Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving

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From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk> 
Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 23:51:58 +0100

Elsevier has just gone from being a Romeo "Pale-Green" publisher to a full 
Romeo Green publisher: Authors have the publisher's official green light to 
self-archive both their pre-refereeing preprints and their refereed 
postprints. 

Elsevier has thereby demonstrated that -- whatever its pricing policy 
may be -- it is a publisher that has heeded the need and the expressed 
desire of the research community for Open Access (OA) and its benefits to 
research productivity and progress. 
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html 

There will be the predictable cavils from the pedants and those who 
have never understood the real meaning and nature of OA: "It's only the 
final refereed draft, not the publisher's PDF," "It does not include 
republishing rights," "Elsevier is still not an OA publisher." 

I, for one, am prepared to stoutly defend Elsevier on all these counts, 
and to say that one could not have asked for more, and that the full 
benefits of OA require not one bit more -- from the publisher. 

For now it's down to you, Dear Researchers! Elsevier (and History) 
is hereafter fully within its rights to say: 

    "If Open Access is truly as important to researchers as they claim it 
    is -- indeed as 30,000+ signatories to the PLoS Open Letter attested 
    that it was http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/cgi-bin/plosSign.pl -- 
    then if researchers are not now ready to *provide* that Open Access, 
    even when given the publisher's official green light to do so, 
    then there is every reason to doubt that they mean (or even know) 
    what they are saying when they clamour for Open Access." 

Elsevier publishes 1,700+ journals. That means at least 200,000 articles 
a year. Eprints.org will be carefully quantifying and tracking what 
proportion of those 200,000 articles is made OA by their authors through 
self-archiving across the next few months and years. Indeed we will be 
monitoring all of the over 80% of journals sampled by Romeo that are 
already green. 

(The following Romeo summary stats are already out of date, because 1700 
pale-green journals have now become bright green! 
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html 
but we will soon catch up at: http://romeo.eprints.org/ [which is 
under construction, waiting for full journal lists from each of the 93 
publishers sampled so far].) 

The OA ball is now clearly in the research community's court (not the 
publishing community's, not the library community's). Let researchers 
and their employers and funders now all rise to the occasion by 
adopting and implementing institutional OA provision policies. Don't 
just sign petitions for publishers to provide OA, but commit your own 
institution to providing it: 

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php 

Stevan Harnad 

Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 03:09:39 +0100 
From: "Hunter, Karen (ELS-US)" <k.hunterelsevier.com> 
To: "'harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk'" <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk> 
Cc: "Karssen, Zeger (ELS)" <Z.Karssen_at_elsevier.nl>, 
     "Bolman, Pieter (ELS)" <P.Bolman_at_elsevier.com>, 
     "Seeley, Mark (ELS)" <m.seeley_at_elsevier.com> 
Subject: Re: Elsevier journal list 

Stevan, 

[H]ere is what we have decided on post-"prints" (i.e. published articles, 
whether published electronically or in print): 

An author may post his version of the final paper on his personal web site 
and on his institution's web site (including its institutional respository). 
Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the 
journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our 
permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository 
elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring 
to his Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - 
but the author can update his version to reflect changes made during the 
refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single, 
definitive archive for the formal published version. 

We will be gradually updating any public information on our policies 
(including our copyright forms and all information on our web site) to get 
it all consistent. 

Karen 

Karen Hunter 
Senior Vice President, Strategy 
Elsevier 
+1-212-633-3787 
k.hunter_at_elsevier.com