Reed Elsevier as "Green" publisher

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@worldnet.att.net>]

>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.

JE:  This is, I think, about the most interesting post to come my way in
quite some time.  Putting aside all quibbles and cavils that are bound to
arise (and which Mr. Harnad properly anticipates in his full post, of
which the quotation above is but a snippet), I would like to pose some
questions about the implications of self-archiving.

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.

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)?

3.  Assuming that cancellations or their threat do occur, how are
publishers likely to respond?  Will they watch their businesses whither
away?  Will they step back from "Romeo Green"?  Or will they migrate the
value away from the articles themselves (which presumably are free to one
and all through a well-tuned Google search) to other facets of their
subscription services? This is the point that I am personally most
interested in.

Joe Esposito