Leveraging Elsevier’s Creative Commons License Requirement to Subvert Embargoes
Josh Bolick
In the last round of author-sharing policy revisions, Elsevier
created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring
embargoes from 12 to 48 months for authors sharing via institutional
repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via an author’s
personal website or blog. At the same time, all prepublication versions
are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No
Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license. At the time this policy was
announced, it was criticized by many in the scholarly communication
community as overly complicated and restrictive. However, this CC
licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting an embargo in
the IR to achieve quicker and wider open distribution of the author’s
accepted manuscript (AAM). To wit, authors may post an appropriately
licensed copy on their personal site or blog, at which point the author’s
host institution may deposit without an embargo in the IR, not through
the license granted in the publication agreement, but through the CC
license on the author’s version, which the sharing policy mandates. This
article outlines the background and rationale of the issue and discusses
the benefits, workflows, and remaining questions. Read more…
Germany vs Elsevier: universities win temporary journal access after refusing to pay fees
The Dutch publishing giant Elsevier has granted uninterrupted access to its paywalled journals for researchers at around 200 German universities and research institutes that had refused to renew their individual subscriptions at the end of 2017.
The institutions had formed a consortium to negotiate a nationwide licence with the publisher. They sought a collective deal that would give most scientists in Germany full online access to about 2,500 journals at about half the price that individual libraries have paid in the past. But talks broke down and, by the end of 2017, no deal had been agreed. Elsevier now says that it will allow the country’s scientists to access its paywalled journals without a contract until a national agreement is reached or 200 individual contracts are hammered out. Read more …
Source: Nature
Sweden stands up for open access – cancels agreement with Elsevier
In order to take steps towards the goal of immediate open access by 2026 set by the Swedish Government, the Bibsam Consortium has after 20 years decided not to renew the agreement with the scientific publisher Elsevier. Elsevier has not been able to present a model that meets the demands of the Bibsam Consortium and the current agreement will not be renewed after 30th of June.
Swedish researchers publish approximately 4 000 articles per year in Elsevier journals. In 2017 € 1,3 million was spent on article processing charges, on top of the € 12 million that organisations spend on licensing fees for reading the Elsevier content. Read more …
This is a reblog – source
Announcing Flockademic: academic-led publishing
By Vincent Tunru – Jan 23, 2018
Half a year ago I quit my job to figure out what I could contribute to making academic articles freely available to all. In that time, I learned a lot, much of which I’ve documented on this blog. And now, I’m putting those learnings into practice.
We need alternatives to the traditional scholarly publishers. And as I wrote in my previous post, these alternatives are most likely to be adopted by academics when they are led by their peers. It is these academic frontrunners that I want to support: starting alternative journals should be as easy as starting a blog. You should be up and running in a matter of minutes, ready to invite contributors and to spread the word, without having to worry about funding models or infrastructure.
To that end, I present: Flockademic.
The same post has be reposted on INSIDE HIGHER ED on Jan 24, 2018. Read more…
Gates Foundation joins shift towards open access platforms
By Jack Grove on March 23, 2017.
One of the world’s biggest funders of scientific research is to establish an open access platform that will allow its grant winners to publish their findings, in a move that could be swiftly followed by the European Commission.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which invests about $1.2 billion (£960 million) a year in global health initiatives, said on 23 March that the Gates Open Research initiative would allow researchers funded by the US charity to publish their work on a free-to-access site, beginning this autumn. Read more…
Predatory journals recruit fake editor
By Piotr Sorokowski, Emanuel Kulczycki, Agnieszka Sorokowska & Katarzyna Pisanski on 22 March 2017.
An investigation finds that dozens of academic titles offered ‘Dr Fraud’ — a sham, unqualified scientist — a place on their editorial board. Katarzyna Pisanski and colleagues report. Read more …
The OA interviews: Philip Cohen, founder of SocArXiv
Re-posted From Open and Shut – – March 13, 2017
Fifteen years after the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) the OA revolution has yet to achieve its objectives. It does not help that legacy publishers are busy appropriating open access, and diluting it in ways that benefit them more than the research community. As things stand we could end up with a half revolution.
But could a new development help recover the situation? More specifically, can the newly reinvigorated preprint movement gain sufficient traction, impetus, and focus to push the revolution the OA movement began in a more desirable direction? Read more …
Are universities finally waking up to the value of copyright?
Posted by Elizabeth Gadd on March 6th, 2017
Whereas a large majority of universities have been proactive about claiming ownership of intellectual property such as patents or teaching materials, only a small percentage have been similarly assertive about copyright. However, amidst continued debate over the affordability of and access to scholarly communication, what practical attempts have been made to retain copyright within the academy rather than assign it to publishers? Elizabeth Gadd has examined copyright policies at 81 UK universities and found that, while a majority still relinquish copyright in scholarly works, an encouraging 20% of university policies sought to share rights with academic staff through licensing. Moreover, the development of a UK equivalent to ‘Harvard-style’ open access policies should help further coordinate efforts to retain copyright within the academy. Read more..
Openness by Default
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation now requires all its grant recipients to make their published, peer-reviewed work immediately available to the public, the latest development in a larger push to make research more accessible.
The foundation rolled out the new policy in 2015, but allowed for a two-year transition period during which grant recipients could embargo their work for 12 months. That option went away on Jan. 1 — from now on, anyone who receives some funding from the foundation must make their research and underlying data available, for example by publishing it in an open-access journal or depositing it in a public repository. Read more…
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