Elsevier and IOP Still Fully Green and Onside With the Angels

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

Re: 
http://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5146/4608
and : 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/815-guid.html

I am going to make this as brief and as simple as possible, in 
the fervent hope that it will be read, understood and acted upon 
by authors and their institutions:

A Green publisher is a publisher that endorses immediate 
self-archiving of their authors' accepted final drafts (but not 
the publisher's version of record) free for all on the web, 
immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That's all it takes for a publisher to be Green (and to be on the 
Side of the Angels).

In the new language that some Green publishers have jointly 
adopted for their copyright transfer agreements recently, some 
new conditions have been added, based on three distinctions. Not 
all Green publishers have added all three conditions (Elsevier, 
for example, has only added two of them, IOP all three), but it 
does not matter, because all three distinctions are incoherent: 
They have no legal, logical, technical nor practical substance 
whatsoever. The only thing that a sensible person can and should 
do with them is to ignore them completely.

Here they are. (The actual wording in the agreement will vary, 
but I am giving just the relevant gist.)

(1) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately 
upon acceptance for publication, free for all BUT YOU MAY ONLY DO 
IT ON YOUR PERSONAL INSTITUTIONAL WEBSITE, NOT IN YOUR 
INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY.

This distinction is completely empty. Your institutional website 
and your institutional repository are just institutional disk 
sectors with different (arbitrary) names.

(2) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately 
upon acceptance for publication, free for all BUT YOU MAY NOT DO 
IT WHERE THERE IS "SYSTEMATIC" DISTRIBUTION.

All websites are systematically harvested by google and other 
search engines, and that's how most users search and access them.

(I think what the drafters of this absurd condition may have had 
in mind is that you may not deposit your paper on a website that 
tries to systematically reconstruct the contents of the entire 
journal. They are perfectly right about that. But an 
institutional repository certainly does not do that; it simply 
displays its own authors' papers, which are an arbitrary fraction 
of any particular journal. If there is anyone that publishers can 
-- and should -- go after, it is 3rd party harvesters that 
reconstruct the contents of the entire journal.)

(3) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately 
upon acceptance for publication, free for all BUT NOT IF YOU ARE 
MANDATED TO DO IT (i.e. YOU MAY IF YOU MAY BUT YOU MAY NOT IF YOU 
MUST).

Authors are advised to advise their publishers, if ever asked, 
hand on heart, that everything they do, they do out of their own 
free well, and not out of coercion (and that includes the mandate 
to publish or perish).

If anyone is minded to spend any more time on this nonsense than 
the time it took to read this message, then they deserve 
everything that's coming (and not coming) to them.

Elsevier and IOP authors: Just keep self-archiving in your IRs, 
exactly as before, and ignore these three silly new clauses, 
secure in the knowledge that they contain nothing of substance.

Stevan Harnad Enabling Open Scholarship 
http://www.openscholarship.org