it all consistent. ↵ </span></i><= /p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span>= </i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Karen Hunter = </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Senior Vice P= resident, Strategy </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Elsevier </sp= an></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">+1-212-633-37= 87 </span></i></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><i><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)"><a href=3D"ht= tp://k.hunter_at_elsevier.com">k.hunter_at_elsevier.com</a></span></i><span= lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,3= 8)"></span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">Yes, 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=E2=80=99 need= for it changed, nor its benefits to research.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">What has changed is Elsevier policy -- in the direction of trying to embargo Green OA to ensure that it does not Elsevier= 's current revenue levels at any risk. </span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">Elsevier did not try to embargo Green OA from 2004-2012 =E2=80=94 but apparently only because they did not believe that a= uthors would ever really bother to provide much Green OA, nor that their institutions an= d funders would ever bother to require them to provide it (for its benefits t= o research).</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">But for some reason <b>Elsevier is not ready to ↵ admit that Elsevier has now decided to embargo Green OA purely to ensure that it = does put Elsevier's current subscription revenue levels at any risk. ↵ </b></s= pan></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">Instead, Elsevier wants to hold OA hostage to its current revenue levels -- by embargoing Green OA, with the payment of <a hr= ef=3D"https://www.google.ca/search?num=3D20&q=3Dsite%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fope= naccess.eprints.org+%22fools+gold%22&oq=3Dsite%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenacces= s.eprints.org+%22fools+gold%22&gs_l=3Dserp.3...339136.344145.0.345749.1= 2.12.0.0.0.0.217.856.11j0j1.12.0.ckpsrh...0...1.1.64.serp..12.0.0._lRkTp5SL= mk"><span style=3D"color:rgb(3,37,83)">Fools-Gold ↵ OA</span></a> publication= fees the only alternative for immediate OA. This ensures that Elsevier's current ↵ reve= nue levels either remain unchanged, or increase. </span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">But, for public-relations reasons, Elsevier prefers to try to portray this as all being done out of =E2=80=9Cfairness,=E2=80=9D an= d to facilitate =E2=80=9Csharing=E2=80=9D (in the spirit of OA).</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">The =E2=80=9Cfairness=E2=80=9D is to ensure that no ↵ instit= ution is exempt from Elsevier=E2=80=99s Green OA embargoes. </span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">And the =E2=80=9Csharing=E2=80=9D is the social ↵ sharing se= rvices like <a ↵ href=3D"http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/mendeley"><span= style=3D"color:rgb(3,37,83)">Mendeley</span></a> (which Elsevier owns), about which Elsevier now believes (for the time bein= g) that authors would not bother to use enough to put their current revenue le= vels at risk (and their institutions and funders cannot mandate that they use th= em) -- hence that that they would not pose a risk to Elsevier's current subscription revenue levels.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">Yet another one of the =E2=80=9Cchanges=E2=80=9D with ↵ whic= h Elsevier seems to be trying to promote sharing seems to be by trying to find a way t= o outlaw the institutional repositories=E2=80=99 "<a ↵ href=3D"http://www.= elsevier.com/about/policies/hosting#non-commercial-platforms"><span ↵ style= =3D"color:rgb(3,37,83)">share ↵ button</span></a>" (otherwise known as t= he <a href=3D"http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/"><span ↵ style=3D"color:r= gb(3,37,83)">=E2=80=9CFair-Dealing=E2=80=9D Button</span></a>). </span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">So just as Elsevier is trying to claim credit for =E2=80=9Callowing=E2=80=9D authors to do =E2=80=9Cdark=E2=80=9D (i.e., emba= rgoed, non-OA) deposits, for which no publisher permission whatsoever is or ever was required, Elsevier now ha= s its lawyers scrambling to find a formalizable way to make it appear as if Elsevier can forbid its authors to provide individual reprints to one anoth= er, as authors have been doing for six decades, under yet another new bogus for= mal 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.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">The one change in Elsevier policy that one can applaud, however (though here too the underlying intentions were far from benign), is the <a ↵ href=3D"http://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/article-p= osting-policy#accepted-manuscript"><span ↵ style=3D"color:rgb(3,37,83)">CC-BY= -NC-ND license</span></a> (unless Elsevier one day decides to back-pedal on that too too). That license is now not only allowe= d but required for any accepted paper that an author elects to self-archive.<= /span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">Let me close by mentioning a few more of the howlers that keep making Elsevier's unending series of arbitrary contractual ↵ bu= g-fixes logically incoherent (i.e., self-contradictory) and technically nonsensical= , hence moot, unenforceable, and eminently ignorable for anyone who takes a f= ew moments to think instead of cringe. <i>Elsevier is trying to use ↵ pseudo-leg= al words to squeeze the virtual genie (the Web) back into the physical bottle = (the old, land-based, print-on-paper world):</i></span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Locus of ↵ deposit:</span></b>= <span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)"> Elsevier tries to make legal distinctions on "where" the ↵ author m= ay 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 ↵ institut= ional repository.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">But do ↵ Elsevier's legal bea= gles ever stop to ask themselves what this all means, in the online medium? <i>If you make your ↵ p= aper openly accessible anywhere at all on the web, it is openly accessible (and linkable and harvestable) from and to anywhere else on the Web.</i> ↵ Google = and google scholar will pick up the link, and so will a host of other harvester= s 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. ↵ </span></= p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">The silliest of all is ↵ the inju= nction 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 function= s, of the self-same institution. They are virtual entities, created by definit= ion; 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 virtua= l world.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">So all Elsevier is ↵ doing by tre= ating these virtual entities as if they were physical ones (besides confusing and misleading th= eir authors) is creating terminological nuisances, forcing system administrator= s to keep re-naming and re-assigning sectors and functions, needlessly, and vacuously, just to accommodate vacuous nuisance terminological stipulations= .</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">(The same thing ↵ applies to &quo= t;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 jour= nal 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 institutio= n no free-rising aggregator: all it is gathering<i> its <u>own</u> ↵ paper output<= /i>, published in multiple disparate journals. But, because of the virtual natur= e of the medium, it is in fact the Web itself that is systematically gathering a= ll disparate papers together, wherever they happen to be hosted, using their metadata tags: author, title, journal, date, URL. The rest is all just soft= ware 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 usefu= l functionality.)</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">The Arxiv ↵ exception.</span><= /b><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)"> In prior iterations of the policy, Elsevier tried (foolishly) to outlaw centra= l 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 d= id not go down very well, so those "legal" restrictions have now ↵ bee= n replaced by the "Arxiv exception": Authors making their ↵ papers OA there (or in RePeC) are now officially exempt from the Elsevier OA embargo.= </span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Well here we are ↵ again: an arbi= trary Elsevier restriction on immediate-OA, based on locus of deposit. The Pandora's ↵ b= ox 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 ↵ <i>alon= gside remote deposit in Arxiv</i> (which is already automated through the <a ↵ href= =3D"http://arxiv.org/help/submit_sword"><span ↵ style=3D"color:rgb(3,37,83)">= SWORD software</span></a>). That completely moots all Elsevier OA ↵ embargoes. Yet another example of Elsevier's ineffectual nuisance stipulations ↵ consist= ing of ad-hoc, pseudo-legal epicycles, all having one sole objective: to try to sc= are authors of 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.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">What's next, ↵ Elsevier? &quo= t;You may use <i>this</i> software but not <i>this</i> ↵ software"?</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">The Share ↵ Button.</span></b>= <span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)"> Although it never defines what it means by "Share Button" ↵ (nor wh= y it is trying to outlaw it), if what Elsevier means is the Institutional Repository's <a ↵ href=3D"https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/Reque= stCopy"><span style=3D"color:rgb(3,37,83)">copy-request ↵ Button</span></a>, = intended to provide individual copies to individual copy-requestors, then this too is just a software-facilitated eprint request. </span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Whenever a user seeks ↵ an embarg= oed deposit, they can click the Button to send an email to the author to request a copy. The auth= or need merely click a link in the email to authorize the software to send the copy.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">So does Elsevier now ↵ want to ma= ke 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 a= n email link that notifies the author that the requestor seeks a copy, with t= he requestor's email alive, and clickable, so that inserting the ↵ embargoed= paper's URL will attach one copy to the email?</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">Elsevier is not going ↵ to make m= any friends by trying to force its authors to do jump through gratuitous hoops in order to accommodate Elsevier's ever more arbitrary and absurd attempts to ↵ conta= in the virtual ether with arbitrary verbal hacks.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><span lang=3D"EN-US" styl= e=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal" ↵ style=3D"margin-left:36pt"><b><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" s= tyle=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)">There are ↵ more.</span></b><s= pan lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;color:rgb(38,38,38)"> There are further nuisance tactics in the current iteration of ↵ Elsevier'= ;s charm initiative, in which self-serving restrictions keep being portrayed as Else= vier'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 mo= ots all Elsevier OA embargoes even more conveniently than depositing all papers= in Arxiv -- but I leave that as an exercise to the reader.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">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 ↵ logic= ally incoherent and technically empty in today's virtual world. It could ↵ sav= e Elsevier a lot of futile effort and save Elsevier authors from a lot of use= less and increasingly arbitrary and annoying nuisance-rules.</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">Best wishes,</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><span lang=3D"EN-US" ↵ style=3D"font-family:Arial;colo= r:rgb(38,38,38)">=C2=A0</span></p> <p class=3D"MsoNormal"><b><span ↵ lang=3D"EN-US" style=3D"font-family:Arial;c= olor:rgb(38,38,38)">Stevan Harnad</span></b><span ↵ style=3D"font-family:Aria= l"></span></p> </div> --001a11357bd08e1c610516ec234c-- -- To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/boai-forum [BOAI] Re: Elsevier: Trying to squeeze the virtual genie back into the physical bottleFrom: Stevan Harnad <harnad AT ecs.soton.ac.uk>
On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 1:08 AM, Michael Eisen <mbeisen AT gmail.com ↵ <mailto:mbeisen AT gmail.com>> wrote: > Stevan- > > I hate to say I told you so, but .... at the Budapest meeting years ago it ↵ was pointed out repeatedly that once green OA actually became a threat to ↵ publishers, they would no longer look so kindly on it. It took a while, but the ↵ inevitable has now happened. Green OA that relied on publishers to peer review ↵ papers + subscriptions to pay for them, but somehow also allowed them to be ↵ made freely available, was never sustainable. If you want OA you have to either ↵ fund publishers by some other means (subsidies, APCs) or wean yourself from ↵ that which they provide (journal branding). Parasitism only works so long as it ↵ is not too painful to the host. It's a testament to a lot of hard work from ↵ green OA advocates that it has become a threat to Elsevier. But the way forward ↵ is not to get them to reverse course, but to look past them to a future that is ↵ free of subscription journals. > > Also, I don't view CC-BY-NC-ND as a victory as the NC part is there to ↵ make sure that no commercial entity - including, somewhat ironically, PLOS - ↵ can use the articles to actually do anything. So this license makes these ↵ articles definitively non open access. > > -Mike Mike, I will respond more fully on your blog: ↵ http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1710 ↵ <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1710> To reply briefly here: 1. The publisher back-pedalling and OA embargoes were anticipated. That’s why ↵ the copy-request Button ↵ <https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy>was already ↵ created to provide access during any embargo, nearly 10 years ago, long before ↵ Elsevier and Springer began back-pedalling. 2. Immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button, once adopted universally, will ↵ lead unstoppably to 100% OA, and almost as quickly as if there were no ↵ publisher OA embargoes. 3. For a “way forward,” it is not enough to “look past the present to the ↵ future”: one must provide a demonstrably viable transition scenario to get us ↵ there from here. 4. Green OA, mandated by institutions and funders, is a demonstrably viable ↵ transition scenario. 5. Offering paid-Gold OA journals as an alternative and waiting instead for all ↵ authors to switch is not a viable transition sceario, for the reasons I ↵ described again yesterday in response to Éric Archambault ↵ <http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2015-May/003366.html>: ↵ multiple journals, multiple subscribing institutions, ongoing access needs, no ↵ coherent “flip” strategy, hence double-payment (i.e., subscription fees for ↵ incoming institutional access to external institutional output plus Gold ↵ publication fees for providing OA to outgoing institutional published output) ↵ when funds are already stretched to the limit by subscriptions that are ↵ uncancellable — until and unless made accessible by another means. 6. That other means is 4, above. The resulting transition scenario has been ↵ described many times, starting in 2001 ↵ <http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1>, ↵ with updates in 2007 <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/>, 2010 ↵ <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html>, 2013 ↵ <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/353991/>, 2014 ↵ <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>, and 2015 <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/361704/>, keeping pace with ongoing mandate and embargo developments. 7. An article that is freely accessible to all online under CC-BY-NC-ND is most ↵ definitely OA — Gratis OA ↵ <http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/08/greengold-oa-and-gratislibre-oa.html>, to be exact. 8. For the reasons I have likewise described many times before, the transition ↵ scenario is to mandate Gratis Green OA (together with the Button, for emabrgoed ↵ deposits) universally. That universal Green Gratis OA will in turn make ↵ subscriptions cancellable, hence unsustainable, which will in turn force ↵ publishers to downsize to affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold Libre OA (CC-BY). 9. It is a bit disappointing to hear an OA advocate characterize Green OA as ↵ parasitic on publishers, when OA’s fundamental rationale has been that ↵ publishers are parasitic on researchers and referees’ work as well as its ↵ public funding. But perhaps when the OA advocate is a publisher, the motivation ↵ changes… Stevan On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 11:23 AM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum AT gmail.com ↵ <mailto:amsciforum AT gmail.com>> wrote: Alicia Wise wrote ↵ <http://www.elsevier.com/connect/coar-recting-the-record#comment-2037996108>: 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 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 changed since 2004 (when Elsevier ↵ was still on the "side of the angels <http://j.mp/OAngelS>" ↵ 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 ↵ <http://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 <tel:%2B1-212-633-3787> k.hunter_at_elsevier.com <http://k.hunter_at_elsevier.com/> Yes, 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 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 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 ↵ <https://www.google.ca/search?num=20&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org+%22fools+gold%22&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org+%22fools+gold%22&gs_l=serp.3...339136.344145.0.345749.12.12.0.0.0.0.217.856.11j0j1.12.0.ckpsrh...0...1.1.64.serp..12.0.0._lRkTp5SLmk> publication fees the only alternative for 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 ↵ <http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/mendeley> (which Elsevier owns), ↵ about which Elsevier now believes (for the time being) that authors would not ↵ bother to use enough to put their current revenue levels at risk (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 seems to be by trying to find a way to outlaw the institutional ↵ repositories’ "share button ↵ <http://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/hosting#non-commercial-platforms>" (otherwise known as the “Fair-Dealing” Button <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/>). 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 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 ↵ <http://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/article-posting-policy#accepted-manuscript> (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 for 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-rising aggregator: all it is gathering 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 ↵ <http://arxiv.org/help/submit_sword>). 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 of 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 ↵ <https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy>, 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 do ↵ 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 [BOAI] [Forum Home] [index] [options] [help]
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