Posted with permission:

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Alexander Borbely wrote:

> I enjoyed reading your spirited advice to the World Congress of Science
> Journalists.
> 
> My wife just gave me the instructions for depositing manuscripts she
> received for a paper in the European J Neuroscience. I was astonished to
> read that depositing the final version of the manuscript is prohibited 
> (see Section "Accepted version"). Making available only the version 
> originally submitted is not very useful if major modifications based 
> on the referees' recommendation are made.
> 
> Are you familiar with these instructions and what is your opinion?
> 
> Alexander A. Borbély, M.D.
> Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology
> Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology
> University of Zurich

I am very familiar with these instructions. Blackwell's is a 12-month
embargo publisher.

The solution is extremely simple: always deposit the postprint (i.e., the
refereed, revised, accepted final draft) immediately upon acceptance
for publication (*definitely* not 12 months later!) and set the access
as "Closed Access" instead of "Open Access," if you wish, which means
the metadata (author, title, journal, abstract) are openly accessible
to anyone on the web immediately, but the full-text is not. In addition,
as I wrote before, make sure to implement the "Fair Use" Button in ZORA:
EMAIL EPRINT REQUEST.

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

All searches will lead to the Closed Access Deposit, and that in turn
has the Button, which will provide for all usage needs during the
1-year embargo, semi-automatically, almost immediately, via almost-OA.

Embargoes will all die (I promise!) a *very* quick death once all
institutions mandate immediate deposit like this; but embargoes will win
the day if institutions foolishly make the mandated *deposit* date
contingent on when publisher embargo's say-so.

     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

Several other points:

(1) Unlike Blackwell's most journals (62%) already endorse immediate
deposit:

     http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php

(2) There is no reason whatsoever to hold out for the publisher's PDF:
The author's postprint is just fine for all research purposes! The PDF
is completely irrelevant, one way or the other.

(3) It is a good idea to deposit the pre-refereeing preprint too, whenever
possible: The repository will clearly tag it as the unrefereed version,
with a link to the refereed postprint (and from there to the "Fair Use"
button); it will also allow search engines to pick up the full-text for
full-text indexing, leading to many more discoveries of both the preprint
and the postprint.

(I do not for one microsecond believe that any publisher's statement that
"a corrected version of the preprint (i.e., the postprint) cannot be made
OA immediately" has any legal validity; nor do I think such nonsense could
ever be enforced, had it had any legal validity. But instead of wasting
still more time to wait for people to at last *realize* this, and deposit
their postprints as OA immediately, the immediate-deposit/optional-access
policy (plus the "Fair Use" button) are the best compromise solution.

Then nature can take its course. And meanwhile researcher access needs
are taken care of, almost-immediately, through almost-OA, during any
putative embargo period.

Stevan Harnad

> European Journal of Neuroscience
> 
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