Trojan Horse from American Chemical Society: Caveat Emptor

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

         ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

Dear colleagues,

I urge you to beware of the American Chemical Society's cynical,
self-serving new "AuthorChoice" Option:

     http://pubs.acs.org/4authors/authorchoice/

It is an "offer" to "allow" authors to pay, not for Gold OA -- 
which is what hybrid Gold/Green publishers like Springer and 
Cambridge University Press offer -- but for Green OA!

In other words, ACS is proposing to charge authors for the right 
to deposit their own papers in their own institutional 
repositories.

This ploy was bound to be tried, but I urge you not to fall for 
it!

You have an unassailable right to deposit your peer-reviewed, 
accepted final drafts (postprints) of your ACS articles in your 
Institutional Repositories. If you don't feel you can make them 
Open Access just yet, make them Closed Access for now, but 
deposit them, immediately upon acceptance for publication (the 
preprint even earlier).

     The Immediate-deposit/Optional-Access Mandate
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html

OA self-archiving mandates by research funders and universities, 
with limits on embargoes, are now being adopted to ensure that 
your deposits are not left in Closed Access for long. But on no 
account should you pay ACS a penny for it.

     http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php

If you feel your deposit needs to be placed under a provisional 
Closed Access Embargo, "almost-OA" is immediately available via 
the EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST Button being implemented by more and 
more Institutional Repositories. Direct individual user to author 
eprint requests and their fulfillment online are Fair Use, as 
they have always been, even when authors mailed paper reprints to 
individual requesters.

     http://www.eprints.org/news/features/request_button.php

To pay for Gold OA today out of scarce research funds -- while 
all publication costs are still being paid by subscriptions -- is 
already irrational.

     "The Geeks and the Irrational"

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/128-guid.html

But to pay for Green OA would border on the absurd. Caveat 
Emptor!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html