[GOAL] Elsevier: still the world's largest scholarly publisher, still green - let's get archiving!

[Heather Morrison]

Elsevier is still the world's largest scholarly publisher and Elsevier authors still do have self-archiving rights. There is a very large corpus of works already published that authors could be making open access through their institutional repositories. 

Elsevier became the largest publisher in part by acquiring other smaller publishers. It is possible that Elsevier does not have author agreements for all of the previously published works. When I inquired about an article I published with another publisher in the 90's since taken over by Elsevier, Elsevier confirmed that they did not have a copy of the author agreement. This may not be unusual. I wonder if the complexity of answering such questions is one of the reasons Elsevier has tended to support broad-based author self-archiving rights. 

Regardless of how the OA community views Elsevier and its recent self-archiving policy change, researchers continue to publish in Elsevier journals. Some researchers have funding to pay to make these articles open access (Elsevier style), but many do not. The only way works published with Elsevier that are not supported for OA APCs will become OA is the authors self-archive.

Re Elsevier style open access - when authors are paying for the OA option, according to the Elsevier copyright website under Open Access Articles, "Authors sign an exclusive license agreement, where authors have copyright but license exclusive rights in their article to the publisher**...in this case authors have the right to: Share their article in the same ways permitted to third parties..."
from: http://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/author-agreement

In other words, when Elsevier publishes a CC-BY license, the copyright is in the name of the author, however the author has in effect signed away all rights to Elsevier. Elsevier is the exclusive Licensor. There is nothing in any of the CC licenses that obligates a Licensor to make the works they license available for free, and there is nothing in any of the CC licenses requiring a Licensor to continue to make a work available under the terms of first publication. Unless authors have and retain language clearly indicating terms that would obligate Elsevier to provide works for OA, Elsevier could change the way they distribute these articles at will. I am noticing that a number of journals and publishers listed in DOAJ require copyright transfer agreements, so this isn't just Elsevier. 

Creative Commons has overlap with open access, but the two are not the same. Superficially, the CC-BY license appears to be the legal embodiment of the spirit of the BOAI definition of open access. However, there are important differences. OA is about works that are free-of-charge. CC licenses can be used with works that are free-of-charge or works that are toll-access. 

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca