What a mess!

"Recently my intern Dave Hansen (another lawyer) and I have been looking at the new author self-archiving policies promulgated by the American Chemical Society and Elsevier. It would be more accurate to say that these policies are anti-archiving; in spite of persistent rhetoric about how committed these publishers are to access to scholarship, the clear intent is to restrict and interfere with decisions faculty authors might make about how best to serve their own interests as scholars. A comical element was introduced into our consideration early on, when we realized that the two different policies imposed directly opposite requirements for self-archiving. The ACS only allows an author to self-archive their final manuscript if doing so is mandated by her institution, while Elsevier only allows it if it is not. So on each campus the policies must be evaluated and one publisher or the other declared off limits. In general these publishers’ statements about author rights are confusing and self-contradictory. It seems clear that the intent of these statements, policies and contracts is not to clarify the authors’ obligations so much as it is to confuse and intimidate them...."