[GOAL] Re: Elsevier: Trying to squeeze the virtual genie back into the physical bottle

[William Gunn]

Eric,

I'm not sure I'm reading it the same way you are, nor am I as convinced as
Mike is that Green OA (of pre-prints & author manuscripts) is a threat to
publishers.

On the first point, if you read Karen's statement as "the author version,
including peer-review revisions is now considered to be a pre-print" this
is indeed a advancement over the previous policy as is doing the opposite
of what you state. They're essentially saying with this policy, as I read
it, that the major value-add the publisher brings is the branding & the
hosting of the version of record, because the peer review is included in
the free-to-post preprint.

On the second point, we need data. Are there any libraries who say they
will definitely cancel a subscription if they can find all papers from a
given journal in a repository somewhere? What does that even mean, given
that libraries don't buy subscriptions a la carte, but as bundles? We need
data!



William Gunn
+1 (650) 614-1749
http://synthesis.williamgunn.org/about/

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:41 PM, Éric Archambault <
eric.archambault at science-metrix.com> wrote:

>  Stevan
>
>
>
> The point you make is important. Elsevier HAS changed its policy and in
> fact the difference is that the peer-review process, done for free by
> academics, is now under embargo, whereas it wasn't before. So you are right
> to mention that Elsevier is backpedalling on OA. The pre-print,
> pre-peer-reviewed was not embargoed before the latest policy, and it is not
> with that policy either. In a way, Elsevier says the original contribution
> to knowledge that academics and researchers submit for publication does not
> belong to them, and so authors are free to make this available for free.
> Fair enough, this is paid for by public money (the greatest majority of it
> anyway).
>
>
>
> What Elsevier says now is that the peer-review process belongs exclusively
> to Elsevier, at least during the embargo period. This is problematic as
> most of the value-added in the peer-review process is paid for by the
> public and income taxes. As Elsevier paid only between 6% of to 8% of its
> revenues in income taxes in the last two years, it can't pretend to
> contribute highly to paying the salary of academics who do that job. We do
> that, us the members of the middle-income earners as we are the most taxed
> of all, all over the world (as % of income, and certainly even more as a %
> of wealth as Thomas Piketty would notice). So basically, the peer-review
> process as well as the papers submitted to that process are largely paid
> for by the public, and should both remain public in the interest of
> consistency and efficiency of economic and social policies.
>
>
>
> Coming to the discussion on "fair-gold", I think it is not productive
> given our most urging challenges. We don't care if companies make profit
> (well, I do as an entrepreneur as I try to produce it, and as a citizen,
> just like you, I do care about social justice and am bothered with the
> profits of Apple and Google and the fact that they barely pay taxes, but
> this is beside the current debate). The core problem with access is when
> companies take public goods and appropriate them exclusively. This is the
> problem with the current publishing system. If we switch to gold, Elsevier
> and others could continue to earn their $10-15 billion per year, and
> provided everything becomes widely available we will have tackled a huge
> problem of private appropriation of a public good, one that means that $450
> billion is locked behind paywalls to generate a comparatively paltry $10-15
> billion in revenues (a large part of it being profit admittedly, it's a
> great business model they have). The present situation is akin to people
> taking down power lines from public utilities to sell the copper in the
> wires for melting - the private rewards to social cost ratio is firmly
> against the public interest. If we switch to gold for the same social cost
> ($10-15 billion per year), we will have sorted the problem. If you then
> feel that Elsevier continues to earn exorbitant profits, you will be free
> to quit your job and compete with them by publishing honest-gold journals,
> Beall will be happy, and everyone will celebrate.
>
>
>
> Yet, though your quest about unfair-embargoing important, there is one
> important aspect you nearly always omit as part of your exercise in
> vigilante. It is currently close to impossible for the public to monitor
> the "à la pièce gold", also frequently called "hybrid OA" that appears in
> subscription-based journals. For example, Elsevier maintains robots.txt
> files that preclude academics and companies alike from crawling its web
> sites to discover the gold articles for which the public has paid.
>
> For example, if you do, in your browser:
>
>
>
> http://www.sciencedirect.com/robots.txt
>
>
>
> You discover that Elsevier mentions:
>
>
>
> User-agent: *
>
> Disallow: /
>
>
>
> which means if your crawler is not on the list, you should be polite
> enough to not crawl the site.  There are currently only 15 welcome
> crawlers, mostly from large firms such as Google and Microsoft.
>
>
>
> Elsevier is not the only one to do that, Wiley does the same, Springer
> also does it even on Springer Open and BMC. As these companies are
> frequently suspected of "double dipping" (charging for à la pièce gold, aka
> "hybrid OA", in subscription journals, and then also charging full price
> for subscription), then something is wrong especially as, as you are well
> aware, some governments mandate this type of solution to increase access.
> The double charging of fees is more of a serious problem than the fact that
> publishers earn profit as again we obtain a socially misfiring policy,
> short-circuited by undue private appropriation. Either publishers do allow
> robots to crawl their site so that people can monitor whether there is some
> "double dipping", or all OA is made available and crawlable, and generally
> publicly discoverable by being consolidated in one place. For these single
> OA papers to become useful, they have to be discovered easily, and be easy
> to consolidate by services such as Paperity, Core, [beginning of the
> commercial self-promotion] and our forthcoming 1science product which aims
> to make all forms of peer-reviewed OA articles searchable in a
> user-friendly, highly streamlined system [end of the commercial
> self-promotion].
>
>
>
> Don't get me wrong, I consider your work as extremely important. Yet, you
> once told me in an email that I was conflating the high price paid for
> subscription with the access issue. You were right to note that, and I saw
> the light thanks to you. I don't care about the money so much as I care
> about access - I'm putting my money where my mouth is and developing
> solutions to increase access to peer-reviewed scientific publications. With
> the fool-gold discourse, you conflate profits and access. For the sake of
> switching to a more socially optimal position, it would be better if we did
> not trap publishers and bare them for doing a honorable exit from the
> currently social un-optimal model towards one everyone can see is clearly
> better for everyone, provided publishers can survive. We all need
> publishers to make the transition in their business model. Your suggestions
> amount to the near-annihilation of the publishers, if I were them, I
> wouldn't be too tempted to follow that path, and this is what they do at
> the moment, and for this I cannot blame them. We have to partners with the
> thousands of middle-income highly taxed individuals in these companies to
> ease the transition of their employers. Let's keep the pressure for green,
> support the intelligent non-doubled-dipped use of gold, support monitoring
> and more transparency. If we keep all the jobs in the publishing industry,
> then just as well, they'll be more taxpayers to pay the tab for the $450
> billion we spend collectively on research, and on paying the salaries of
> university staff and free though conflating thinkers such as yourself.
>
>
>
> Éric Archambault
>
> President and CEO, Science-Metrix Inc.
>
> President and CEO, 1science Inc.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Stevan Harnad
> *Sent:* May-25-15 2:24 PM
> *To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> *Subject:* [GOAL] Elsevier: Trying to squeeze the virtual genie back into
> the physical bottle
>
>
>
> *Alicia Wise wrote*
> <http://www.elsevier.com/connect/coar-recting-the-record#comment-2037996108>
> :
>
>
>
> *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 <http://j.mp/OAngelS>"
> 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 <http://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 <%2B1-212-633-3787> *
>
> *k.hunter_at_elsevier.com <http://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
> <https://www.google.ca/search?num=20&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org+%22fools+gold%22&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org+%22fools+gold%22&gs_l=serp.3...339136.344145.0.345749.12.12.0.0.0.0.217.856.11j0j1.12.0.ckpsrh...0...1.1.64.serp..12.0.0._lRkTp5SLmk>
> 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
> <http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/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
> <http://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/hosting#non-commercial-platforms>"
> (otherwise known as the "Fair-Dealing" Button
> <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/>).
>
>
>
> 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
> <http://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/article-posting-policy#accepted-manuscript>
> (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
> <http://arxiv.org/help/submit_sword>). 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
> <https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy>, 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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