See also: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0136.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1604.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1963.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1964.html
In an article in the July 5 _Chronicle of Higher Education_ on institutional eprint archives, Jeffrey Young summarizes Elsevier's self-archiving policy in these words:
Elsevier does allow its authors to publish their papers in institutional repositories or other noncommercial archives, provided that the authors ask permission first. He says that fewer than 5 percent of authors ask.
Young interviewed Arie Jongejan, head of Elsevier's Science and Technology division. So perhaps this summary of company policy is based on Jongejan's authority. Young's article http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i43/43a02901.htm Since the _Chronicle_ article will have wide distribution, I'd like to note three qualifications to its summary of Elsevier's policy. (1) Elsevier allows authors to put preprints in public archives without special permission. The archived preprint may remain online after the postprint is published. Elsevier does not allow authors to update the online preprint to match the published postprint. http://authors.elsevier.com/PublisherInfoDetail.html?dc=PRP (2) Elsevier allows authors to put even postprints into institutional repositories provided that these are not accessible to the public. http://authors.elsevier.com/PublisherInfoDetail.html?dc=CI (3) Elsevier's CEO, Derk Haank, gave an interview with Richard Poynder in the April 2002 _Information Today_ in which he described a far more liberal archiving policy than the one described in the _Chronicle_ or the Elsevier web site. Here is the key excerpt from the Poynder interview. http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm
[Haank] "We consider open archiving to be in line with our policy of open linking, which we have always supported. As a founding father of CrossRef, we realize that other initiatives like open archiving could be another means to the same end." [...] [Poynder] "You imply that open archiving is the same as CrossRef, but CrossRef assumes that linked articles are all behind a financial firewall. Open archiving, by contrast, depends on researchers self-archiving their articles on the Web so that anyone can access them at no cost. Supposing an academic wants to publish a paper in one of your journals, but to self-archive it on the Web as well. Would that be acceptable to Elsevier?" [Haank] "You can put your paper on your own Web site if you want. The only thing we insist on is that if we publish your article you don't publish it in a Springer or Wiley journal, too. In fact, I believe we have the most liberal copyright policy available."
To me these statements imply (1) that Haank would allow Elsevier authors to archive postprints as well as preprints without case-by-case permission, and (2) that postprints may be put in publicly accessible archives. I asked him in an April letter whether the Budapest Open Access Initiative would be justified in drawing these inferences from his interview, but he has not replied. ---------- Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374 Email [email protected] Web http://www.earlham.edu/~peters Editor, Free Online Scholarship Newsletter http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/ Editor, FOS News blog http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
