Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, [identity deleted] wrote: I've been watching the [OA] debates with interest and am slowly shifting the stance of both our publisher... and the owners of the Journal [that I edit] on the area of copyright and open access. I'd welcome a discussion on the way I'm taking things with the journal. ... ...I am now in a position to send all authors PDFs which I pre-clear for personal distribution and storage in (non-web) institutional repositories. There is still some resistance from the publishers... to the idea of mounting these PDFs on-line as they believe (wrongly I think) that it would deprive them of significant revenue streams from pay-as- -you-go access. What do you mean by (non-web) institutional repositories? If you mean that authors cannot store their article publicly on the web, but can send out email versions of their article to online reprint-requesters, then that is not much progress and it is not OA. Moreover, logically and practically, it is not a very coherent notion: For if I am given the journal's green light to store a copy of my article's full-text online in a non-publicly-accessible location, as well as to email it to anyone who requests a reprint, then all I have to do is put my article's metadata (author, title, journal, year, etc.) online on the web, publicly (which I can do in any case, without a green light from anyone); then I can link an automatic piece of software to the metadata's URL, such that, if anyone presses the request this as a reprint button, a pop-up asks for the reprint-requester's email address and then sends a piece of code to yet another piece of software, which in turn retrieves the full-text from the non-public site where it is stored and emails it to the reprint-requester's email address immediately. So, in exchange for a few seconds delay and a piece of awkward, Rube-Goldberg software, the author can provide exactly the same outcome as if your journal had simply given the author the green light to self-archive the article publicly on the web, allowing the reprint requester to download it directly, without the superfluous loop! (The PDF is not critical: A green light to self-archive the final, peer-reviewed draft -- the postprint -- would be quite sifficient.) http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint So, may I suggest that you reconsider this needless baroque constraint, and simply join the 84% of journals that are already green on OA self-archiving? http://romeo.eprints.org/stats. There are physics journals that have been effectively green since 1991, and some of their contents have long been 100% OA through self-archiving for years now, yet their subscription revenues have not dried up. One physics journal (JHEP), born gold (subsidised), even converted back to green, successfully, by migrating to a green publisher (IOP). JHEP will convert from toll-free-access to toll-based access http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1812.html It is converting from gray to *gold* that is a potential risk to cost-recovery at this time; the risk from converting from gray to green is minimal. Moreover, it is looking more and more likely that self-archiving will soon be mandated by research funders as well as by universities. So your journal can position itself on the side of the angels (green) voluntarily now, or wait till it starts feeling author pressure because of the mandate (which will put the 14% gray journals at risk of otherwise losing authors), and then go green only because it was forced by author pressure. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we151.htm http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/congress.html http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php I think it would be both more positive and progressive, historically -- and better PR, right now, in light of the research community's mounting demand for OA -- to go green voluntarily at this time. The benefits of enhanced impact, after all, are then shared by both the author-institution and the journal! Harnad, S. Brody, T. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals, D-Lib Magazine 10 (6) June http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html Stevan Harnad UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green):
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
Prior Topic Thread: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3770.html On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 [identity deleted] wrote: I'm reading about your green light model of self-archiving. If you have a moment, where is a review of why some publishers are not averse to self-archiving of *post-print* items? Seems counterintuitive that any of them would allow this. Asking for a review of why publishers are not averse to the self-archiving of the refereed postprint rather gets the wrong end of the stick: It is spectators and speculators who have simply *assumed* that publishers would be opposed. Publishers, more sensibly and practically, saw that there was no point or possibility in opposing OA itself: that would create far too great and obvious a conflict of interest between themselves and their authors, given the growing empirical evidence for the dramatic benefits of OA for research and researchers. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html So publishers sensibly and benignly gave OA self-archiving the green light, partly to demonstrate that they are not trying to oppose the benefits of OA for research and researchers -- and partly also because enhanced article impact also means enhanced journal impact, which sells more journals and attracts more authors. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Most publishers have, however, understandably been averse to converting to gold (OA journal) publishing, because of the risks and uncertainties of this still untested cost-recovery model. They prefer to wait and see; and supporting green is a sensible and natural way to resist pressure to convert to gold: See, I support OA: If authors want it, they can go ahead self-archive their own individual articles. But please don't ask me to make all the sacrifices and assume all the risks: if you want OA so much, you have the green light: Your move! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/greenroad.html One can speculate about what will happen *after* there is 100% OA (and I too have speculated about the possibilities in the past http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm ) but it is now clear that far too much precious time (and access, and impact) has already been lost speculating and counter-speculating, while doing nothing: What is needed now is self-archiving, not speculation. Your own question is merely inviting me to do some more speculation: 84% of journals are green. Don't look a gift-horse in the mouth and worry about whether it might not be Trojan: You have the green light. Cross the street! Stevan Harnad P.S. The difference between pale-green (preprints) and full-green (postprints) is trivial, as the authors can always post the corrections after the preprints. Moreover, no green light is needed to post preprints, so even the green/gray distinction is merely a psychological matter: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#copyright1
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
Regarding the article in the UK's Guardian newspaper: Open access jeopardises academic publishers, Reed chief warns Richard Wray, Wednesday June 30, 2004 http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/books/story/0,10595,1250591,00.html At the end: Reed has, however, made some concessions towards the open access movement... Alongside the rise of open access publishers, such as BioMed Central and PLoS, some academics are pushing for the right to place copies of articles they write for subscription journals on their own websites. Reed has changed its copyright rules to allow self-archiving in this way. Tim Brody Southampton University http://citebase.eprints.org/
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
[To save time and minimise misunderstanding, my reply is appended at end. SH] --- Stevan Harnad writes: 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. The change seems to be from the restriction still found on: http://authors.elsevier.com/getting_published.html?dc=PRP We request that authors do not update public server versions of their articles to be identical to the articles as published. Author requests to post a published article on a public server will be considered by Elsevier on a case-by-case basis. Note that we have no other restrictions about updating public server versions, just that they should not be updated so as to mimic the article as published. That was somewhat restrictive. But the new wording does not seem to be full Green - there is one request and one restriction. The request: Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to ^^ the journal's home page which as long as people understand it is a request and not legally binding (because it is a request, else they would have said MUST not SHOULD). The restriction however but any other posting (e.g. to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. seems identical to the prior restriction. Hence I can post to my own web pages, and possibly to EconWPA.wustl.edu (since it is housed by my institution) or possibly not (because it is not my institution's archive) but I can not post it to some other 'elsewhere' server without permission meaning PALE GREEN. I applaud Elsevier but IMHO the new statement is not much greener before. I guess each baby step in the right direction is good, but honestly this is a baby step compared to the position before which allowed preprints without restriction or request. MODERATOR'S REPLY: (1) Elsevier inicated that they are in the process of revising their documentation. (Bob quotes the old documentation.) (2) Citing and linking the article is just good scholarly practise. (3) The restriction against 3rd party websites is to avoid sanctioning 3rd-party cut-rate rival-publication. But OA obviates any motivation to do 3rd-party re-publication and OAI interoperability means it is sufficient to self-archive in one's own institutional archive and merely deposit the metadata and link in central archives, if one wishes. (4) Elsevier is a BRIGHT GREEN publisher. -- S.H. | Bob Parks Voice: (314) 935-5665 | | Department of Economics, Campus Box 1208 Fax: (314) 935-4156 | | Washington University| | One Brookings Drive | | St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899b...@parks.wustl.edu|
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
As long as we're making corrections on Stephen Pincock's article in the Scientist (Tool allows open-access search) http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040607/01/ Stephen cites me as follows: It's thought that the approximately 1200 OA journals currently available make up about 5% of all scholarly journals, Harnad said. Another 15% allows authors to deposit their articles in OA archives, meaning altogether that articles from about 20% of journals are available in OA of some description. That the 1200 OA journals are 5% of all peer-reviewed journals is correct. That there is 15% OA self-archiving is also correct. But that 15% of journals allows (sic) authors to self-archive is incorrect. (Stephen goes on to correct this later by stating, correctly, that it is 80% of journals that have given their green light so far.) It is also incorrect that 20% of journals are availaible in OA: It is 20% of *articles* (i.e., 5% + 15%) for which OA has so far been provided. Just 80% left to go... http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html Stevan Harnad On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Stephen Pincock wrote: Dear Dr. Harnad, DOAJ is describing its latest development--article searching--as a major breakthrough--I wonder if you agree. Stephen, It's not a major breakthrough, but it's a very useful asset. Let me put it in context: There are between 20,000 and 40,000 peer-reviewed journals publishing between 2-4 million articles per year. Of these journals, about 1200 (or 5%) are Open Access Journals, and these are the ones indexed by DOAJ. For the remaining 95% of journals, about 15% of their articles are also OA, because their authors have self-archived them, many in OAI-compliant Archives: http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse Many (but not yet all) of those self-archived OA articles are accessible through OAIster, DOAJ's sister-project. http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ So, to put it all in context: Of all OA articles, about 1/4 of them are in OA journals and about 3/4 of them are in OA archives (many of them OAI-compliant, interoperable. There is some redundancy, because OAIster also harvests OA journal archives, and because some of the some of the articles in DOAJ are also in OAIster. But all in all, the more points of access to these OA articles, the better. The only thing I would be ready to describe as a major breakthrough for OA, however, would be something that significantly accelerated the growth of OA from 20% to 100%! The likelihood that this acceleration will come from the creation/conversion of more of the 20-40,000 journals to OA journals (gold) is low. But the likelihood that it will come from their conversion to green (i.e., giving their authors the green light to self-archive) is higher, as 80% of them have done it already http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html including the recent announcement by Elsevier that its 1800 journals have all gone green. That is still only the *likelihood* of OA. A major breakthrough in the *actuality* of OA will only come when authors accelerate their OA self-archiving rate toward 100% All indications are that this will only come when they are *required* to do so: Swan Brown (2004) asked authors to say how they would feel if their employer or funding body required them to deposit copies of their published articles in ... repositories. The vast majority... said they would do so willingly. Swan, A. Brown, S.N. (2004) JISC/OSI Journal Authors Survey Report. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISCOAreport1.pdf http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3628.html Swan, A. Brown, S.N. (2004) Authors and open access publishing. Learned Publishing 2004:17(3) 219-224. So the breakthrough will be when universities and research institutions and research funders realize that if they want to maximize their research impact by maximizing access to it, they must require not only publish or perish (as they already do), but also OA provision, by adopting an official OA provision policy: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php The empirical evidence for the huge OA/TA impact advantage is meanwhile being gathered and being made known to universities, research institutions and research funders: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/impact.html it could also be the germinal form of a proper research tool. It's all about research *impact*: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/impact.html The rest is trivial (search engines, etc,) On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Stephen Pincock wrote: When you say there are between 20,000 and 40,000 journals, this seems to me a rather large range--what is the estimate based on? The data are from Ulrich's and Carol Tenopir: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3496.html The uncertainty range is because it is uncertain what percentage of the 40,000 is really peer-reviewed journals. At
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
I appreciate Stevan's posting and David's raising the question about Cell Press. Cell Press has the same policy as Elsevier on post-print posting of the author's final version. Cell Press does not, however, permit preprint posting and will not consider for publication papers that have been previously posted on the Web. And, in response to those who have asked about the new policy, we are indeed working on getting all of the official information (Web site, transfer forms, etc.) to be consistent with that policy. We had previously permitted posting with permission (and had routinely given permission) but now no permission is required for posting the author's final version. Karen Hunter Senior Vice President, Strategy Elsevier -Original Message- Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 1:18 AM From: Stevan Harnad To: David Goodman Subject: Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving On Fri, 28 May 2004, David Goodman wrote: I do not think any scientist would consider Elsevier's policy a fully satisfactory permanent arrangement, and all would prefer that the edited version from the publisher could be posted. One can always prefer more. Free journals with all costs covered by a generous subsidy from somewhere would be nice too. But Elsevier's green self-archiving policy is all that it is *reasonable* for a scientist to demand of a publisher today, in the interests of OA. More important, it is all that is needed for 100% OA today. I, for one, would consider the arrangement fully satisfactory till doomsday if the pre-refereeing preprints and the refereed final drafts of all 2.5 million annual articles in all 24,000 journals were all OA as of tomorrow. Nothing more would be needed: Nothing. But it is not unreasonable to accept partial solutions for the time being, on the realistic principle that it is better to get the material disseminated in some fashion. This move does provide for the access to the material in some form, especially considering that articles in some fields are only lightly edited, and that some authors may consider the preprint version close enough--or conceivably superior--to the changes imposed by the editor and peer-reviewer. We are not talking here about the preprints only, or even mainly: The announcement was that Elsevier had gone from pale-green (green light for self-archiving pre-refereeing preprints self-archiving only) to fully green (preprints and postprints). That was the target, and it is about that that I repeat that nothing more is needed. Please let us not blur that fact. [SNIP] I can understand the excitement felt when Elsevier liberalizes its policy. Considering the size of the publisher and the amount of material affected, there has been a tendency to accept all its progressive moves, however small intrinsically, as major progress. This is not a small progressive move but *exactly* what every responsible publisher, not setting its own interests over those of research and researchers, would and should do: no more nor less. (Note that it has nothing to do with pricing policy, and none of this should be taken as pertaining to pricing policy in any way.) Elsevier's policy is a perfectly reasonable competitive move to encourage authors to use its journals rather than those of other commercial publishers, some of which do not yet allow postprints. It may also have the effect of encouraging them to use Elsevier rather than society journals (many of which do not allow posting at all), hoping to balance the right to self-archive against the narrow distribution of some of Elsevier's weaker titles. I do not think it is useful to make these rather cynical speculations about Elsevier's motivation. I do not believe Elsevier went green just in order to drum up more business; but if it does drum up more business -- or forces the competition to do likewise -- so much the better. The more green the better, because more green means more OA. I have been informed that Cell Press, arguably the portion of Elsevier that has the strongest titles, does not have the same policy to pre- and post-prints as the other Elsevier Science titles. I have not yet been able to determine exactly how it differs. Perhaps Karen Hunter could reply to clarify this. [SNIP]
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
Reed allows academics free web access Article in the Guardian by Richard Wray, Thursday June 3 2004 http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1230219,00.html This article is ok but it contains a number of errors: Until now the world's largest academic publisher has been a staunch opponent of open access, saying it poses a threat to the quality of academic research. Incorrect. Elsevier has been an opponent of OA publishing, but not necessarily of OA; and it was because they didn't want to risk losing revenue that they claimed OA publishing would endanger research quality. But it is now letting academics put a text version of their accepted articles on to their own websites, or sites operated by their institutions. Not text, but *full-text* (and not necessarily just a text-file!). Karen Hunter, Elsevier senior vice-president, strategy, explained: There was a desire in the market from many authors and many institutions to have an official record of their institution's intellectual output. We have listened and we have responded. It's not for a record! It's for usage and impact. (Book output is part of an institution's intellectual output, but no one is proposing that all books be made OA: just peer-reviewed journal articles, in order to maximize their usage and impact.) Deborah Cockerill, assistant publisher at rival open access publisher BioMed Central, said Reed's move merely scratches the surface of the fundamental problem with the traditional publishing model which is based on controlling access. OA is not about a problem with the traditional publishing model but about a problem with needlessly lost impact. OA remedies the latter, not the former. Reed, which has spent millions of pounds developing an online database of its journals known as Science Direct, is allowing authors to post only a text version of their published articles on the internet. Incorrect. Not text-only but whatever version the author likes, as long as it is not Elsevier's own PDF or HTML. Fair enough (and there's no need for the publisher's PDF or HTML in order to provide 100% OA). In addition each posting must include a link to the journal's home page - which operates almost as free advertising. That link would be advisable scholarly practise even if it were not required by Elsevier. And every citation of a paper is free advertising for the journal it appeared in. So what? Crucially, academics will not be allowed to put links to their papers in central academic databases, making it very difficult for anyone else to find the paper. Incorrect. They may not *deposit* the full-text in a 3rd party website (because that could be a rival publisher), only on the website of the author or the author's institution. But that is also all that is needed for OA, and for anyone on the web to be able to search for and find the paper (e.g. via OAIster or google). And of course authors may put a *link* wherever they wish! And any harvester can harvest the metadata (authorname, title, journalname, date, etc.) too. This kind of archiving is in many ways useless to the majority of scientists, mainly because no one will know the copies exist at all or where to find them Incorrect. This kind of archiving provides exactly what scientists need, namely OA, and the papers will be at least as visible as anything else on the web (via google) and even moreso (via OAI harvesters and search engines such as OAIster). Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 (gold): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 (green): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
[Apologies for posting to both lists, but I believe this issue is of sufficient joint importance and timeliness to call for consideration by both the librarians' list and the scientists' list. S.H.] On Mon, 31 May 2004, Joseph J. Esposito wrote: 1. Does anyone know of any library cancellations of journals because of the availability of some or all of the articles in such journals in self- or institutional archives? I do not know of any such cancellations myself, but I wonder if I am once again embarrassingly underinformed. I know of precisely the opposite, and it is very important to understand that a flurry of journal cancellations by libraries would be precisely the *wrong* way either to greet and encourage journals going green or to encourage authors to act upon it by self-archiving. This is yet another example of the very urgent need to unbundle the journal affordability problem from the access/impact problem. Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, Gingras, Y., Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., Hilf, E.R. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature (web focus) http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html The case illustrating the opposite is physics, in which there has been substantial self-archiving since 1991, with some fields already at 100% OA (Open Access) for years now. There have been no journal cancellations as a result; rather, the result was that the American Physical Society (APS), the publisher of the most important journals in the field, was the first publisher to go green, many years ago. It would have been a great shame, extremely short-sighted, and an even greater retardant on OA, if the reward for APS's pains had been cancellation! Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society) Blume (1999) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0471.html An even stronger counterexample comes from the very area of physics where self-archiving first flourished, and where it reached 100% first: High Energy Physics (HEP): (We don't have the data for HEP alone, but they are a subset of nuclear and particle physics, which is now at approximately 50% OA overall: please compare the green bars in nuclear/particle physics alone http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0032.gif with those for all fields of physics: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0031.gif ) The Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP) was born gold in 1997, that is, it was created as an OA journal in this field that had already been self-archiving since 1991 and was already at or near 100% OA by 1997. Within one year, JHEP achieved an ISI impact factor of 6.6 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1814.html and it just kept rising: http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~ejds/seminars2002/Loriano_Bonora/Jhep_presentazione/impact01.htm Nevertheless, by 2002, JHEP had difficulty making ends meet as an OA journal, so it converted from gold to green, the title being taken over by the Institute of Physics (IOP) and offered on the usual subscription/license toll-access model. JHEP will convert from toll-free-access to toll-based access Harnad (2002) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1812.html The first thing to note is that in that case institutional libraries did exactly the *right* thing, which was to subscribe to JHEP in virtue of the fact that it was an important, high-quality, high-impact journal. The second thing to note is that all the *articles* in JHEP are and remain OA to this day, because their authors continue to make them OA by self-archiving them. This is what the authors of all the 2.5 million annual articles in the 24,000 peer-reviewed should all be doing, as of now. In keeping with the importance of separating the article access/impact problem from the journal pricing/affordability problem, I will not speculate here about the role of pricing in the decision of so many institutions to subscribe to JHEP after it converted from gold to green. Reasonable prices are always desirable and advantageous. But the substantive point is that -- rather than speculating about and perhaps even encouraging library *cancellations* as the reward for publishers taking the positive step of going green so authors are encouraged to provide OA -- we should consider JHEP as evidence of the possibility of peaceful co-existence between OA via self-archiving and the continuing support of the journals that have given it their green light. 2. Assuming cancellations because of self-archiving are negligible or nonexistent, at what point, if ever, would one expect such cancellations to begin? Or are we to imagine that there will be no cancellations and that the widespread acceptance of Romeo Green standards will have no economic impact on publishers' revenues from libraries (and, thus, no impact on reducing libraries' expenditures)?
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
On Fri, 28 May 2004, David Goodman wrote: I do not think any scientist would consider Elsevier's policy a fully satisfactory permanent arrangement, and all would prefer that the edited version from the publisher could be posted. One can always prefer more. Free journals with all costs covered by a generous subsidy from somewhere would be nice too. But Elsevier's green self-archiving policy is all that it is *reasonable* for a scientist to demand of a publisher today, in the interests of OA. More important, it is all that is needed for 100% OA today. I, for one, would consider the arrangement fully satisfactory till doomsday if the pre-refereeing preprints and the refereed final drafts of all 2.5 million annual articles in all 24,000 journals were all OA as of tomorrow. Nothing more would be needed (for research and researchers): Nothing. But it is not unreasonable to accept partial solutions for the time being, on the realistic principle that it is better to get the material disseminated in some fashion. This move does provide for the access to the material in some form, especially considering that articles in some fields are only lightly edited, and that some authors may consider the preprint version close enough--or conceivably superior--to the changes imposed by the editor and peer-reviewer. We are not talking here about the preprints only, or even mainly: The announcement was that Elsevier had gone from pale-green (green light for self-archiving pre-refereeing preprints self-archiving only) to fully green (preprints and postprints). That was the target, and it is about that that I repeat that nothing more is needed. Please let us not blur that fact. Of course a lot more can be self-archived than the preprint and postprint: An author can self-archive the various revisions in between, can self-archive an enhanced version of the postprint, or even revised post-postprints corrected, updated or upgraded in response to subsequent comments or findings. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-self-archive That is the scholarly skywriting continuum. But a critical milestone will always be the refereed final draft, the draft accepted for publication as having met the peer-review standards of a particular journal. Harnad, Stevan (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/15/81/index.html The move to open access journals also has less-than-satisfactory temporary arrangements. Among such partial solutions are journals where all but the last few months are openly available, or the widely-acclaimed PNAS policy of letting the author pay extra for open access. If you look at the BOAI definition of Open Access, you will see that it amounts to immediate, permanent, toll-free, full-text online access. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml Delayed/embargoed access is of course better than no access (i.e., just toll-access; just as lower-toll access is better than higher-toll access), but it certainly isn't Open Access. And a journal (like Science, for example) that offers only delayed/embargoed access is certainly not an OA journal: Shulenburger on open access: so NEAR and yet so far http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3277.html Is Embargoed Access Open Access? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3687.html I can understand the excitement felt when Elsevier liberalizes its policy. Considering the size of the publisher and the amount of material affected, there has been a tendency to accept all its progressive moves, however small intrinsically, as major progress. This is not a small progressive move but *exactly* what every responsible publisher, not setting its own interests over those of research and researchers, would and should do: no more nor less. (Note that it has nothing to do with pricing policy, and none of this should be taken as pertaining to pricing policy in any way.) Elsevier's policy is a perfectly reasonable competitive move to encourage authors to use its journals rather than those of other commercial publishers, some of which do not yet allow postprints. It may also have the effect of encouraging them to use Elsevier rather than society journals (many of which do not allow posting at all), hoping to balance the right to self-archive against the narrow distribution of some of Elsevier's weaker titles. I do not think it is useful to make these rather suspicious speculations about Elsevier's motivation. I do not believe Elsevier went green just in order to drum up more business; but if it does drum up more business -- or forces the competition to do likewise -- so much the better. The more green the better, because more green means more OA. I have been informed that Cell Press, arguably the portion of Elsevier that
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 List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 03:09:39 +0100 From: Hunter, Karen (ELS-US) k.hunterelsevier.com To: 'har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk' har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Cc: Karssen, Zeger (ELS) z.kars...@elsevier.nl, Bolman, Pieter (ELS) p.bol...@elsevier.com, Seeley, Mark (ELS) m.see...@elsevier.com 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 Karen Hunter Senior Vice President, Strategy Elsevier +1-212-633-3787 k.hun...@elsevier.com
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
Thanks to Elsevier, but... What about some special data included into the papers ? For instance, atomic coordinates of crystal structures are traditionnally copied in papers by monopolistic commercial databases (CSD, ICSD, CRYSTMET), and not put in open access at all (exception for the PDB - Protein Database - and AMCSD - minerals -and NDB - nucleic acids). This concerns the final coordinates possibly modified after the reviewing process. To my knowledge, the database institutions do not pay a cent to the journals (even, they pretend to a copyright on the data). Are the authors allowed by Elsevier to upload their data (CIF files) into an open access database like the COD (http://www.crystallography.net/)? We would like to see crystallographers deposit CIFs with the COD prior to publication, with the understanding that this disclosure should not be considered prior publication when a paper is prepared for journal publication. Armel Le Bail Universite du Maine France
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
On Fri, 28 May 2004, Armel Le Bail, Universite du Maine, France, wrote: Thanks to Elsevier, but... What about some special data included into the papers ? For instance, atomic coordinates of crystal structures are traditionnally copied in papers by monopolistic commercial databases (CSD, ICSD, CRYSTMET), and not put in open access at all (exception for the PDB - Protein Database - and AMCSD - minerals -and NDB - nucleic acids). This concerns the final coordinates possibly modified after the reviewing process. To my knowledge, the database institutions do not pay a cent to the journals (even, they pretend to a copyright on the data). OA is about the full-text contents of the 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 refereed journals (Elsevier's comprising about 1700 of them). It is not about what is *not* in those articles. Nor is it about what database publishers harvest into their proprietary databases. But data in OA contents can be harvested by more than one party. (And, by the way, the postprint is the corrected, peer-reviewed final draft, as also pointed out in the letter from Karen Hunter of Elsevier.) Are the authors allowed by Elsevier to upload their data (CIF files) into an open access database like the COD (http://www.crystallography.net/)? We would like to see crystallographers deposit CIFs with the COD prior to publication, with the understanding that this disclosure should not be considered prior publication when a paper is prepared for journal publication. Journal publishers do not *own* the data reported in the articles they publish. They own only the copyright to the full-text (if that has been tranferred). If you publish the datum atomic weight of Lugdunum = 18 in your (Elsevier) article, no one owns (or has a copyright or patent on) that fact. I may read it (if I have access), use it, state it, and cite it in my own (Springer) article. I may also have reported in my own (Springer) article the atomic wight of Hubdunum = 21. Again, you may use, state and cite my datum in your (Elsevier) article. A database compiler can also harvest both those data and others like them into a proprietary database that I and everyone else must then pay to access. I may again use those facts in my research and cite them in my articles, but fair use limits how many of them I may reproduce. And I may not offer a compilation of them online, because the database compilers have added value and borne expenses in their harvesting and compilation, and I cannot pirate their efforts and expenses to re-offer it without permission and compensation. But this does not apply to the *data* reported in an OA primary article: Both proprietary databases and nonproprietary databases are free to harvest the data from OA articles and make compilations of them if they wish (taking your L=18 and my H=21, etc., presumably citing the source where appropriate). Neither the full-text itself, however, nor substantial verbatim portions of it, are merely data to be harvested: In other words, OA does not necessarily entail the right to harvest and republish full-texts in their entirety, nor substantial subsets of them, and to republish them online (e,g, in compilations) without further permissions. But one must also ask oneself why anyone would want to do anything like that with OA articles! For the full-texts are all already OA, already accessible to anyone online, and hence can be just as easily *linked* as harvested, if someone wishes to do a compilation. By way of an ironic example: Ulrichs responded to my recent call for anyone with access to Ulrichs to supply me with the journal lists for the 85 (now 93) publishers in the SHERPA/Romeo database. Ulrichs pointed out that this would be a violation of Fair Use. Fair enough. We are now instead in the process of requesting from or directly harvesting each publisher's journal list from their own (OA) website. http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers.html The primary publishers themselves are of course not treating their own journal lists as proprietary databases but as advertising their products. Soon authors will come to realize that their own full-texts journal articles are really rather like advertisements too: written to be read and used as much as possible. Stevan Harnad Prior AmSci Subject Thread: Free Access vs. Open Access http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html
Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving
I do not think any scientist would consider Elsevier's policy a fully satisfactory permanent arrangement, and all would prefer that the edited version from the publisher could be posted. But it is not unreasonable to accept partial solutions for the time being, on the realistic principle that it is better to get the material disseminated in some fashion. This move does provide for the access to the material in some form, especially considering that articles in some fields are only lightly edited, and that some author may consider the preprint version close enough--or conceivably superior--to the changes imposed by the editor and peer-reviewer. The move to open access journals also has less-than-satisfactory temporary arrangements. Among such partial solutions are journals where all but the last few months are openly available, or the widely-acclaimed PNAS policy of letting the author pay extra for open access. I can understand the excitement felt when Elsevier liberalizes its policy. Considering the size of the publisher and the amount of material affected, there has been a tendency to accept all its progressive moves, however small intrinsically, as major progress. Elsevier's policy is a perfectly reasonable competitive move to encourage authors to use its journals rather than those of other commercial publishers, some of which do not yet allow postprints. It may also have the effect of encouraging them to use Elsevier rather than society journals (many of which do not allow posting at all), hoping to balance the right to self-archive against the narrow distribution of some of Elsevier's weaker titles. I have been informed that Cell Press, arguably the portion of Elsevier that has the strongest titles, does not have the same policy to pre- and post-prints as the other Elsevier Science titles. I have not yet been able to determine exactly how it differs. It may, indeed be the case that in order to achieve the widest dissemination we may have to be content with policies such as this for a time. It may even be the case that the scientific world decides to ignore the need for anything more than the basic presentation of ideas, and accepts a self-prepared report as full publication. There are applied fields where this has long been the case, and where semi-edited and semi-peer-reviewed conference proceedings or technical reports form the important literature. Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University dgood...@liu.edu (and, formerly: Princeton University Library)
