Open and Shut?: Open Access: Springer tightens rules on self-archiving

"Last month Danny Kingsley — Manager for Scholarly Communications & ePublishing at the Australian National University (ANU) — highlighted a number of publishers that have recently changed their self-archiving (Green OA) policies.   Amongst the publishers named by Kingsley was Springer — the world’s second-largest journal publisher — which changed its self-archiving policy earlier this year.  While Springer had previously insisted that where a funder required papers to be deposited in a central repository like PubMed Central this could only be done aftera 12-month embargo, it allowed authors to post their papers in institutional repositories immediately. Under the new policy, however, the 12-month embargo has been extended to cover papers posted in institutional repositories as well. (Although authors can still post copies of their accepted manuscripts on their personal web sites without embargo).  Kingsley concluded that the change was likely a response to the new UK OA policyintroduced by Research Councils UK (RCUK) on April 1st.  Elsewhere, OA advocate Stevan Harnad described the change as 'Springer Silliness', and a Springer author expressed “confusion” over what the policy actually means.  In the hope of clarifying matters I sent a list of questions to Springer. I publish the answers to those questions below exactly as they were provided by Springer, which answered the questions on condition that I published them 'in full, uninterrupted, and unedited (including hyperlinks) as a cohesive whole'.  I would simply note that in answering my question on whether it had any evidence that self-archiving has had a negative impact on it, Springer cites a survey undertaken by The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). I would invite interested parties to read an interview I did with the Chief Executive of ALPSP Audrey McCulloch about the survey last year ..."