On 2011-01-06, at 10:59 AM, David Prosser wrote:

>> SH:
>> GREEN means you have the journal's green light to deposit your final draft on your institutional website immediately.
>> *That is the sole, generic information authors need.*
> 
> DP:
> So for an author in an Elsevier journal whose institution has mandated 'systematic deposit' Elsevier may not be a GREEN publisher.  It depends.  That's the point.  And that's what RoMEO tells us. 

No, that's definitely *not* the point (at least not mine).

A GREEN publisher is a publisher that states that all authors have the publisher's green light to deposit their final draft on their institutional website immediately (without having to seek permission or pay an extra fee, of course).

If this is accompanied by an absurd "restriction" such us "unless the author is a human being" or "unless the author has a blue-eyed uncle" or "unless there is a string of 7 consecutive 7's in the decimal expansion of pi" or unless "free will" exists -- or, equivalently: "unless the institutional website is an institutional repository" or "unless your institution requires you to deposit" -- then this is gibberish, to be ignored, not to be faithfully formalized by SHERPA/Romeo.

And, yes, I definitely do think that it is for SHERPA/Romeo to make the judgment that such absurd restrictions -- unlike embargoes -- are indeed absurd, and to be ignored in cataloguing publishers' author self-archiving policies. SHERPA/Romeo, by parroting them mechanically, is doing no one a favour except the purveyors of absurd restrictions of any description.

(It reminds me of nothing more than Pascal's Wager, according to which it's better to abide by scriptural decrees, because even if they are false, and you nevertheless abide by them, all you have done was to abide by unnecessary decrees for one lifetime, whereas if they are true and you don't abide by them, you will burn in hell for an eternity. The risk/benefit analysis dictates abidance either way. There's already an analogy there. But I am thinking of the fact that all one need do to trump Pascal's Wager is to invent a rival creed, with rival scriptural decrees, but raise the ante for not abiding, from, say, one eternity in hell to your soul's splitting in a thousand pieces, each living its own torments as well as those of its parallel 999 clones', etc.  etc. There is no ceiling on doubling your bets if all you are doing is making arbitrary stipulations. The moral of the story is that the way to make people abide by your decrees is to make the consequences of not abiding seem more aversive than abiding, no matter how far-fetched they might be...) 

But I am repeating myself (and so are you), so perhaps we should declare ourselves, respectively, unconvinced by the other...

Best wishes,

Stevan