Open access at Elsevier – 2014 in retrospect and a look at 2015 | Elsevier Connect

"Each January, we like to reflect upon how the open access landscape has evolved in the past year and what the year ahead might hold. Key themes for 2014 were again collaboration and steady progress on both gold and green open access. These trends, unsurprisingly, are set to continue in 2015 and are part of broader activities to accelerate open science, including open research data ... On the closely related topic of open research data, 2014 was a busy year. We continue to engage with an array of external partners, some focused on policy and others on practice and some on both. Great examples are RECODE and the Research Data Alliance. We launched an Open Data pilot, giving authors the option to make their supplementary data files publicly available under a CC-BY license. In addition we continue to support authors who wish to archive their data in a public repository through our database linking program. We will take this one step further in 2015, through new collaborations between Elsevier and data centers, where we encourage researchers to submit data DOIs with their articles so that their data will be indexed and easily accessible.  In 2015, we will further clarify our commitment to making research data accessible and useable through ourresearch data policy.  On open science or Science 2.0 more broadly, we again are working on an array of international initiatives. This includes collaborating with the European Commission in support of their Open Science agenda; withScience 2.0, participating in the Open Science forum facilitated by the National Academies of Science; and similar initiatives in many other parts of the world with key stakeholders ... As you may be aware, Elsevier has had a test-and-learn approach to open access licensing. We have decided to make some changes to our OA licensing policy to simplify our communication to authors and operations and take advantage of new Creative Commons licenses. We will continue to offer authors a choice between a commercial user license (CC-BY) and a noncommercial user license (CC BY-NC-ND), but we will no longer offer the CC-BY-NC-SA version of license in our proprietary journals – only 11 percent of authors chose that option. We have also migrated from version 3.0 to version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses ... To support the growth in OA publishing and our commitment to author choice, there is a tremendous flurry of helpful activity throughout our Operations departments and from the ScienceDirect team to ensure that we can disseminate OA articles widely and correctly. This is much more fiddly and hard than it might first appear, with numerous changes required in formatting, labelling, licensing, metadata and production. There have been occasional bumps on the road of our OA journey  which we can share and learn from, but I'm amazed at the amount of cheerful and creative effort that goes into making OA publishing a real success ... While much of our externally visible effort in 2014 focused on scaling up gold open access, we never forget that many parts of the world are more enthusiastic about green open access. For example, in 2014, new green OA mandates emerged in China, the UK and the US. We have engaged closely in each of these countries and many others.  We've also had pilots with institutional repositories going for several years, for example, with theWorld Bank. While we've been learning from others in the research community, and reflecting carefully on green open access, we look forward to communicating more about our vision, approach and services.  At the industry level, Elsevier is very active in CHORUS, an initiative to provide access to author manuscripts after their embargo period expires. Access is provided on the publisher's platform, saving researchers the administrative burden of self-archiving. Research institutions want to showcase their research via institutional repositories, and so we have been piloting an array of metadata, API and other technical too