Elsevier says: Green Light-Go!

**My apologies for posting something this lengthy (and I've tried to edit it down)--but it is rather big news and has been sent to several discussion lists.
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Elsevier has just gone from being a Romeo "Pale-Green" publisher to a full Romeo Green publisher: Authors have the publisher's official green light to self-archive both their pre-refereeing preprints and their refereed postprints.

Elsevier has thereby demonstrated that -- whatever its pricing policy may be -- it is a publisher that has heeded the need and the expressed desire of the research community for Open Access (OA) and its benefits to research productivity and progress.
<http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html>

...

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...
...

The OA ball is now clearly in the research community's court (not the publishing community's, not the library community's). Let researchers and their employers and funders now all rise to the occasion by adopting and implementing institutional OA provision policies. Don't just sign petitions for publishers to provide OA, but commit your own institution to providing it:

http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Stevan Harnad

Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 03:09:39 +0100
From: "Hunter, Karen (ELS-US)"
To: "'harnad@xxx.soton.ac.uk'"
Subject: Re: Elsevier journal list

Stevan,

[H]ere is what we have decided on post-"prints" (i.e. published articles, whether published electronically or in print):

An author may post his or her version of the final paper on personal web site and on the institution's web site (including its institutional respository). Each posting should include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page (or the article's DOI). The author does not need our permission to do this, but any other posting (e.g. to a repository elsewhere) would require our permission. By "his version" we are referring to Word or Tex file, not a PDF or HTML downloaded from ScienceDirect - but the author can update the version to reflect changes made during the refereeing and editing process. Elsevier will continue to be the single, definitive archive for the formal published version.

We will be gradually updating any public information on our policies (including our copyright forms and all information on our web site) to get it all consistent.