[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"

[Stevan Harnad]

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com>
wrote:

>   One step could be to promote self-archiving instead of reluctantly
>   allowing it and then only under certain circumstances. But given that
>   immediacy is obviously not considered the most important feature
>   of OA by many of its advocates (vide many mandates), and immediacy
>   is perhaps the most understandable of the publishers' fears, there
>   is an opportunity for Elsevier to make all the journal material it
>   publishes available with full open access, CC-BY, after a reasonable
>   embargo of a year, maybe two years in less fast-moving disciplines.

Asking Elsevier to drop its ambivalence about Green OA self-archiving
is good.

But then saying that immediate OA is so unimportant to researchers
and OA advocates that this is an opportunity for Elsevier to change its
current policy is not good.  Elsevier has been Green -- meaning immediate,
unembargoed OA self-archiving – since 2004. Karen Hunter has repeatedly
affirmed this position. Signalling to Elsevier now that back-pedalling
to a "reasonable" embargo of a year or two is acceptable is a definite
step in the wrong direction.

It is true that many mandates allow an embargo, but that is precisely
because the 40% of publishers that are not yet Green still insist on
an embargo as a condition for allowing self-archiving at all. In other
words, the reason such mandates allow embargoes is not because all
researchers and all mandates don't consider immediate, unembargoed OA to
be important. It is in order to accommodate these non-Green publishers
that don't yet allow immediate, unembargoed OA.

Jan has introduced the issue of Libre OA into the Elsevier
discussion. Immediate, unembargoed OA may be less important for
Libre OA than for Gratis OA, but what is at issue here is Gratis OA.
Up until now, this conversation was about urging Elsevier to remove its
recent self-serving and self-contradictory hedging clause about Gratis OA
mandates. And it is probably best not to bring any potentially obfuscating
issues into the conversation or the company will use them to slide away
from addressing the issue at point – gratis OA permissions.

I urge Elsevier to drop the self-contradictory hedging clause about Green
Gratis OA in its author rights retention agreement: it is confusing, works
against the interests of science, is clearly against the interests of the
public, counter-productive and helping to fuel the anti-Elsevier protests.

I’m sure we all look forward to hearing an affirmative answer from
Alicia Wise that the company has thought the matter through and is
removing that clause.

Stevan Harnad