Hi Peter – Since your question was to me, I’ll respond for bepress here. We see our role as building a platform that excels in making open access content discoverable. We leave the exact definition of open access, including licensing and access control, to our customers to decide.
So, for the record, yes, Digital Commons meets your criteria when our customers decide to make their work openly available, which is almost all of the time. When schools decide to restrict access on their content, we support them in that too. It’s their content and we have no claim to it. Best, Promita -- Promita Chatterji Product Marketing Manager bepress From: <goal-boun...@eprints.org> on behalf of Peter Murray-Rust <pm...@cam.ac.uk> Reply-To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org> Date: Tuesday, March 13, 2018 at 2:50 AM To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org> Subject: Re: [GOAL] bepress and SSRN Announce Integration Pilot with Columbia and University of Georgia Law Schools Please can the Elsevier poster of this announcement define exactly (in operational terms, not marketing fluff) what is meant by "openaccess" . When I visit the SSRN site I find it is a walled garden with the message: <quote> What Happened? We have observed an unusual download pattern. The reason why this might happen: * Accessing through a proxy server * Having problems downloading a paper * Accidentally downloading a paper too frequently Please consider signing in or creating a free account. You can continue downloading this paper and you will no longer see this page. It also helps us track reader interest and provide accurate download counts to our authors and readers. </quote> This seems standard for other visitors who have tried to download even a single paper. My interpretation is that Elsevier (because SSRN and Bepress are now Elsevier) want to monitor and control readers in a walled garden. Unless I am reliably informed otherwise I expect that Elsevier will track all my actions on the site (monitor), probably report them to third parties, form data products out of my actions (monitoring) and also provide a nonobjective set of search results based on whatever Elsevier wants to promote (this is common in walled gardens). Could the Product Marketing Manager inform this list precisely: * whether visitors can use SSRN/Bepress anonymously without registering? * what the explicit licence is on the articles (e.g. CC BY) * whether text and data mining is allowed without Elsevier' permission The answers to all these questions can be single words. If they are not (YES, CC-BY, YES) then I do not regard this as Open Access P. On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 7:11 PM, Chatterji, Promita (ELS-BKY) <pchatte...@bepress.com<mailto:pchatte...@bepress.com>> wrote: ** apologies for cross-posting** bepress and SSRN Announce Integration Pilot with Columbia and University of Georgia Law Schools Bepress<http://bepress%20and%20SSRN%20Announce%20Integration%20Pilot%20with%20Columbia%20and%20University%20of%20Georgia%20Law%20Schools> and SSRN<https://www.ssrn.com/en/> are pleased to announce a joint pilot to explore integration between their two platforms. The four-month pilot launches today with the participation of Columbia Law School’s Arthur W. Diamond Law Library and University of Georgia School of Law’s Library. Both bepress and SSRN are eager to explore potential solutions to the obstacles that professional schools and their libraries face in promoting their open access scholarship. The initial pilot offers one possible model for demonstrating the increased reach of legal scholarship when work is available through an open access repository as well as a specialized network of peers, by simplifying population of and aggregating research impact from both platforms. “We are incredibly excited to launch this project,” stated Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Managing Director at bepress. “It is the first step in our vision to work together with others in the Elsevier ecosystem in order to better support our community with their open access initiatives.” Columbia Law School Library Director Kent McKeever noted, “this is exactly the kind of synergy that I was hoping to see now that both products are under the Elsevier umbrella.” With Elsevier’s acquisition of bepress in August 2017, both platforms are now part of the Elsevier portfolio. One goal of the pilot is to support open access initiatives by helping libraries quickly populate their institutional repositories. SSRN and bepress will explore ways to easily transfer research articles, enabling this scholarship to become part of an institution’s open access collections. “Integrating these two platforms will reduce some of the hurdles to making law faculties’ scholarship freely available through open access,” states Carol Watson, Director of the Law Library at the University of Georgia. The pilot also tests potential benefits for authors. Bankier states, “we believe that authors should be able to get credit for their readership, regardless of whether an article is downloaded from bepress’s Digital Commons or SSRN.” As Watson puts it, the integration will lead to a “more accurate assessment of the true impact of their legal scholarship” by harnessing the discovery power that is at the heart of both platforms. SSRN and bepress are leading names in the law scholarship, with thousands of authors -- Promita Chatterji Product Marketing Manager bepress _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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