Elsevier Share Links: The Schrödinger’s cat of Open Access | Plan S

by Sally Rumsey, Jisc cOAlition S OA Expert

Many publishers rightly appear keen to proclaim publicly the many benefits of open access (OA), to state how eager they are to support openness, and to publicise their OA offerings to researchers to help make their articles open for greater access, visibility and readership (e.g. Wiley, T&F, and SN). They generally acknowledge that maximising sharing, availability, visibility, and barrier-free access are good for research. 

As part of its ‘sharing’ provision, Elsevier offers its published authors Share Links. It would appear, though, that the rhetoric surrounding these links does not match Elsevier’s own restrictions and dire warnings of the risks of sharing. (Readers may be interested that a similar problem of another major publisher’s permissions around sharing not matching rhetoric was described in the blog We encourage you to share your article widely – but not too much).

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