Information Research Weblog

Steven Harnad has reported on the BOAI Forum mailing list that Elsevier has signed up to Open Access - authors are given the right to put their papers on their own Web site, or their institution's repository, and can include not only the pre-print, but also make changes so that it is identical to the published version. However, they cannot use the files from the publisher's site.

As Harnad says:

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.

I remain doubtful as to whether or not this will happen, simply because UK institutions (with one or two notable exceptions) have shown not the slightest interest in supporting Open Access. We even have the Chairman of the UK Research Councils rubbishing Open Access:

Professor Sir Keith O'Nions, the director-general of the Research Councils, yesterday said that it would be "unwise" for ministers to demand that government-funded journals should be available without charge over the internet.

The man doesn't know what he is talking about - subsequently confusing open access publishing (i.e., peer reviewed journals) with non-reviewed pre-print repositories. No wonder he pops up in this week's Private Eye, which reports that in his role as Chairman of the Natural History Museum's trustees, he managed to spend £400,000 on a Price Waterhouse investigation into where £20,000 had got to...

Isn't it wonderful that our intellectual assets are in such safe hands?