On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Jan Velterop <[email protected]> wrote:
> One step could be to promote self-archiving instead of reluctantly > allowing it and then only under certain circumstances. But given that > immediacy is obviously not considered the most important feature > of OA by many of its advocates (vide many mandates), and immediacy > is perhaps the most understandable of the publishers' fears, there > is an opportunity for Elsevier to make all the journal material it > publishes available with full open access, CC-BY, after a reasonable > embargo of a year, maybe two years in less fast-moving disciplines. Asking Elsevier to drop its ambivalence about Green OA self-archiving is good. But then saying that immediate OA is so unimportant to researchers and OA advocates that this is an opportunity for Elsevier to change its current policy is not good. Elsevier has been Green -- meaning immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving – since 2004. Karen Hunter has repeatedly affirmed this position. Signalling to Elsevier now that back-pedalling to a "reasonable" embargo of a year or two is acceptable is a definite step in the wrong direction. It is true that many mandates allow an embargo, but that is precisely because the 40% of publishers that are not yet Green still insist on an embargo as a condition for allowing self-archiving at all. In other words, the reason such mandates allow embargoes is not because all researchers and all mandates don't consider immediate, unembargoed OA to be important. It is in order to accommodate these non-Green publishers that don't yet allow immediate, unembargoed OA. Jan has introduced the issue of Libre OA into the Elsevier discussion. Immediate, unembargoed OA may be less important for Libre OA than for Gratis OA, but what is at issue here is Gratis OA. Up until now, this conversation was about urging Elsevier to remove its recent self-serving and self-contradictory hedging clause about Gratis OA mandates. And it is probably best not to bring any potentially obfuscating issues into the conversation or the company will use them to slide away from addressing the issue at point – gratis OA permissions. I urge Elsevier to drop the self-contradictory hedging clause about Green Gratis OA in its author rights retention agreement: it is confusing, works against the interests of science, is clearly against the interests of the public, counter-productive and helping to fuel the anti-Elsevier protests. I’m sure we all look forward to hearing an affirmative answer from Alicia Wise that the company has thought the matter through and is removing that clause. Stevan Harnad _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
