[GOAL] Re: Elsevier: Trying to squeeze the virtual genie back into the physical bottle
Jean-Claude Guédon
jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca
Tue May 26 21:49:32 BST 2015
Like Stevan, I would not characterize the green road as "parasitic"; or,
if I were, I would do so only in the sense that when some mushrooms
parasite other mushrooms, they make them much more comestible...
Green and Gold are a bit like the two fists of a boxer: you parry with
one and hit with the other, and either fist is just as good to fulfil
either task.
Stevan has always been clear about the fact that what he demands first
is not the ultimate objective, but only a necessary first step. No one
wants to stop efforts at the level of gratis OA, but getting at least
gratis OA is a valuable first step.
CC-BY-NC-ND is indeed terribly restrictive, but, again, it is better
than nothing.
APC-Gold is better than nothing, but it too has downsides: it opens the
door to predatory journals; it certainly stimulated the thinking behind
a truly terrible system - namely the hybrid journals -, and, like
subscription journals, it discriminates against poorer institutions
and/or countries (and exceptions made for poorer countries are not
entirely satisfactory either).
Subsidized mega-journals would be the best system because:
1. Being subsidized, they would offer gratis access to authors and libre
access to users. They could choose a CC-by licence.
2. Being subsidized, they would remind all of us that the publishing
phase of research is an integral part of research (which is subsidized,
and would not be "sustainable" without subsidies), and they would move
the financing of publishing research with the financing of research;
3. Because they are mega-journals, they would decouple quality from
editorial orientations: issues of marginal, peripheral,
curiosity-driven, interests would be treated on an equal footing with
"hot" issues, whatever the source of "heat". We might have had better
and earlier answers to Ebola with such a system, just to use this
example;
4. Repositories could be transformed into mega-journals by accepting
papers that go nowhere else and by organizing peer review. By reducing
acquisition budgets by so much percent per year, libraries could find
resources to support the organization of peer review over their
collections of unrefereed submissions;
5. Repositories could go for papers of good scientific quality that lead
to negative results. Such papers are precious, yet are presently being
lost;
6. Repositories could guarantee the free (and libre) capability of
linking data sets to papers, as well as data and text mining of any
kind;
7. Ultimately, the evaluation of research would come primarily from
these networks of repositories acting as mega-journals, and would be
based on a set of criteria that would totally by-pass the impact factor.
8. With decreasing revenues from libraries, and a loosening grip on the
criteria of quality control, the large commercial corporations would
have to shape up, or shape out.
The devil, as usual, is in the details, but here is a workable scenario
that starts from two bases - green OA plus gratis-libre-Gold. It builds
on Stevan's vision, and it also builds on the visions inherent on
platforms such as Redalyc and Scielo. It retains many lessons from PLoS
ONE.
Finally, this perspective also integrates the rising data issue, the
linkages between research papers and data, and the issues related to
both data and text mining. It focuses on the needed first steps, but it
also provides a roadmap for the healthy development of a scientific
communication system that would work on a world scale and be inclusive
and poly-centric rather than hierarchic and oligarchic.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Le mardi 26 mai 2015 à 12:03 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> Mike,
>
>
> I will respond more fully on your blog:
> http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1710
>
>
> To reply briefly here:
>
>
> 1. The publisher back-pedalling and OA embargoes were anticipated.
> That’s why the copy-request Button was already created to provide
> access during any embargo, nearly 10 years ago, long before Elsevier
> and Springer began back-pedalling.
>
>
> 2. Immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button, once adopted
> universally, will lead unstoppably to 100% OA, and almost as quickly
> as if there were no publisher OA embargoes.
>
>
> 3. For a “way forward,” it is not enough to “look past the present to
> the future”: one must provide a demonstrably viable transition
> scenario to get us there from here.
>
>
> 4. Green OA, mandated by institutions and funders, is a demonstrably
> viable transition scenario.
>
>
> 5. Offering paid-Gold OA journals as an alternative and waiting for
> all authors to switch is not a viable transition sceario, for the
> reasons I described again yesterday in response to Éric Archambault:
> multiple journals, multiple subscribing institutions, ongoing access
> needs, no coherent “flip” strategy, hence double-payment (i.e.,
> subscription fees for incoming institutional access to external
> institutional output plus Gold publication fees for providing OA to
> outgoing institutional published output) when funds are already
> stretched to the limit by subscriptions that are uncancellable — until
> and unless made accessible by another means.
>
>
> 6. That other means is 4, above. The resulting transition scenario has
> been described many times, starting in 2001, with updates in 2007,
> 2010, 2013, 2014, and 2015, keeping pace with ongoing mandate and
> embargo developments.
>
>
> 7. An article that is freely accessible to all online under
> CC-BY-NC-ND is most definitely OA — Gratis OA, to be exact.
>
>
> 8. For the reasons I have likewise described many times before, the
> transition scenario is to mandate Gratis Green OA (together with the
> Button, for emabrgoed deposits) universally. That universal Green
> Gratis OA will in turn make subscriptions cancellable, hence
> unsustainable, which will in turn force to downsize to affordable,
> sustainable Fair-Gold Libre OA (CC-BY)
>
>
> 9. It is a bit disappointing to hear an OA advocate characterize Green
> OA as parasitic on publishers, when OA’s fundamental rationale has
> been that publishers are parasitic on researchers and referees’ work
> as well as its public funding. But perhaps when the OA advocate is a
> publisher, the motivation changes…
>
>
> Stevan
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 1:08 AM, Michael Eisen <mbeisen at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Stevan-
>
>
>
> I hate to say I told you so, but .... at the Budapest meeting
> years ago it was pointed out repeatedly that once green OA
> actually became a threat to publishers, they would no longer
> look so kindly on it. It took a while, but the inevitable has
> now happened. Green OA that relied on publishers to peer
> review papers + subscriptions to pay for them, but somehow
> also allowed them to be made freely available, was never
> sustainable. If you want OA you have to either fund publishers
> by some other means (subsidies, APCs) or wean yourself from
> that which they provide (journal branding). Parasitism only
> works so long as it is not too painful to the host. It's a
> testament to a lot of hard work from green OA advocates that
> it has become a threat to Elsevier. But the way forward is not
> to get them to reverse course, but to look past them to a
> future that is free of subscription journals.
>
>
> Also, I don't view CC-BY-NC-ND as a victory as the NC part is
> there to make sure that no commercial entity - including,
> somewhat ironically, PLOS - can use the articles to actually
> do anything. So this license makes these articles definitively
> non open access.
>
>
> -Mike
>
>
> On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 11:23 AM, Stevan Harnad
> <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Alicia Wise wrote:
>
>
>
> Dear Stevan,
>
>
>
> I admire your vision and passion for green open access
> – in fact we all do here at Elsevier - and for your
> tenacity as your definitions and concepts of green
> open access have remain unchanged for more than 15
> years. We also recognize that the open access
> landscape has changed dramatically over the last few
> years, for example with the emergence of Social
> Collaboration Networks. This refresh of our policy,
> the first since 2004, reflects what we are hearing
> from researchers and research institutions about how
> we can support their changing needs. We look forward
> to continuing input from and collaboration with the
> research community, and will continue to review and
> refine our policy.
>
>
>
> Let me state clearly that we support both green and
> gold OA. Embargo periods have been used by us – and
> other publishers – for a very long time and are not
> new. The only thing that’s changed about IRs is our
> old policy said you had to have an agreement which
> included embargos, and the new policy is you don’t
> need to do an agreement provided you and your authors
> comply with the embargo period policy. It might be
> most constructive for people to just judge us based on
> reading through the policy and considering what we
> have said and are saying.
>
>
>
> With kind wishes and good night,
>
> Alicia Wise, Elsevier
>
>
>
>
>
> Dear Alicia,
>
>
>
> You wrote:
>
>
>
> "This refresh of our policy [is| the first since
> 2004... Embargo periods have been used by us... for a
> very long time and are not new. The only thing that’s
> changed about IRs is our old policy said you had to
> have an agreement which included embargos..."
>
>
>
> Is this the old policy that hasn't changed changed
> since 2004 (when Elsevier was still on the "side of
> the angels" insofar as Green OA was concerned) until
> the "refresh"? (I don't see any mention of embargoes
> in it...):
>
>
>
> Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 03:09:39 +0100
>
> From: "Hunter, Karen (ELS-US)"
>
> To: "'harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk'"
>
> Cc: "Karssen, Zeger (ELS)" , "Bolman, Pieter (ELS)" ,
> "Seeley, Mark (ELS)"
>
> Subject: Re: Elsevier journal list
>
>
>
> Stevan,
>
>
>
> [H]ere is what we have decided on post-"prints" (i.e.
> published articles, whether published electronically
> or in print):
>
>
>
> An author may post his version of the final paper on
> his personal web site and on his institution's web
> site (including its institutional respository). Each
> posting should include the article's citation and a
> link to the journal's home page (or the article's
> DOI). The author does not need our permission to do
> this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository
> elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his
> version" we are referring to his Word or Tex file, not
> a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - but the
> author can update his version to reflect changes made
> during the refereeing and editing process. Elsevier
> will continue to be the single, definitive archive for
> the formal published version.
>
>
>
> We will be gradually updating any public information
> on our policies (including our copyright forms and all
> information on our web site) to get it all
> consistent.
>
>
>
> Karen Hunter
>
> Senior Vice President, Strategy
>
> Elsevier
>
> +1-212-633-3787
>
> k.hunter_at_elsevier.com
>
>
>
> Yes, the definition of authors providing free,
> immediate online access (Green OA self-archiving) has
> not changed since the online medium first made it
> possible. Neither has researchers’ need for it
> changed, nor its benefits to research.
>
>
>
> What has changed is Elsevier policy -- in the
> direction of trying to embargo Green OA to ensure that
> it does not Elsevier's current revenue levels at any
> risk.
>
>
>
> Elsevier did not try to embargo Green OA from
> 2004-2012 — but apparently only because they did not
> believe that authors would ever really bother to
> provide much Green OA, nor that their institutions and
> funders would ever bother to require them to provide
> it (for its benefits to research).
>
>
>
> But for some reason Elsevier is not ready to admit
> that Elsevier has now decided to embargo Green OA
> purely to ensure that it does put Elsevier's current
> subscription revenue levels at any risk.
>
>
>
> Instead, Elsevier wants to hold OA hostage to its
> current revenue levels -- by embargoing Green OA, with
> the payment of Fools-Gold OA publication fees the only
> alternative for immediate OA. This ensures that
> Elsevier's current revenue levels either remain
> unchanged, or increase.
>
>
>
> But, for public-relations reasons, Elsevier prefers to
> try to portray this as all being done out of
> “fairness,” and to facilitate “sharing” (in the spirit
> of OA).
>
>
>
> The “fairness” is to ensure that no institution is
> exempt from Elsevier’s Green OA embargoes.
>
>
>
> And the “sharing” is the social sharing services like
> Mendeley (which Elsevier owns), about which Elsevier
> now believes (for the time being) that authors would
> not bother to use enough to put their current revenue
> levels at risk (and their institutions and funders
> cannot mandate that they use them) -- hence that that
> they would not pose a risk to Elsevier's current
> subscription revenue levels.
>
>
>
> Yet another one of the “changes” with which Elsevier
> seems to be trying to promote sharing seems to be by
> trying to find a way to outlaw the institutional
> repositories’ "share button" (otherwise known as the
> “Fair-Dealing” Button).
>
>
>
> So just as Elsevier is trying to claim credit for
> “allowing” authors to do “dark” (i.e., embargoed,
> non-OA) deposits, for which no publisher permission
> whatsoever is or ever was required, Elsevier now has
> its lawyers scrambling to find a formalizable way to
> make it appear as if Elsevier can forbid its authors
> to provide individual reprints to one another, as
> authors have been doing for six decades, under yet
> another new bogus formal pretext to make it appear
> sufficiently confusing and threatening to ensure that
> the responses to Elsevier author surveys (for its
> "evidence-based policy") continue to be sufficiently
> perplexed and meek to justify any double-talk in
> either Elsevier policy or Elsevier PR.
>
>
>
> The one change in Elsevier policy that one can
> applaud, however (though here too the underlying
> intentions were far from benign), is the CC-BY-NC-ND
> license (unless Elsevier one day decides to back-pedal
> on that too too). That license is now not only allowed
> but required for any accepted paper that an author
> elects to self-archive.
>
>
>
> Let me close by mentioning a few more of the howlers
> that keep making Elsevier's unending series of
> arbitrary contractual bug-fixes logically incoherent
> (i.e., self-contradictory) and technically
> nonsensical, hence moot, unenforceable, and eminently
> ignorable for anyone who takes a few moments to think
> instead of cringe. Elsevier is trying to use
> pseudo-legal words to squeeze the virtual genie (the
> Web) back into the physical bottle (the old,
> land-based, print-on-paper world):
>
>
>
> Locus of deposit:Elsevier tries to make legal
> distinctions on "where" the author may make their
> papers (Green) OA on the Web: "You may post it here
> but not there." "Here" might be an institutional
> website, "there" may be a central website. "Here"
> might be an institutional author's homepage, "there"
> might be an institutional repository.
>
>
>
> But do Elsevier's legal beagles ever stop to ask
> themselves what this all means, in the online medium?
> If you make your paper openly accessible anywhere at
> all on the web, it is openly accessible (and linkable
> and harvestable) from and to anywhere else on the Web.
> Google and google scholar will pick up the link, and
> so will a host of other harvesters and indexers. And
> users never go to the deposit site to seek a paper:
> They seek and find and link to it via the link
> harvesters and indexers. So locus restrictions are
> silly and completely empty in the virtual world.
>
>
>
> The silliest of all is the injunction that "you may
> post it on your institutional home page but not your
> institutional repository." What nonsense! The
> institutional home page and the institutional
> repository are just tagged disk sectors and software
> functions, of the self-same institution. They are
> virtual entities, created by definition; one can be
> renamed as the other at any time. And their
> functionalities are completely swappable or integrable
> too. That too is a feature of the virtual world.
>
>
>
> So all Elsevier is doing by treating these virtual
> entities as if they were physical ones (besides
> confusing and misleading their authors) is creating
> terminological nuisances, forcing system
> administrators to keep re-naming and re-assigning
> sectors and functions, needlessly, and vacuously, just
> to accommodate vacuous nuisance terminological
> stipulations.
>
>
>
> (The same thing applies to "systematicity" and
> "aggregation," which I notice that Elsevier has since
> dropped as futile: The attempt had been to outlaw
> posting where the contents of a journal were being
> systematically aggregated, by analogy with a rival
> free-riding publisher systematically gathering
> together all the disparate papers in a journal so as
> to re-sell them at a cut-rate. Well not only is an
> institution no free-rising aggregator: all it is
> gathering its own paper output, published in multiple
> disparate journals. But, because of the virtual nature
> of the medium, it is in fact the Web itself that is
> systematically gathering all disparate papers
> together, wherever they happen to be hosted, using
> their metadata tags: author, title, journal, date,
> URL. The rest is all just software functionality. And
> if the full-text is out there, somewhere, anywhere,
> and it is OA, then there is no way to stop the rest of
> this very welcome and useful functionality.)
>
>
>
> The Arxiv exception. In prior iterations of the
> policy, Elsevier tried (foolishly) to outlaw central
> deposit. They essentially tried to tell authors who
> had been making their papers OA in Arxiv since 1991
> that they may no longer do that. Well, that did not go
> down very well, so those "legal" restrictions have now
> been replaced by the "Arxiv exception": Authors making
> their papers OA there (or in RePeC) are now officially
> exempt from the Elsevier OA embargo.
>
>
>
> Well here we are again: an arbitrary Elsevier
> restriction on immediate-OA, based on locus of
> deposit. The Pandora's box that this immediately opens
> is that all a mandating institution need do in order
> to detoxify Elsevier's OA embargo completely is to
> mandate immediate (dark) deposit of all institutional
> output in the institutional repository alongside
> remote deposit in Arxiv (which is already automated
> through the SWORD software). That completely moots all
> Elsevier OA embargoes. Yet another example of
> Elsevier's ineffectual nuisance stipulations
> consisting of ad-hoc, pseudo-legal epicycles, all
> having one sole objective: to try to scare authors of
> doing anything that might possibly pose a risk to
> Elsevier's current revenue streams, using any words
> that will do the trick, even if only for a while, and
> even if they make no sense.
>
>
>
> What's next, Elsevier? "You may use this software but
> not this software"?
>
>
>
> The Share Button.Although it never defines what it
> means by "Share Button" (nor why it is trying to
> outlaw it), if what Elsevier means is the
> Institutional Repository's copy-request Button,
> intended to provide individual copies to individual
> copy-requestors, then this too is just a
> software-facilitated eprint request.
>
>
>
> Whenever a user seeks an embargoed deposit, they can
> click the Button to send an email to the author to
> request a copy. The author need merely click a link in
> the email to authorize the software to send the copy.
>
>
>
> So does Elsevier now want to make yet another nuisance
> stipulation, so the Button cannot be called a "Share
> Button," so instead the name of the author of the
> embargoed paper has to be made into an email link that
> notifies the author that the requestor seeks a copy,
> with the requestor's email alive, and clickable, so
> that inserting the embargoed paper's URL will attach
> one copy to the email?
>
>
>
> Elsevier is not going to make many friends by trying
> to force its authors to do jump through gratuitous
> hoops in order to accommodate Elsevier's ever more
> arbitrary and absurd attempts to contain the virtual
> ether with arbitrary verbal hacks.
>
>
>
> There are more.There are further nuisance tactics in
> the current iteration of Elsevier's charm initiative,
> in which self-serving restrictions keep being
> portrayed as Elsevier's honest attempts to facilitate
> rather than hamper sharing. One particularly
> interesting one that I have not yet deconstructed (but
> that the attentive reader of the latest Elsevier
> documentation will have detected) likewise moots all
> Elsevier OA embargoes even more conveniently than
> depositing all papers in Arxiv -- but I leave that as
> an exercise to the reader.
>
>
>
> So Alicia, if Elsevier "admires [my] vision," let me
> invite you to consult with me about present and future
> OA policy conditions. I'll be happy to share with you
> which ones are logically incoherent and technically
> empty in today's virtual world. It could save Elsevier
> a lot of futile effort and save Elsevier authors from
> a lot of useless and increasingly arbitrary and
> annoying nuisance-rules.
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
> Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
> Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development
>
> Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
> University of California, Berkeley
>
>
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