[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Still Onside of Angels on Immediate, Unembargoed Green OA Self-Archiving By Its Authors
On 2013-05-03, at 2:57 AM, David Prosser david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk wrote: I agree with Andras and I cannot see how any publisher who has a policy along the lines of: You may make your author version freely available without embargo unless you are mandated (by funder or institution) to do so, in which case you may not make your author version freely available without embargo can be described as being on the side of the Angels. We may dismiss such a policy as FUD or even claim that it is illogical and unenforceable - as Stevan does - but we cannot possibly describe it as angelic. Since -- exactly like Springer's (hedge-free) rights-retention policy (and countless others) -- Elsevier's policy does indeed formally recognize right of the authors of the articles published in 2000 Elsevier journals to make them immediately OA (unembargoed), I would say that the angelic tag was fully earned. The tag is not earned for the FUD. The right right response to the FUD is to ignore it. Let's not waste time and divert attention to the question of whether they are Cherubim or Seraphim: The fact that Elsevier give their Green Light to immediate, unembargoed OA-provision by their authors is what matters (to those who care more about OA than about journal pricing or publisher boycotting). Harrumph! Stevan On 2 May 2013, at 08:17, Andras Holl wrote: Dear Stevan, Regardless however right you are, Elsevier's play with words succesfully confuses a large number of authors, who do not deposit because of this. Andras On Wed, 1 May 2013 20:24:46 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 5:10 PM, BISSET J. james.bis...@durham.ac.uk wrote: From our understanding of Elsevier policy this is not the case in two instances: 1) if the institution requires deposit in their institutional repository 2) if the funder requires open access. Dear James, Elsevier rights agreements state that authors retains the right to make their final drafts OA immediately upon publication: no embargo. I will answer your more detailed questions below, but let me already give you a simple general answer from which all the specific ones can be deduced. If a contract says you have the right to do X, then it cannot go on to stipulate that you only have the right to exercise your right to do X if you are not required to exercise it. That is empty double-talk, and can and should be completely ignored as empty. A right is a right; you either have it or you don't. Moreover, Elsevier authors do not need Elsevier's permission to deposit in their IRs any more than they need Elsevier's permission to go to the WC! The only thing at issue is the right to make the deposit immediately OA (i.e., free online). And Elsevier (like Springer, and about 60% of all publishers) state that the author retains the right to make the final draft OA immediately upon publication: no OA embargo. So all authors with any sense should go ahead and exercise that formally endorsed right that they retain! I have an email from Elsevier today confirming that in either of the two cases above, immediate deposit is permitted but open access is not permitted until [after] an embargo period... Elsevier is just playing on words here. As I said, the right to deposit is not at issue. Elsevier does not have any say over where I put my final draft. The only right at issue is the right to make the deposit immediately OA (i.e., free online). Additionally, Durham has reissued its mandate for self-archiving, including a requirement that only those deposited (not necessarily open access) can be used for consideration in promotion or probation (the 'how' this will work us still being looked at - So this has not yet been registered anywhere). Bravo on adopting the optimal institutional OA mandate. Soon we can hope that the Durham mandate will be reinforced by the very same mandate from HEFCE/REF: only articles whose final drafts were deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication will be eligible for submission to the next REF (2020). Institutional and HEFCE immediate-deposit mandates can then mutually reinforce one another, and institutions will be able to devise a simple mechanism for monitoring and verifying compliance. Because we now mandate deposit, Elsevier have indicated we cannot make any publications open access until we sign an agreement with them - which includes restricting access from immediate upon publication (as it was without a mandate) to the embargo periods mentioned above. This is very interesting: Have you asked yourself why Elsevier is asking for a second agreement? Isn't the author's signed agreement enough, if it is really sufficient to
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Still Onside of Angels on Immediate, Unembargoed Green OA Self-Archiving By Its Authors
Since -- exactly like Springer's (hedge-free) rights-retention policy (and countless others) -- Elsevier's policy does indeed formally recognize right of the authors of the articles published in 2000 Elsevier journals to make them immediately OA (unembargoed), I would say that the angelic tag was fully earned. Actually, they don't. See: http://www.elsevier.com/authors/author-rights-and-responsibilities Penultimate row of the column: 'Mandated deposit or deposit in or posting to subject-oriented or centralized repositories' for 'accepted author manuscripts' 'Yes under specific agreement between Elsevier and the repository**' To me that means 'no' if no agreement between Elsevier and the repository. The exception is arXiv where Elsevier obviously feel the horse has bolted and there is no point trying to close that stable door. David On 3 May 2013, at 12:25, Stevan Harnad wrote: On 2013-05-03, at 2:57 AM, David Prosser david.pros...@rluk.ac.uk wrote: I agree with Andras and I cannot see how any publisher who has a policy along the lines of: You may make your author version freely available without embargo unless you are mandated (by funder or institution) to do so, in which case you may not make your author version freely available without embargo can be described as being on the side of the Angels. We may dismiss such a policy as FUD or even claim that it is illogical and unenforceable - as Stevan does - but we cannot possibly describe it as angelic. Since -- exactly like Springer's (hedge-free) rights-retention policy (and countless others) -- Elsevier's policy does indeed formally recognize right of the authors of the articles published in 2000 Elsevier journals to make them immediately OA (unembargoed), I would say that the angelic tag was fully earned. The tag is not earned for the FUD. The right right response to the FUD is to ignore it. Let's not waste time and divert attention to the question of whether they are Cherubim or Seraphim: The fact that Elsevier give their Green Light to immediate, unembargoed OA-provision by their authors is what matters (to those who care more about OA than about journal pricing or publisher boycotting). Harrumph! Stevan On 2 May 2013, at 08:17, Andras Holl wrote: Dear Stevan, Regardless however right you are, Elsevier's play with words succesfully confuses a large number of authors, who do not deposit because of this. Andras On Wed, 1 May 2013 20:24:46 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 5:10 PM, BISSET J. james.bis...@durham.ac.uk wrote: From our understanding of Elsevier policy this is not the case in two instances: 1) if the institution requires deposit in their institutional repository 2) if the funder requires open access. Dear James, Elsevier rights agreements state that authors retains the right to make their final drafts OA immediately upon publication: no embargo. I will answer your more detailed questions below, but let me already give you a simple general answer from which all the specific ones can be deduced. If a contract says you have the right to do X, then it cannot go on to stipulate that you only have the right to exercise your right to do X if you are not required to exercise it. That is empty double-talk, and can and should be completely ignored as empty. A right is a right; you either have it or you don't. Moreover, Elsevier authors do not need Elsevier's permission to deposit in their IRs any more than they need Elsevier's permission to go to the WC! The only thing at issue is the right to make the deposit immediately OA (i.e., free online). And Elsevier (like Springer, and about 60% of all publishers) state that the author retains the right to make the final draft OA immediately upon publication: no OA embargo. So all authors with any sense should go ahead and exercise that formally endorsed right that they retain! I have an email from Elsevier today confirming that in either of the two cases above, immediate deposit is permitted but open access is not permitted until [after] an embargo period... Elsevier is just playing on words here. As I said, the right to deposit is not at issue. Elsevier does not have any say over where I put my final draft. The only right at issue is the right to make the deposit immediately OA (i.e., free online). Additionally, Durham has reissued its mandate for self-archiving, including a requirement that only those deposited (not necessarily open access) can be used for consideration in promotion or probation (the 'how' this will work us still being looked at - So this has not yet been registered anywhere). Bravo on adopting the optimal institutional OA mandate. Soon we can hope that the Durham mandate will
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Still Onside of Angels on Immediate, Unembargoed Green OA Self-Archiving By Its Authors
On 2013-05-02, at 3:17 AM, Andras Holl h...@konkoly.hu wrote: Dear Stevan, Regardless however right you are, Elsevier's play with words succesfully confuses a large number of authors, who do not deposit because of this. Dear Andras, You are quite right. But word-play is word-play, and the only way to defeat it is to use one's brains. That's what authors, their institiutions and their funders need to do, with mandates that are clear, effective, monitored and verified. Elsevier policy allowing immediate, unembargoed self-archiving by authors is identical to Springer's policy, but the way, apart from all the formal FUD. Springer is perfectly straightforward about it. So ignore the FUD, deposit immediately, and make the immediate-deposit OA immediately. Leave the FUD for those who are fatuous enough to be taken in by it. Below is a recent posting I did on this very point on another list. Best wishes, Istvan ELSEVIER VS ACADEMIC SLOW-WITTEDNESS Elsevier has many very unsavoury practices: It overcharges for subscriptions; it tries [and succeeds] to make confidential contingency deals with universities, linking subscription prices to university OA policy agreements; it lobbies against OA mandates; and it hedges its policy on Green OA with so much unspeakable nonsense that it is hard to sort out the signal from the noise. Yet the signal is clear for those with eyes to see and wits to filter out FUD: Elsevier authors all retain the right to make their refereed final drafts free online immediately upon acceptance for publication. For anyone with any common sense, that's all that's needed. Ignore all the accompanying double-talk about mandates and systematicity. It's all just incoherent formalistic FUD. Deposit your final draft in your institutional repository and make it immediately OA and pay no attention to anything else Elsevier says about it. The trouble is, many people still do not have the sense to realize that. So they keep solemnly agonizing over absurd details like You may only exercise the right to self-archive that all Elsevier authors retain if you are not required to exercise it -- which makes as much sense as: You may only exercise the right to self-archive that all Elsevier authors retain if you do not have a blue-eyed maternal uncle. Well I'm beginning to think that slow-wittedness deserves to learn its lesson the hard way. So let those so inclined keep solemnly agonizing over how to comply with Elsevier's hedged gibberish. (The physicists in Arxiv instantly intuited all of this nearly quarter century ago, and computer scientists, with anonymous FTP archives, even earlier. The rest of us have only ourselves to blame for our lost quarter-century of research access and impact...) Andras On Wed, 1 May 2013 20:24:46 -0400, Stevan Harnad wrote On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 5:10 PM, BISSET J. james.bis...@durham.ac.uk wrote: From our understanding of Elsevier policy this is not the case in two instances: 1) if the institution requires deposit in their institutional repository 2) if the funder requires open access. Dear James, Elsevier rights agreements state that authors retains the right to make their final drafts OA immediately upon publication: no embargo. I will answer your more detailed questions below, but let me already give you a simple general answer from which all the specific ones can be deduced. If a contract says you have the right to do X, then it cannot go on to stipulate that you only have the right to exercise your right to do X if you are not required to exercise it. That is empty double-talk, and can and should be completely ignored as empty. A right is a right; you either have it or you don't. Moreover, Elsevier authors do not need Elsevier's permission to deposit in their IRs any more than they need Elsevier's permission to go to the WC! The only thing at issue is the right to make the deposit immediately OA (i.e., free online). And Elsevier (like Springer, and about 60% of all publishers) state that the author retains the right to make the final draft OA immediately upon publication: no OA embargo. So all authors with any sense should go ahead and exercise that formally endorsed right that they retain! I have an email from Elsevier today confirming that in either of the two cases above, immediate deposit is permitted but open access is not permitted until [after] an embargo period... Elsevier is just playing on words here. As I said, the right to deposit is not at issue. Elsevier does not have any say over where I put my final draft. The only right at issue is the right to make the deposit immediately OA (i.e., free online). Additionally, Durham has reissued its mandate for self-archiving, including a requirement that only those deposited (not
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Still Onside of Angels on Immediate, Unembargoed Green OA Self-Archiving By Its Authors
On 2013-05-02, at 4:28 AM, Fotis Georgatos fo...@mail.cern.ch wrote: On May 2, 2013, at 9:17 AM, Andras Holl wrote: Regardless however right you are, Elsevier's play with words succesfully confuses a large number of authors, who do not deposit because of this. It is the role of research institutes and university boards to step forward and make an emphatic statement about the status quo and, how their subordinates/affiliates are expected to behave. Taxpayers do not have an excuse of confusion when they make their contributions so, that puts some responsibility on the individual authors, too. btw. -sorry if the question has been asked again over here- is there an open ranking list of universities worldwide as regards the clarity of their messaging in relation to Open Access? Dear Fotis, We have done a study testing the correlation (positive and significant) between the strength of the institutional Green OA mandates in ROARMAP and the number of deposits in the repository. An earlier preprint is below. An updated version will be posted shortly. Details available from Dr. Yassine Gargouri: yassinegargo...@hotmail.com The Liege mandate, the strongest, has a deposit rate of over 80%. The Liege model -- immediate-deposit (ID/OA) designated the mechanism for submitting publications for performance review -- is now being adopted more and more, with UK's HEFCE/REF proposing it also for funder mandates. Best wishes, Stevan Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness Yassine Gargouri, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Tim Brody, Les Carr, Stevan Harnad (Submitted on 30 Oct 2012 (v1), last revised 2 Nov 2012 (this version, v2)) We have now tested the Finch Committee's Hypothesis that Green Open Access Mandates are ineffective in generating deposits in institutional repositories. With data from ROARMAP on institutional Green OA mandates and data from ROAR on institutional repositories, we show that deposit number and rate is significantly correlated with mandate strength (classified as 1-12): The stronger the mandate, the more the deposits. The strongest mandates generate deposit rates of 70%+ within 2 years of adoption, compared to the un-mandated deposit rate of 20%. The effect is already detectable at the national level, where the UK, which has the largest proportion of Green OA mandates, has a national OA rate of 35%, compared to the global baseline of 25%. The conclusion is that, contrary to the Finch Hypothesis, Green Open Access Mandates do have a major effect, and the stronger the mandate, the stronger the effect (the Liege ID/OA mandate, linked to research performance evaluation, being the strongest mandate model). RCUK (as well as all universities, research institutions and research funders worldwide) would be well advised to adopt the strongest Green OA mandates and to integrate institutional and funder mandates.___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Still Onside of Angels on Immediate, Unembargoed Green OA Self-Archiving By Its Authors
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 5:10 PM, BISSET J. james.bis...@durham.ac.uk wrote: From our understanding of Elsevier policy this is not the case in two instances: 1) if the institution requires deposit in their institutional repository 2) if the funder requires open access. Dear James, Elsevier rights agreements state that authors retains the right to make their final drafts OA immediately upon publication: no embargo. I will answer your more detailed questions below, but let me already give you a simple general answer from which all the specific ones can be deduced. If a contract says *you have the right to do X*, then it cannot go on to stipulate that you only have the *right to exercise* your right to do X if you are not required to exercise it. That is empty double-talk,http://www.google.ca/search?hl=enlr=q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/ie=UTF-8tbm=blgtbs=qdr:mnum=100c2coff=1safe=active#q=elsevier+double-talk+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/lr=c2coff=1safe=activehl=entbm=blgtbas=0source=lntsa=Xei=VpiBUeBI08fSAc-pgaAMved=0CBsQpwUoAAbav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.bvm=bv.45921128,d.dmQfp=1dc003e2610cd254biw=1181bih=708and can and should be completely ignored as empty. A right is a right; you either have it or you don't. Moreover, Elsevier authors do not need Elsevier's permission to *deposit*in their IRs any more than they need Elsevier's permission to go to the WC! The only thing at issue is *the right to make the deposit immediately OA (i.e., free online)*. And Elsevier (like Springer, and about 60% of all publishers) state that the author retains the right to make the final draft OA immediately upon publication: no OA embargo. So all authors with any sense should go ahead and exercise that formally endorsed right that they retain! I have an email from Elsevier today confirming that in either of the two cases above, immediate deposit is permitted but open access is not permitted until [after] an embargo period... Elsevier is just playing on words here. As I said, the right to *deposit*is not at issue. Elsevier does not have any say over where I put my final draft. The only right at issue is *the right to make the deposit immediately OA (i.e., free online)*. Additionally, Durham has reissued its mandate for self-archiving, including a requirement that only those deposited (not necessarily open access) can be used for consideration in promotion or probation (the 'how' this will work us still being looked at - So this has not yet been registered anywhere). Bravo on adopting the optimal institutional OA mandate. Soon we can hope that the Durham mandate will be reinforced by the very same mandate from HEFCE/REF http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rinfrastruct/openaccess/: only articles whose final drafts were deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication will be eligible for submission to the next REF (2020). Institutional and HEFCE immediate-deposit mandates can then mutually reinforce one another, and institutions will be able to devise a simple mechanism for monitoring and verifying compliancehttp://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1004-Harnad-Follow-Up-Comments-to-BIS-Select-Committee-on-Open-Access.html . Because we now mandate deposit, Elsevier have indicated we cannot make any publications open access until we sign an agreement with them - which includes restricting access from immediate upon publication (as it was without a mandate) to the embargo periods mentioned above. This is very interesting: Have you asked yourself *why* Elsevier is asking for a second agreement? Isn't the author's signed agreement enough, if it is really sufficient to accord him a right yet prevent him from exercising that right? Well obviously not, because of the double-talk I just mentioned. In an agreement with the clause *Clause C1:* *You retain the right to do X* followed by the clause *Clause C2: **but you may not exercise your right to do X if you are required to do X* you are sanctioning a contradiction. Logically speaking (and contracts must obey logic as surely as they must obey the law), this is pretty much the same as simply saying: *Clause C1:* *You may do X* and *Clause C2: **You may not do X*. With a logical contradiction, you can pretty much take your choice and do whatever you like, because anything (and the opposite of anything) follows from a contradiction. A good choice would be to read sequentially, follow Clause 1, and simply ignore Clause 2, which just says the opposite. If challenged, cite clause 1. And this is the real reason that Elsevier is not comfortable with relying on its signed author rights agreement with its authors as grounds for restraining them form doing what the retain the right to do if they are required to do it. So they instead try to get a signature to yet another agreement, from yet another party -- the university -- a further
