"One step [for Elsevier] 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."

ALICIA WISE (AW): "Stevan Harnad has helpfully summarized Elsevier’s posting policy for accepted author manuscripts, but has left out a couple of really important elements.

"He is correct that all our authors can post voluntarily to their websites and institutional repositories.  Posting is also fine where there is a requirement/mandate AND we have an agreement in place.  We have a growing number of these agreements."

AW:
"An overview of our funding body agreements can be read here.  These agreements, for example, mean that we post to UKPMC for authors who receive funding from a number of funding agencies including the Wellcome Trust.  We deposit manuscripts into PMC for NIH-funded authors."

AW:
"Posting in the arXiv is fine too."

AW:
"We are also piloting open access agreements with a growing number of institutions, including posting in institutional repositories."

AW:
"It is already clear that one size does not fit all institutions, and we are keen to continue learning, listening, and partnering."

AW:
"Our access policies can be read in full [here] (health warning: they are written for those who really enjoy detail) and we’ve been working on a more friendly and succinct summary too (but this is still a work in "

That clause seems to be pure FUD and I strongly urge Elsevier -- for the sake of its public image, which is right now at an all-time low -- to drop that clause rather than digging itself deeper by trying to justify it.

The goal of the strategy is transparent:

"We wish to appear to be supportive of open access, formally encoding in our author agreements our authors' right to post their accepted author manuscripts to their institution's open access repository -- but [to ensure that publication remains sustainable,' we wish to prevent institutions from requiring their authors to exercise that right unless they make a side-deal with us."

Not a commendable publisher strategy, at a time when the worldwide pressure for open access is mounting ever higher, and subscriptions are still paying the cost of publication, in full, and handsomely.

If there is eventually to be a transition to hybrid or Gold OA publishing, let that transition occur without trying to hold hostage the authors' right to provide Green OA to their author accepted manuscripts by posting them free for all in their institutional repositories, exercising the right that Elsevier has formally agreed rests with the author.

Stevan Harnad

"but not in institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings."

"[W]hat positive things are established scholarly publishers doing to facilitate the various visions for open access and future scholarly communications that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized?"

RM: I would recommend the following change in one clause of the What rights do I retain as a journal author? stated in Elsevier's portal, which says:

"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional website or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher. Click here for further information)"

RM: By this one:

"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal, institutional website, subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article"

RM: I think this could be something to be encouraged, celebrated and recognized.

"the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal, institutional website or institutional repositories or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article"

"BOAI intended OA to mean much more than just the freedom to read an article online, and the term is used in this stronger sense by most of the people writing about open access today.... That’s not to say that “gratis OA” is not a good thing. Of course, it is. But..."

"[T]he [RCUK] agencies which fund UK scientists [have] required [researchers]… to make their research papers free [online] since 2006; but now they’re going to enforce it…"

"[W]ill research papers be instantly open, or will publishers get to impose a delay?…[S]ome [publishers] let authors put up a free copy of the published manuscript after an embargo period. This is known as ‘green’ open access… RCUK open-access policies currently permit this embargo, with a six-month delay."

"[T]he recommendation will be for a mixed green-gold model… ultimately we will see a transition to gold – so the real question is how long this will take."

"British universities could end up paying twice – once to make their research open access, and again for subscriptions to the journals that they will still need to buy, because those journals will contain 94% non-British, non-open-access, research."

"[T]he UK could challenge the US for global leadership on open access."

"Just being able to read a free PDF isn’t actually open access."

"[R]esearchers and institutions would be forced to comply with open access…. mak[ing] open access a requirement for future grants… asking institutions to sign a statement that papers published under its grants are compliant with its open access policy; and if not… hold back a final instalment… of the grant funding."

"What Wales will add here is not clear… Some celebrity involvement is to be welcomed."

1. The requirement has to be to deposit in the fundee's institutional repository (rather than an institution-external repository).

2. The deposit itself must be made immediately upon acceptance for publication (rather than only after a publisher embargo period).

EXCERPTS: ...Policies can require ‘green’ Open Access by self-archiving but to preserve authors’ freedom to publish where they choose policies should only encourage ‘gold’ Open Access through publication in Open Access journals... Evidence has unequivocally demonstrated that to have real effect policies must be mandatory, whether institutional or funder policies.... Evidence shows that researchers are quite happy to be mandated to act in this way... The optimum arrangement, one that accommodates the needs of all stakeholders, and has the potential to collect the greatest amount of Open Access content, is for a network of institutional repositories to be the primary locus for deposit and for centralised, subject-specific collections to be created by harvesting the required content from that network of distributed repositories...

Comment on Elsevier Editors' Update by Henk Moed:
"Does Open Access publishing increase citation rates? Studies conducted in this area have not yet adequately controlled for various kinds of sampling bias."

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My friend Henk Moed (whose work I admire and whose scientific integrity I am in no way calling into question!) has replied to my query:

"Where on earth did Henk get the idea that some institutions' self-archiving 'did not increase when their OA regime was transformed from non-mandatory into mandatory'?"

Henk wrote to tell me that he got the idea from our own paper! (Gargouri et al 2010, Figure 1)

The figure shows the self-archiving rates from 2002-2006 for four mandated repositories, compared to the unmandated baseline self-archiving rate of about 20% per year. The four mandated repositories all have a self-archiving rate of about 60% for each of the six years.

Now where Henk got the idea that the mandates may not increase self-archiving was from the fact that the date on which the mandate was adopted differed for the four repositories, the earliest mandate being in 2002, the latest in 2004. So he inferred from the fact that the 2002-2006 rates were flat in all cases, that some, at least, of the mandates did not increase self-archiving.

There are two important details that Henk did not take into account:

(1) The date is the date the articles were published, not the date they were self-archived.

(2) When a mandate is adopted, the self-archiving is not just done for articles published on or after the mandate: it is also done retroactively, for articles published before the mandate, especially for recent years.

So the reason the self-archiving rates are flat is retroactive self-archiving. A clue is already there in Figure 1, because both the post-mandate self-archiving rates and the pre-mandate self-archiving rates are about three times the baseline (unmandated) rates (60% vs 20%).

(The baseline rate was derived from comparing the percentage of the articles that our robot found freely accessible on the web for the reference sample of articles in each of the publication years for the four mandated institutions with the percentage the robot found for articles published in the same journals and years, but from other institutions.)

The practice of retroactive self-archiving in the mandated repositories was confirmed in a later study that we will soon report, comparing the self-archiving rate for the same publishing years (from 2002 onward) as sampled by our robot several years later: The percentage for each year continued to grow years after adoption of the mandate.

One important thing to note, however, is that our estimate of the self-archiving rate for mandated institutions was actually an underestimate: We know the rates were higher than 60%, but we used the noisier and less reliable robot method rather than counting what was in the repository directly, in order to make the estimates comparable with the robot's estimate for the unmandated self-archiving rate. (The unmandated papers were not even necessarily self-archived in the author's instituitional repository: many were on their authors' personal or lab websites.)

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1). pp. 55-59.

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.

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[Update: See new definition of "Weak" and "Strong" OA, 29/4/2008]

SUMMARY: (a) On the current BBB definitions, Green OA ("price-freedom") is not OA, hence Green OA mandates are not OA mandates. This is self-contradictory, and the definition needs to be updated.
      (b) I am of course in no way opposed to getting more than OA ("price") ("p"): I am opposed to getting less than OA because of (prematurely) insisting on more than OA: to delaying or diminishing the good for the better.
      (c) I believe that consensus on adopting and applying Green OA self-archiving mandates (true and effective mandates, with no opt-out option) is within immediate reach globally and has already demonstrated (locally) that it will generate full Green OA.
      (d) I also believe that universal Green OA will in turn generate p OA as a natural matter of course.
      (e) I also believe that reaching consensus on adopting and complying with p OA mandates from the outset is highly unlikely, and that holding out for that, instead of immediately agreeing on mandating Green OA, will only delay reaching universal OA. This would amount to getting less than OA because of (prematurely) insisting on more than OA.
      (f) The same is true about (incoherently) arguing (on the basis of BBB) that Green OA is not really OA, hence Green OA mandates are not really OA mandates.
      (g) Peter Suber has understood, fully, that our tactical differences are only about priorities: about means, not ends. (Not everyone else has understood this.)
      (i) There is an interim pragmatic trade-off among embargoes, opt-out options and the payment of extra publisher fees that is adequately resolved for the immediate primary needs of research and researchers by the immediate deposit mandate plus the "email eprint request" Button, which provide interim "almost-OA" during any embargo. Universal ID/OA mandates will hasten the inevitable natural death of access embargoes and usage restrictions.

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"How many people must die because an OA guru says 'There is a need to update BBB' and denies the need of re-use?"

(1) We have neither price-freedom nor permission-freedom today. (So if people are dying because of that, they're dying.)

(2) I am as sure as I am of anything (short of Cartesian certainty) that universal price-freedom (Green OA) not only fulfills most of the immediate needs of researchers, but that it is also the fastest and surest way of eventually achieving permission-freedom too (let's call that "Gold OA," for simplicity -- it's not, but it'll do).

(3) Now price-freedom can be achieved by self-archiving, and self-archiving can be (and is being) mandated.

(4) Insisting now on wrapping permission-freedom (copyright-retention) into the mandate makes it much more difficult and less likely that consensus will be reached on adopting a mandate at all -- and if adopted, this stronger p mandate seems to require an opt-out option as a compromise (as in Harvard's p mandate), which means it is no longer a mandate at all, hence compliance is no longer assured. (This can be fixed by restricting the opt-out option to the permission clause, and adding an immediate deposit clause with no opt-out.)

(5) But (as Peter Suber has very fully understood) I have no reservations at all about stronger mandates (Green price-freedom plus Gold permission-freedom mandates) if they can be successfully agreed upon, adopted, implemented and fulfilled. More is always better than less if it can indeed be had; more is only an obstacle if it stands in the way of the less that is already within reach.

(6) Harvard's p copyright-retention mandate, with an opt-out, is not a mandate. If it nevertheless proves, in 3 years, to deliver nearly 100% p OA, then it will be a success (and I will have been proved wrong). If not, then yet another 3 years will have been lost by needlessly over-reaching -- because we already have evidence that weaker Green deposit (price-freedom) mandates, without opt-out, deliver nearly 100% (Green) OA within 3 years. (And if Harvard's p mandate with opt-out is widely imitated in the meanwhile, instead of just a price-freedom mandate without opt-out, without even knowing whether p with opt-out is destined to succeed or fail, then a lot more years of OA will be needlessly lost.)

"Kripke (1980) gives a good example of how "gold" might be baptized on the shiny yellow metal in question, used for trade, decoration and discourse, and then we might discover "fool's gold," which would make all the sensory features we had used until then inadequate, forcing us to find new ones. [Kripke] points out that it is even possible in principle for "gold" to have been inadvertently baptized on "fool's gold"! Of interest here are not the ontological aspects of this possibility, but the epistemic ones: We could bootstrap successfully to real gold even if every prior case had been fool's gold. "Gold" would still be the right word for what we had been trying to pick out all along, and its original provisional features would still have provided a close enough approximation to ground it, even if later information were to pull the ground out from under it, so to speak." [Harnad 1990]

1. It is excellent that RCUK is reducing the allowable embargo period (to 6 months for most research councils).

2. A license that formally allows more re-use rights (e.g., "Libre OA", CC-BY) is desirable, but it asks for more than just free online access ("Gratis OA") at a time when we are still far from having free online access. It thereby puts more constraints on authors, demands more of publishers, and those added constraints make it harder for that vast majority of institutions and funders who have not yet managed to reach consensus on adopting a Green OA self-archiving mandate of their own.

I accordingly recommend to RCUK that "Lbre OA" be strongly encouraged, but that only "Gratis OA" (which automatically includes linking, downloading, local print-off, local storage, local data-mining, search-engine harvesting and search) be required.

This makes it easier and more probable that universities and research institutions will be able to follow suit, adopting complementary Green OA mandates of their own, for all of their research output, whether or not RCUK-funded. It will also make it easier and more probable that other research funders will adopt similar institution-friendly mandates.

Once mandatory Gratis OA prevails, it will not be long before it is upgraded to Libre OA. But first things first. Do not let the best get in the way of the good, of which there is still so very little.

3. The designated locus of deposit should be the fundee's own institutional repository, not an institution-external central repository. Central repositories and search engines can then harvest the metadata from the institutional repository for search or re-display. 

The reason for this is again that there are more publisher restrictions on institution-external deposit than on institutional deposit, and at this time when there is still so little OA and so few OA mandates, it will make it easier and more probable that universities and research institutions will be able to follow suit, adopting complementary Green OA mandates of their own, for all of their research output, whether or not RCUK-funded, if their researchers do not need to do multiple institution-external deposits or to face needless extra publisher restrictions. http://bit.ly/DepLoc

4. The optimal Green OA Mandate is ID/OA -- Immediate Deposit, Optional Access -- is identical to the RCUK Mandate in every respect except that it stipulates that the deposit itself must be done immediately upon acceptance for publication, rather than only after the allowable embargo period has expired. 

This means that users will see the metadata immediately, and can already make automated eprint requests to the author for single copies for research purposes during the embargo.

5. Repository deposit should be officially stipulated as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for research assessment as well as for submitting publication lists for RCUK research proposals.

Re: Richard Poynder: Open Access, brick by brick. Open and Shut? Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2010) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

PLOS NULL: the high profile, high impact journal that publishes articles that have been peer reviewed, accepted and corrected for publication by third party journals whose lawyers have then refused to agree the author's pro-repository copyright transfer amendment.

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Giles, J. (2007) PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access. Nature 5 January 2007.

Hajjem, C., Harnad, S. and Gingras, Y. (2005) Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 28(4) pp. 39-47.

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).

Harnad, S. (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19 (16).

Harnad, S. (2005) Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research.

Harnad, Stevan (2005) Australia Is Not Maximising the Return on its Research Investment. In Steele, Prof Colin, Eds. Proceedings National Scholarly Communications Forum 2005, Sydney, Australia.

Houghton, J., Steele, C. Sheehan, P. (2006) Research Communication Costs in Australia: Emerging Opportunities and Benefits. A report to the Department of Education, Science and Training.

Houghton, J. Sheehan, P. (2006) The Economic Impact of Enhanced Access to Research Findings. Centre for Strategic Economic Studies Victoria University

Sale, A. (2006) The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4).

Sale, A. (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.

Sale, A. (2006) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.

Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February.

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE.

Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.