** Cross-Posted **

Re:   http://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5146/4608
and : http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/815-guid.html

I am going to make this as brief and as simple as possible, in the
fervent hope that it will be read, understood and acted upon by
authors and their institutions:

A Green publisher is a publisher that endorses immediate
self-archiving of their authors' accepted final drafts (but not the
publisher's version of record) free for all on the web, immediately
upon acceptance for publication.

That's all it takes for a publisher to be Green (and to be on the Side
of the Angels).

In the new language that some Green publishers have jointly adopted
for their copyright transfer agreements recently, some new conditions
have been added, based on three distinctions. Not all Green publishers
have added all three conditions (Elsevier, for example, has only added
two of them, IOP all three), but it does not matter, because all three
distinctions are incoherent: They have no legal, logical, technical
nor practical substance whatsoever. The only thing that a sensible
person can and should do with them is to ignore them completely.

Here they are. (The actual wording in the agreement will vary, but I
am giving just the relevant gist.)

(1) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon
acceptance for publication, free for all BUT YOU MAY ONLY DO IT ON
YOUR PERSONAL INSTITUTIONAL WEBSITE, NOT IN YOUR INSTITUTIONAL
REPOSITORY.

This distinction is completely empty. Your institutional website and
your institutional repository are just institutional disk sectors with
different (arbitrary) names.

(2) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon
acceptance for publication, free for all BUT YOU MAY NOT DO IT WHERE
THERE IS "SYSTEMATIC" DISTRIBUTION.

All websites are systematically harvested by google and other search
engines, and that's how most users search and access them.

(I think what the drafters of this absurd condition may have had in
mind is that you may not deposit your paper on a website that tries to
systematically reconstruct the contents of the entire journal. They
are perfectly right about that. But an institutional repository
certainly does not do that; it simply displays its own authors'
papers, which are an arbitrary fraction of any particular journal. If
there is anyone that publishers can -- and should -- go after, it is
3rd party harvesters that reconstruct the contents of the entire
journal.)

(3) You may self-archive your final draft on the web, immediately upon
acceptance for publication, free for all BUT NOT IF YOU ARE MANDATED
TO DO IT (i.e. YOU MAY IF YOU MAY BUT YOU MAY NOT IF YOU MUST).

Authors are advised to advise their publishers, if ever asked, hand on
heart, that everything they do, they do out of their own free well,
and not out of coercion (and that includes the mandate to publish or
perish).

If anyone is minded to spend any more time on this nonsense than the
time it took to read this message, then they deserve everything that's
coming (and not coming) to them.

Elsevier and IOP authors: Just keep self-archiving in your IRs,
exactly as before, and ignore these three silly new clauses, secure in
the knowledge that they contain nothing of substance.

Stevan Harnad
Enabling Open Scholarship
http://www.openscholarship.org