Elsevier’s new sharing policy: A step in the wrong direction – Confessions of a Science Librarian

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-05-24

Summary:

"Elsevier has released a new scholarly article sharing policy which is definitely more disappointing than really any cause for cheer. Basically the crux is that the only place that authors are allowed to have the final publication version of an article in a non-open access Elsevier publication is on the Elsevier website itself. Of course, after any embargo period has elapse or if the author has paid an author processing charge and published in a hybrid or gold open access journal, they are allowed to post the article on their own webpage or institutional repository. During the time that the article is most important for scholars to access, it’s Elsevier only. Which is not a surprising policy in many ways for a publisher to have, after all they want to maximize their subscription fees as well as APCs not to mention traffic to their sites. But an issue that I (and many others) have with this new policy is that it may very well be in direct contravention to what authors are required to do to meet various institution and national open access policies. Canada’s new policy requires open access to the final version within 12 months of publication, much shorter than many journal’s embargo period. As such, this policy is potentially setting authors against their funders. And will no doubt cause many authors to either ignore the policy or put pressure on the government to water down the requirements. The requirement for a CC-BY-NC-ND license is also much too restrictive, forcing authors to adopt a licence that isn’t the generally accepted (particularly in STEM fields) open access license of CC-BY. And I could go on. The policy is very long and very detailed, more than probably most people want to wade through. This length and complexity is an issue too ..."

Link:

http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2015/05/21/elseviers-new-sharing-policy-a-step-in-the-wrong-direction/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.embargoes oa.libre

Date tagged:

05/24/2015, 08:17

Date published:

05/24/2015, 04:17