Elsevier tries to block institutional OA mandates

"Elsevier obviously is trying to block institutions from adopting open access mandates by its policy of demanding separate agreements. The kind of agreements with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) proposed by Elsevier represent a huge step backwards concerning author rights....The Steering Committee of the OpenAccess.se in May 2011 made a statement critical to Elsevier’s policy on author rights, which now requires specific agreements with universities or research funders if they have an open access mandate. The committee urged Elsevier to withdraw the new clause and recommended ”that Swedish universities with open access mandates refrain from concluding separate agreements with Elsevier. Instead, this issue should be managed along with negotiations over national license agreements with Elsevier”. The statement was commented by Alicia Wise, Director of Universal Access from Elsevier, to which I responded. You will find our exchange of comments here. Alicia had written ”we are still in test-and-learn mode for institutional agreements.” We also had a number of questions. So when Elsevier proposed a pilot for manuscript posting in Sweden involving a number of institutions we were prepared to take a closer look at it....This proposal has now been discussed by the Steering Committees of the Swedish BIBSAM (licensing) consortium and of the OpenAccess.se. Both steering committees came to the conclusion that we should withdraw from further negotiations on this proposal. In a Response to Elsevier’s OA pilot proposal for Sweden the position of these committees is explained: ”The main objection is that the embargo times – varying from 12 to 48 months – in the proposal will severely restrict and deteriorate the rights of authors to deposit copies of their articles in their institutional repositories....We want researchers at all HEIs – irrespective of their institution having an OA mandate or not – to have the right to post at least the accepted author version of their articles in Elsevier journals in their institutional repository immediately after publication....When other publishers try to adapt their policies to OA mandates Elsevier instead seems to have chosen the alternative of trying to block OA mandates. We do not think this is a wise policy in the long run.” ..."