Sharing Policy Draws Criticism; Elsevier Responds

"On April 30 the academic publishing company Elsevier announced that it would be updating its article sharing policies. In a post on its website titled Unleashing the power of academic sharing, Elsevier’s director of access and policy Alicia Wise outlined a framework of new sharing and hosting policies, which include guidelines for sharing academic articles at every stage of their existence, from preprint to post-publication, and protocol for both non-commercial—that is, repository—and commercial hosting platforms. 'This is our first major refresh since [2004],' Wise told LJ. 'What we needed to do was to build in greater clarity about how authors could share open access content,' as well as provisions for sharing articles on commercial platforms such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Mendeley (which is owned by Elsevier). The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) responded on May 20 with a statement against Elsevier’s sharing policy, which at press time had been signed by more than 2,000 organizations and individuals worldwide, including the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the American Library Association (ALA), and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL). It read, in part: 'This policy represents a significant obstacle to the dissemination and use of research knowledge, and creates unnecessary barriers for Elsevier published authors in complying with funders’ open access policies.' The statement, which urged Elsevier to reconsider its policy, received a number of comments, including several from Wise, who maintained that the new sharing policies were 'more liberal in supporting the dissemination and use of research' ..."