[GOAL] Re: Elsevier requires institutions to seek Elsevier's agreement to require their authors to exercise their rights?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Stevan Harnad <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk>wrote:

> The issue is the self-contradiction between (1) a formal statement that a
> right rests with the author (i.e., does not require seeking the agreement
> of the publisher) yet at the same time (2) stipulating that the right to
> *exercise* that right requires seeking agreement from the publisher!
>
>
> This is exactly the issue. Is self-archiving a right? I think it *should*
be but I have always assumed that many people see it as a hard-won
concession from the publisher.

This is why I keep urging formal definitions and formal procedures. At
present that seems that publisher "agreements" are made with individual
organizations or even individuals. Publisher statements (such as statements
of permission to self-archive) can be rescinded later (as appears here, at
least in practice) or modified without notification.

Meanwhile the actual practices are in secret contracts between N publishers
and M universities - an N*M confusion matrix.

I would feel more positive about Green OA if it was a formalized process as
opposed to resting on fuzzy concepts. For example there seem to many
different definitions of what self-archiving is, and this varies between
publishers.


-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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