** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

Dear colleagues,

I urge you to beware of the American Chemical Society's cynical,
self-serving new "AuthorChoice" Option:

    http://pubs.acs.org/4authors/authorchoice/

It is an "offer" to "allow" authors to pay, not for Gold OA -- which is what
hybrid Gold/Green publishers like Springer and Cambridge University
Press offer -- but for Green OA!

In other words, ACS is proposing to charge authors for the right to
deposit their own papers in their own institutional repositories.

This ploy was bound to be tried, but I urge you not to fall for it!

You have an unassailable right to deposit your peer-reviewed, accepted
final drafts (postprints) of your ACS articles in your Institutional
Repositories. If you don't feel you can make them Open Access just yet,
make them Closed Access for now, but deposit them, immediately upon
acceptance for publication (the preprint even earlier).

    The Immediate-deposit/Optional-Access Mandate
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html

OA self-archiving mandates by research funders and universities, with limits
on embargoes, are now being adopted to ensure that your deposits are not
left in Closed Access for long. But on no account should you pay ACS a
penny for it.

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

If you feel your deposit needs to be placed under a provisional Closed
Access Embargo, "almost-OA" is immediately available via the EMAIL
EPRINT REQUEST Button being implemented by more and more Institutional
Repositories. Direct individual user to author eprint requests and their
fulfillment online are Fair Use, as they have always been, even when
authors mailed paper reprints to individual requesters.

    http://www.eprints.org/news/features/request_button.php

To pay for Gold OA today out of scarce research funds -- while all
publication costs are still being paid by subscriptions -- is already
irrational.

    "The Geeks and the Irrational"
    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/128-guid.html

But to pay for Green OA would border on the absurd. Caveat Emptor!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html