Open access lobby attacks Elsevier | The Australian

"Academic, library and technology organisations are denouncing a new sharing and hosting policy adopted last month by publisher Elsevier, saying it undermines open access policies at universities and prevents authors from sharing their work. Elsevier, which publishes thousands of journals, introduced the policy last month. It aims to strike a balance between making sharing 'simple and seamles' and 'being consistent with access and usage rights associated with journal articles,' the publisher said in a blog post. Many librarians and open access advocates, however, see the policy as an attack on institutional repositories, where colleges collect and make available research their faculty members produce. The new policy does not allow authors to share their journal article manuscripts publicly through those repositories, only privately 'with a colleague or with an invitation-only online group.' Availability through the repositories is subject to journals’ embargo periods, which in some cases last for several years. Last week, 23 organisations, among them Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and library and open access associations in countries such as the US, Australia, Canada, China, Brazil and the UK, issued a joint statement calling on Elsevier to reconsider the policy. The Confederation of Open Access Repositories and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or SPARC, organised the campaign ..."