Elsevier on Open Access part 2

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“Somehow I’m on Elsevier’s author mail-out listing and as such I received the first edition of their“Author’s Update” newsletter. Whilst nowhere near as misrepresentative of Open Access as their recent Editor’s Update issue (that I blogged about recently), it is worth taking a few moments to consider how Elsevier presents Open Access to a largely uninformed audience; us academics. Elsevier’s Alice Wise (Director of Universal Access) contributed a piece to the newsletter ... where she sets out the various options available to authors wanting to publish Open Access papers or in one of Elsevier’s Open Access journals. Wise outlines the options available to authors and provides links to various pages on the Elsevier website that set out author rights under Elsevier’s open access provisions. She even mentions Elsevier’s policy on self-posting of author manuscripts. To the uninitiated this all sounds great; Elsevier are being ‘open’ and providing the academic with a range of tools that allow them to choose open access... What Elsevier considers ‘open access’ publication isn’t what most informed academics consider Open Access. The latter is encapsulated in the Budapest Open Access Initiative and is essentially the same as the definition implicit in the Creative CommonsBy Attribution (CC-BY) licence. PLoS use this licence for articles published in their journals. Springer’s Open Choice offering likewise adopts this definition of Open Access... Elsevier’s idea of ‘open access’ isn’t that open at all. What you can and can’t do with a ‘sponsored article’ (as Elsevier likes to call them) is much more restrictive than the liberal rights allowed under CC-BY. Elsevier’s Author Rights are set out here. They ban use of their ‘open access’ articles for commercial purposes for example, which are so far-reaching in their definition that the author of an article would not be allowed to distribute the PDF of their paper that they have paid Elsevier to publish on their personal website if that website uses advertising... Alice Wise is at pains to point out that authors wishing to publish in their ‘open access’ journals or make their article a ‘sponsored article’ have to pay a processing fee... It’s at this point I start wondering why Elsevier need to restrict ‘open access’ articles in their journals at all? Hasn’t the author paid them for publishing and archiving their paper? Let’s not forget that this costs $3000 a time, not an insignificant amount. You’d have thought that for such a large amount of money Elsevier’s costs would be covered and your paper would be open for any use? Well, you’d be wrong, very wrong... Elsevier wants us to pay them to publish our articles, to cover their costs, and then they still want to restrict access/use so that they can control commercial use of our work... If we pass over the monopolistic aspects of the academic publishing industry when it comes to certain big-name journals, a more insidious problem with Elsevier’s tactics/offerings raises its head. It is one that Elsevier openly admits is a problem with ‘open access’ publishing; a study [PDF] byJISC found that copyright was generally a misunderstood topic among scientists and researchers. It is hard to ignore the feeling that as far as Elsevier is concerned if they make their ‘open access’ offerings walk and quack like a duck then the misunderstandings and apathy among the scientific community will lead them to think they really are Open Access ducks. If the customers Elsevier are targeting with newsletters like ‘Author’s Update’ are as misinformed and apathetic as research shows, will they notice the differences in the rights allowed other researchers under their respective ‘open access’ offerings? I doubt it. Elsevier undermines the term Open Access and I can’t quite rid myself of the sour taste in my mouth that Elsevier knows this all to well and are doing their best to make sure authors are confused... Another section of Wise’s article covers self-archiving or self-posting of author manuscripts. Apparently Elsevier are happy for researchers to do this and have an extensive policy explaining this. It is OK to post your pre-print on your own website or that of your institution, Wise tells us. It is even OK for you to post your accepted author manuscript (AAM – this is your version incorporating any changes resulting from peer review but before being typeset and copy edited by the publisher) on your own website. They even let you post the AAM on your institution’s website. But there is a big but with that last bit. You are only allowed to do this if your institution doesn’t systematically demand this of its employees. So, just to be clear, if you want to post your AAM on your institution’s website of your own volition that is fine. But not if your institution requires you to! For that your institution would need an agreement with Elsevier. At this point, many academics would just give up and not both self-archiving. Whilst self-archiving isn’t really relevant to the Open Access aspects of this post, it does suggest that Elsevier doesn’t have a consistent a

Link:

http://ucfagls.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/elsevier-on-open-access-part-2/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.comment oa.mandates oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.deposits oa.plos oa.cc oa.ir oa.declarations oa.boai oa.hybrid oa.reports oa.fees oa.wellcome oa.rcuk oa.jisc oa.preprints oa.springer oa.definitions oa.libre oa.policies oa.versions oa.journals oa.repositories

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 18:31

Date published:

04/04/2012, 17:50