On 2011-01-06, at 9:36 AM, David Prosser wrote:

> So, what Stevan is calling for is a service that tells you that you have the right to deposit in all circumstances, despite the fact that you may have signed a contract that (technically, unenforceably, who knows) forbids you from depositing in certain circumstances.
> 
> It may just be that we live in an over-cautious age, but I wonder how many public institutions would want to host a service that gives expert advice that they know is deliberately wrong.
> 
> And I really don't see the point of a service that gives you the green light, but with the proviso that in some cases there may be restrictions on the where and the what which you'll have to ferret out for yourself.  Why not incorporate these specific circumstances into the system, as RoMEO does? 
> 
> For Elsevier, where we started, Stevan's system would say either:
> 
> Green - do what you like
> 
> or if he were feeling more cautious:
> 
> Green - there may or may not be some conditions that apply in your case, but you'll have to ferret these out for yourself.
> 
> RoMEO says:
> 
> Green - but here are some additional conditions that may apply in your case.
> 
> The first is dishonest and if we acknowledge conditions better to have them listed.  Of course, the author is then free to make a decision on whether or not to abide by the conditions.

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.*

The caveats about blue-eyed uncles and square circles can be left to the author to ferret out and puzzle over, if he cares too. I am not recommending lying about them: I am recommending leaving them out of SHERPA/Romeo, which should not be for the amusement and edification of permission pedants or fetishists, but for the liberation of authors' fingers from Zeno's Paralysis.

Given that (true) generic information, the author can act on the green light now -- and decide about the blue-eyed uncles if and when he ever gets a take-down notice.

And the only thing institutions need do, in mandating OA, is to mandate deposit of the final draft immediately upon acceptance for publication. They need not mandate -- only recommend -- that access to the deposit be made OA immediately. They can leave that to the author's judgment, like host. And they can even take it down, if ever they get a credible take-down notice, like any other host. So SHERPA/Romeo's not for that either.
openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html 

That's all that's really at issue here, practically speaking, no matter how we try to turn it into a solemn moralistic or legalistic conundrum.

Stevan

> 
> 
> 
> On 6 Jan 2011, at 13:47, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 6:22 AM, FrederickFriend <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>>> Like David I agree with Stevan apart from his criticism of SHERPA-RoMEO.
>>> 
>>> In one sense the Elsevier wording comes as no surprise, in that when many
>>> publishers have said that they allow "green" self-archiving it has always
>>> been with a sometimes unspoken "caveat" that they will review their policy
>>> if repository deposit happens on a large scale. The more recent element is
>>> the inclusion of "institutional repositories with mandates for systematic
>>> postings", which I assume to be Elsevier's response to the growing number of
>>> institutional mandates. I agree with Stevan that authors should not hold
>>> back from repository deposit if they do not know whether or not the wording
>>> applies to them. They should hold onto their rights as authors.
>>> 
>>> Despite ambiguities around the words "mandates for systematic postings",
>>> Elsevier are more open than some other publishers about their wishes on
>>> repository deposit. There are rumours than another major publisher is taking
>>> action to block repository deposit without publicising the fact on
>>> SHERPA-RoMEO. I encourage all repository managers to share any information
>>> they have about how publisher policies are being applied in practice.
>> 
>> It will come as no surprise that I disagree -- profoundly -- with my
>> three friends David Prosser, Charles Oppenheim and Fred Friend, on the
>> precise practical question on which they are demurring, as if it were
>> rather an ethical or legal imperative (which it most decidedly is
>> not):
>> 
>> Here are, I think, are the relevant objective data:
>> 
>> (1) It has been possible for researchers to self-archive their
>> unrefereed and refereed drafts for at least two decades. Proof:
>> Computer scientists and physicists have been doing it successfully for
>> two decades.
>> 
>> (2) Despite this, over 85% of authors in fields other than computer
>> science and physics have *not* been self-archiving throughout the past
>> two decades, despite the demonstrations of its possibility,
>> feasibility and benefits, and despite the invention of a name to
>> describe the result ("open access," OA) and a movement to facilitate
>> it.
>> 
>> (3) In the past decade, 85% of researchers have continued to fail to
>> self-archive, despite the fact that the majority of journals -- and
>> virtually all the top journals -- have given their green light to
>> self-archive.
>> 
>> (4) One of the (many) reasons why researchers do not self-archive is
>> profound confusions, generating unfounded worries, about rights:
>> http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#10.Copyright
>> 
>> (5) The source of the confusions is partly in authors' own fuzzy
>> notions about copyright and consequences, compounded by conflicting
>> (and equally confused) advice and "expert judgments" from permissions
>> officers and lawyers who are mostly just opining themselves.
>> 
>> (6) The model on which most of the faulty advice is given to authors
>> is course-packs in which teachers distribute multiple paper copies of
>> the copyrighted work of *others* for teaching purposes: This has
>> nothing whatsoever to do with authors giving away their *own* work
>> online for research purposes.
>> 
>> (7) But for the majority of journals (including virtually all the top
>> journals) the above has been mooted by the fact that they have given
>> their authors the green light to give away their own work online for
>> research purposes.
>> 
>> (8) All that is needed in order to inform the author community about
>> which journals have given their authors the green light to give away
>> their own work online for research purposes is to specify WHICH
>> journals have given their green light to depositing WHAT, WHERE and
>> WHEN.
>> 
>> (9) WHICH means: specifying the journal.
>> 
>> (10) WHAT means: specifying what may be deposited: the only relevant
>> distinction here is whether the green light is for the unrefereed
>> draft ("PALE-GREEN") or the refereed draft ("GREEN"); the default for
>> GREEN is the author's final, revised, refereed, accepted draft;
>> anything beyond that (such as the publisher's proprietary PDF) is an
>> extra, and can be left to authors to ferret out for themselves, if
>> they so desire, by consulting the journal's policy details; the cause
>> of dispelling the unfounded worry about self-archiving itself is fully
>> served by indicating whether the journal is PALE-GREEN or GREEN.
>> Otherwise the journal is GRAY (meaning it does not give its green
>> light to self-archiving either the unrefereed or the refereed draft).
>> 
>> (11) WHERE, by default, means the author's institutional repository.
>> Just as some journals do not endorse self-archiving the publisher's
>> PDF, some do not endorse self-archiving institution-externally, in a
>> third-party repository. The distinction is vacuous, since an article
>> that is accessible free for all anywhere on the web is accessible free
>> for all everywhere on the web, and its metadata can be harvested by
>> innumerable central indices and search engines.
>> 
>> (12) WHEN is not vacuous, but a journal that does not give its green
>> light to self-archiving the author's final, revised, refereed,
>> accepted draft immediately upon publication is either just a
>> PALE-GREEN publisher or a GRAY publisher.
>> 
>> (13) So all that authors who are afraid to self-archive need to know
>> is whether their journal is GREEN, PALE-GREEN, or GRAY -- and, if the
>> latter two, the length of the embargo on the self-archiving of the
>> refereed draft.
>> 
>> (14) Instead, SHERPA-Romeo offers authors a needless profusion of
>> colour-codes (green, blue, yellow, white) accompanied by an endless,
>> confusing and completely unnecessary welter of conditions and
>> restrictions, no doubt a source of abiding interest to beleaguered
>> permissions librarians, accustomed only to puzzling over usage rights
>> for incoming third-party content rather than outgoing own-content --
>> and perhaps also to cataloguers accustomed to cataloguing all metadata
>> without having to ask themselves why -- but for authors merely a
>> reinforcement of the antecedent state of confusion and indecision that
>> has already kept 85% of them from self-archiving for two decades now:
>> the very confusion and indecision that a clear, relevant journal
>> self-archiving policy index was meant to dispel.
>> 
>> So, no, the purpose of a journal self-archiving policy index is *not*
>> to catalogue every nuance of every publisher's copyright policy: It is
>> only to inform authors whether or not their journal has given its
>> green light to self-archive the unrefereed or refereed draft of their
>> article, in their institutional repository, immediately upon
>> publication (and if not, when).
>> 
>> Whatever further verbiage the publisher may choose to append to this
>> basic information -- including hocus-pocus about the distinction
>> between an "institutional website" versus an "institutional
>> repository," "spontaneous self-archiving" versus "mandated
>> self-archiving," and authors' blue-eyed uncles -- can be left to
>> authors to look up if they wish. The journal self-archiving policy
>> index's work will be done having provided the PALE-GREEN/GREEN data
>> and the embargo-length.
>> 
>> And, no, all the faithful echoing of all the minutiae of each
>> publisher's copyright conditions -- apart from the essential ones
>> above -- is *not* the solemn ethical duty of a journal self-archiving
>> policy index to provide, come what may. Nor is it a legal, ethical or
>> scholarly failing to fail to echo it (let alone to keep warning
>> authors that even these hedged and hobbled conditions risk being
>> rescinded if they comply! )
>> http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#32.Poisoned
>> 
>> On the contrary, winnowing the substantive wheat from the irrelevant
>> and often incoherent chaff would provide an invaluable service to
>> authors who are undecided and uncertain about self-archiving -- in a
>> way that simply reproducing the whole mess certainly will not.
>> 
>> Perhaps we need two SHERPA/Romeos: one for authors who want to know
>> whether or not they have their journal's green light to provide OA by
>> self-archiving (Oa), and one for permissions librarians and others who
>> may be concerned to know every nuance of every journal's copyright
>> policy, for whatever reason (Ob). SHERPA/Romeo is trying to do both,
>> with the result that it is hardly doing Oa at all, perhaps even
>> undoing it.
>> 
>> One last observation (a conjecture): It may be that the reason why
>> SHERPA/Romeo has become so top-heavy on permission-librarian minutiae
>> is that at some institutions the "self"-archiving is not being done by
>> authors at all, but by librarians, on their behalf. If so, perhaps
>> this is a mixed blessing: It does spare the authors having to do a few
>> keystrokes, but at the cost of a great deal of OA's target content not
>> getting "self"-archived at all, because deposit is being decided by
>> third parties, according to third-party criteria, instead of what good
>> sense and good practice would dictate.
>> 
>> This is a moot point whilst self-archiving mandates are still rare:
>> Without a mandate, librarian intervention and mediation seems to be
>> the only way to eke out more OA content.
>> 
>> But proxy-archiving and imploring by librarians is not the scaleable,
>> sustainable solution for OA: green self-archiving mandates are. And
>> for mandates it's all the more important to dispel the pettifoggery
>> and get to the essentials: GREEN, PALE-GREEN and embargo length.
>> That's all.
>> 
>> Stevan Harnad
>> 
>> 
>>> -----Original Message----- From: David Prosser
>>> Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2011 10:30 AM
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum
>>> 
>>> Of course, I agree with almost everything Stevan says.  The exception being
>>> the rather snide comments regarding SHERPA-RoMEO.
>>> 
>>> RoMEO is not 'enshrining' or 'canonising' anything.  It is reporting.  And
>>> if an author signs a copyright agreement with Elsevier then they are are
>>> agreeing to the terms reported.  We may all agree that these terms are ' (1)
>>> arbitrary, (2) incoherent, and (3) unenforceable', but it's not for RoMEO to
>>> make that call.  It is a database of 'permissions that are normally given as
>>> part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement' not 'permission that
>>> we think sensible leaving out the one's we don't like'.  That may reduce its
>>> advocacy power and do nothing to dispel the confusion being created by
>>> publishers with arbitrary, incoherent, and (possibly) unenforceable clauses
>>> in their policies, but it does have the advantage of being honest.
>>> 
>>> David
>> 
>> On 2011-01-06, at 6:05 AM, CHARLES OPPENHEIM wrote:
>> 
>>> I totally agree with David's point.  I would compare it to a Yellow Pages Telephone
>>> Directory - it faithfully reports what it is aware of, and makes no judgement about
>>> the quality of the service provided.  It is still incredibly useful as a resource, but it
>>> is up to authors to decide who they wish to publish with, not Romeo.
>> 
>>> Charles
>> 
>>> Professor Charles Oppenheim
>> 
>>> 
>>> On 6 Jan 2011, at 03:00, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>>> 
>>>> ** Cross-posted **
>>>> 
>>>> The following query came up on the UKCORR mailing list:
>>>> 
>>>>> I was surprised to read the paragraph below under author's rights
>>>>> (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/copyright##rights)
>>>>> 
>>>>>> "the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the
>>>>>> final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review
>>>>>> process) on your personal or institutional web site or server for
>>>>>> scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a
>>>>>> link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not
>>>>>> in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional
>>>>>> repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is
>>>>>> a specific agreement with the publisher- see
>>>>>> http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbody agreements for further
>>>>>> information]);"
>>>> 
>>>> You can't blame Elsevier's Perplexed Permissions Personnel for trying:
>>>> After all, if researchers -- clueless and cowed about copyright --
>>>> have already lost nearly two decades of research access and impact for
>>>> no reason at all, making it clear that only if/(when they are required
>>>> (mandated) by their institutions and funders will they dare to do what
>>>> is manifestly in their own best interests and already fully within
>>>> their reach, then it's only natural that those who perceive their own
>>>> interests to be in conflict with those of research and researchers
>>>> will attempt to see whether they cannot capitalize on researchers'
>>>> guileless gullibility, yet again.
>>>> 
>>>> In three words, the above "restrictions" on the green light to make
>>>> author's final drafts OA are (1) arbitrary, (2) incoherent, and (3)
>>>> unenforceable. They are the rough equivalent of saying: You have "the
>>>> right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final
>>>> journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process)
>>>> on your personal or institutional web site or server for scholarly
>>>> purposes -- but not if you are required to do so by your institution
>>>> or funder."
>>>> 
>>>> They might as well have added "or if you have a blue-eyed uncle who
>>>> prefers tea to toast on alternate Tuesdays."
>>>> 
>>>> My own inclination is to say that if researchers prove to be stupid
>>>> enough to fall for that, then they deserve everything that is coming
>>>> to them (or rather, withheld from them).
>>>> 
>>>> But even I, seasoned cynic that the last 20 years have made me, don't
>>>> believe that researchers are quite that stupid -- though I wouldn't
>>>> put it past SHERPA/Romeo to go ahead and solemnly enshrine this latest
>>>> bit of double-talk in one of its slavish lists of "General Conditions"
>>>> on a publisher's otherwise "green" self-archiving policy, thereby
>>>> helpfully furnishing an effective pseudo-official megaphone for every
>>>> such piece of optimistic gibberish, no matter how absurd.
>>>> 
>>>> My advice to authors (if, unlike what the sensible computer scientists
>>>> and physicists have been doing all along -- namely, self-archiving
>>>> without first seeking anyone's blessing for two decades -- they only
>>>> durst self-archive if their publishers have first given them their
>>>> green light to do so) is that they take their publishers at their word
>>>> when they do give them their green light to do so, and ignore any
>>>> SHERPA/Romeo tommy-rot they may try to append to that green light to
>>>> make it seem as if there is any rational line that can be drawn
>>>> between "yes, you may make your refereed final draft OA" and "no, you
>>>> may not make your refereed final draft OA."
>>>> 
>>>> For those who are interested in knowing what is actually happening,
>>>> worldwide, insofar as OA self-archiving is concerned, I recommend
>>>> reading Peter Suber's stirring 2010 Summary of real progress rather
>>>> than the sort of pseudo-legalistic smoke-screening periodically
>>>> emitted by Permissions Department Pundits (whether or not not they are
>>>> canonized by SHERPA-Romeo):
>>>> http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#2010
>>>> 
>>>> Dixit,
>>>> 
>>>> Your Weary and Wizened Archivangelist
>>>