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. (mbei...@berkeley.edu) Investigator Howard Hughes Medical Institute & Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development Department of Molecular and Cell Biology UC Berkeley