Re: Elsevier Again Confirms Its Position on the Side of the Green OA Angels

From: Michael Eisen <mbeisen_at_LBL.GOV>
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:08:50 -0800

Stevan-
I will proudly claim the mantle of an OA extremist if it means
calling bulls**t on Elsevier's policy. I am very happy to see Karen
Hunter's message, because it confirms what I and many others have
been saying for years - that Elsevier only supports Green OA
publishing because they know it will be adopted by a small fraction
of their authors. What more evidence do you need that Elsevier is not
actually committed to OA than this explicit statement that they
prohibit the clearest and easiest path towards achieving Green OA to
their published articles? Why should Elsevier care whether authors
download the articles themselves or if someone else does it for them
other than the expectation that in the former case, the practical
obstacles will prevent most authors from doing so. Unless and until
Elsevier radically restructures its business model for scientific
publishing, they will only permit Green OA so long as it is largely
unsuccessful - the moment it becomes possible to get most Elsevier
articles in IRs they will have to end this practice, as their current
policy against IR downloads makes abundantly clear. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

-Michael "The Extremist" Eisen

On Nov 26, 2008, at 12:46 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:

      On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 2:53 PM, Hunter, Karen A
      (ELS-NYC) <k.hunter -- elsevier.com> wrote:

             As much as Elsevier appreciates praise for
            its policies, we also want to prevent
            misunderstanding.

            We are grateful that Colin Smith, Research
            Repository Manager of the Open University,
            approached us with a question on our author
            posting policy.  Mr. Smith had noticed that
            for some journals an early "accepted
            manuscript" version of an author's paper was
            available on ScienceDirect and he wanted to
            know if authors could download it and deposit
            it to their institutional repositories.  As
            our longstanding policy permits authors to
            voluntarily post their own author manuscripts
            to their personal website or institutional
            repository, we responded that we would not
            object to an author downloading this version.

            However, our broader policy prohibits
            systematic downloading or posting. Therefore,
            it is not permitted for IR managers or any
            other third party to download articles or any
            other version such as articles-in-press or
            accepted manuscripts from ScienceDirect and
            post them. To the extent that Colin Smith's
            message could be read as encouraging IR
            managers to download, it is a
            misinterpretation of our position.


Karen Hunter's response is very fair, and Elsevier's policy on
author self-archiving is both very fair and very progressive --
indeed a model for all Publishers that wish to adopt a Green OA
policy.

I know there will be extremists who will jump on me for having
said this, and I am sure nothing I say will be able to make
them realize how unreasonable they are being -- and how their
extremism works against OA.

Green OA self-archiving provides the opportunity for achieving
universal OA precisely because it is author SELF-archiving.
Thus is it is perfectly reasonable for Green publishers to
endorse only self-archiving, not 3rd-party archiving, to
endorse self-archiving in the author's own institutional
repository, but not in a 3rd-party repository, and to endorse
depositing the author's own final draft, not the publisher's
draft.

The fact that we do not yet have universal Green OA is not
publishers' fault, and certainly not Green publishers' fault.
The only thing standing between us and universal Green OA is
keystrokes -- authors' keystrokes. And the way to persuade
authors to perform those keystrokes -- for their own benefit,
as well as for the benefit of the institutions that pay their
salaries, the agencies that fund their research, and the
tax-paying public that funds their institutions and their
funders -- is for their institutions and funders to mandate
that those keystrokes are performed.

It would not only be unjust, but it would border on the
grotesque, if the punishment for publishers who had been
progressive enough to give their official green light to their
authors to perform those keystrokes  -- yet their authors
couldn't be bothered to perform the keystrokes, and their
institutions and funders could not be bothered to mandate the
keystrokes -- were that their green light was construed as
permission to automatically harvest from the publisher's
website the drafts that their own authors could not be bothered
or persuaded to deposit in their own institutional repository.

No. Open Access is a benefit that the research community needs
to provide for itself. The only reasonable thing to ask of
publishers is that they should not try to prevent the
keystrokes from being performed. It would be both unreasonable
and unfair to demand that publishers also perform the
keystrokes on the authors' behalf, through automated downloads,
for that would be tantamount to demanding that they become Gold
OA publishers, rather than just endorsing Green OA.

What is needed is more keystroke mandates from institutions and
funders, not more pressure on Green publishers who have already
done for Green OA all that can be reasonable asked of them.

Stevan Harnad


Michael Eisen, Ph.D. (MBEISEN_at_BERKELEY.EDU)
Investigator
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
&
Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
UC Berkeley
Received on Wed Nov 26 2008 - 23:11:40 GMT