Subject: Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 15:02:58 +0100 (BST) |
In a press release announced in Peter Suber's Open Access News yesterday http://openaccess.jhmi.edu/news/details.cfm?news_id=72 Johns Hopkins University Press announced that it too has given its green light to self-archiving: > JHU Press is making revisions to its standard journal > agreement, clarifying some personal re-use rights. The new > statement will tell authors: > You have the following nonexclusive rights: (1) to use the > Article in your own teaching activities; (2) to publish the > Article, or permit its publication, as a part of any book > you may write; (3) to include the Article in your own > personal or departmental database or on-line site; (4) to > include the Article in your institutional database provided > the database does not directly compete with either the > Johns Hopkins University Press or Project Muse, is non- > commercial, is institution specific and not a repository > that is disciplined based and/or accepts contributions from > outside the institution. For use (4), you agree to request > prior permission from the Press. For all rights granted in > this paragraph, you agree to credit the Press as publisher > and copyright holder. > http://openaccess.jhmi.edu/news/details.cfm?news_id=72 Some of this may sound a bit confusing to authors, but actually it is extremely simple. The simple version is: Just look at (3): It gives the green light for all the self-archiving you need (institutional self-archiving, which include's the author's own institution-provided (i) personal website, (ii) departmental website or (iii) institutional website). Permission is only required for websites at other sites (particularly commercial ones that might be competing with the publisher). I clarify the underlying motivation and legal and technical considerations below. The SHERPA/Romeo directory of publishers' self-archiving policies is maintained at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php There is also a Romeo portal at http://romeo.eprints.org that presents the self-archiving policies in terms of individual journals rather than just publishers, in order to help prospective self-archiving authors, their employers and funders. I reproduce below a message just sent to SHERPA/Romeo about what policy details I think should and should not be echoed in the Romeo directory, and why. Needless to say, it is only the meaningful details that should be echoed, not the meaningless ones, for that would only be to amplify noise and create confusion, rather than to clarify self-archiving for authors, their employers and their funders: (a) Romeo should not endeavour to restate every nuance of each publisher's policy. Leave that to the journal's own copyright policy statement (which is always linked to the Romeo listing). Romeo needs to provide the relevant broad-stroke data plus the link; it is not an inventory of every clause any publisher ever inserted in any agreement! (b) This is especially true when the publisher makes detailed distinctions that are either irrelevant or even meaningless: otherwise Romeo is not providing information but merely amplifying noise. (c) There is a specific example of this in the JHUP case: In their (3) they give the JHUP author the green light "(3) to include the Article in your own personal or departmental database or on-line site" That is it: that is all the information that is needed by the prospective self-archiving author. And it does not require the author asking for any further permission. The further distinction, which is meaningless, that JHUP says requires further permission, is: "(4) to include the Article in your institutional database provided the database does not directly compete with either the Johns Hopkins University Press or Project Muse, is non- commercial, is institution specific and not a repository that is disciplined based and/or accepts contributions from outside the institution. For use (4), you agree to request prior permission from the Press. I know *exactly* what JHUP's lawyers mean here (and it's silly of them, but it's ok): They want to make sure that giving their formal green light to author self-archiving is not construable in court as giving the green light to 3rd-party rival publishers who then have the right to publish and sell a competing version, free-riding on the primary publisher's investment and competing with his product. (1st-party is the author and his institution/funder, 2nd-party is the publisher, 3rd-party would be anyone else.) As I say, this is silly (because once the article is available for free for all on the web, there is no point for a competing publisher to try to sell it!), but it is ok for JHUP to make this condition if they wish, because the author's own university, self-archiving its own article output, is *not* a 3rd-party publisher. Therefore (4) is irrelevant for institutional self-archiving and the author need not ask for further permission to self-archive. The further distinction, however, between (i) the university-provided disk-sector and format for the author's "personal" or "departmental" "on-line database" or "on-line server" and (ii) the university-provided disk sector and format for the author's "institutional database" is a completely meaningless distinction based on a (lawyerly) technical failure to understand institutional online servers. Under-informed JHUP lawyers are here making incoherent analogies with the paper medium, based on making technically and practically meaningless, hence untenable, distinctions! The author's institutional OAI archive, like the author's institutional home archive, or institutional departmental archive, is indeed "institution-specific," "non-commercial," and "does not compete with JHUP and Project Muse" (i.e., is not a rival 3rd-party publisher re-selling JHUP products, sanctioned under the guise of "self-archiving"). So clause (4) is irrelevant in this respect. There is one condition, however, that *is* technically meaningful, and hence could be explicitly echoed in Romeo, and this pertains to central, discipline-based archives: Again, this stipulation is silly, because central archives like Arxiv and CogPrints are not only every bit as non-commercial, and every bit *not* competing publishers, as the author's own institutional archive. But, in their lawyers' concern to make sure they are not formally sanctioning of 3rd-party publishing in giving their green light to author/institution self-archiving, some publishers have formally ruled out central archiving as a precaution: Central archives are *not* just an institutional disk-sector, and they *do* accept articles from other institutions, hence they do not quite fit the technical meaning of "self" in 1st-party "self-archiving" if the "self" is construed as the author himself archiving it in his "own" archive: The author's institutional disk sector for his homepage, departmental page, or institutional page are all clearly 1st-party "own" and "self". But a central archive, at another institution's website, is not. To repeat, this distinction (which could easily be finessed technically by distributing the central archives through local institutional nodes instead of localizing them) is silly in the case of archives like Arxiv and CogPrints, which are clearly not rival publishers but simply another way of achieving *exactly* the same outcome as putting one's paper in one's own institutional archive: In either case, the result is a free article, OAI-compliant, openly accessible webwide, its metadata harvestable by google, OAIster, and others, etc. But the JHUP lawyers feel more comfortable adding this extra explicit restriction so that a true rival 3rd-party publisher cannot use JHUP's official green light for author/institution self-archiving in order to legally justify republishing and re-selling JHUP products. So the condition is harmless (and specific exemptions can no doubt be negotiated by the author with JHUP for OAI archives like Arxiv or CogPrints, if the author wishes, either before self-archiving, or, more sensibly, after, if JHUP ever decides to ask the author to remove the article -- as no publisher has ever done, for any of the 260,000 articles self-archived in Arxiv since 1991!). So, please, just list condition (3) in SHERPA/Romeo, using only the wording "On author or institutional server only". That covers it as closely as Romeo should get involved. Don't re-iterate incoherent details. You might add that self-archiving elsewhere than in the author's own institutional archives requires permission from JHUP. I would also request, again, that SHERPA/Romeo drop 2 out of the 3 redundant and misleading alternatives in the "cut and paste" section. It should not be Romeo's role to encourage publishers to make meaningless distinctions! Please drop the 1st and 3rd of the following from your list on http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoupdate.php --> # On author's or employer's web site only # On author or institutional server only --> # On author's personal web site Finally, I hope it is obvious that the JHUP stipulation about "not a repository that is disciplined based" is merely another reference to 3rd-party central archives, and should not be construed as contradicting the green light for "departmental" archives (which are, of course, also "discipline based")! Lawyers! Love 'em, but they *are* exhausting... Stevan Harnad Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Threads: "Open Letter to Philip Campbell, Editor, Nature" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2601.html "Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2823.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3206.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3787.html "Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3024.html "Re: Free Access vs. Open Access" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3417.html "Re: Legal ways around copyright for one's own giveaway texts" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3134.html "Re: The Special Case of Law Reviews" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3202.html "Re: Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3780.html "New JISC-funded Rights Metadata for Open archiving (RoMEO) project" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2258.html "Re: Project RoMEO Listing of Journal Copyright Agreements" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2430.html "DOAJ, OAIster and Romeo should chart growth, as EPrints does" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3495.html "Please compare Romeo functionality and provide feedback" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3699.html NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-forum@xxxxxxxxx Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/
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