PhysMath Central Blog
Open access at Elsevier: Is it really?
Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher, has recently recognized that all results from the Large Hadron Collider will be published exclusively in OA journals, and to that end has magnanimously "agreed to sponsor any articles accepted for publication that
report the initial experimental results from CERN’s LHC project".
However, a closer look at what has been reported as a no-fee, open access option shows that it is lacking several key OA characteristics. A closer look at what your $3000 (+VAT) buys for a typical, non-LHC 'sponsored article' is hard to come by. The official Elsevier page is lacking in any detail, but I would suggest that any author, or group of authors, willing to take up this offer should answer these questions to their own satisfaction first.
Is your copyright being signed over to the publisher, or are you encouraged to retain it?
Will the free access be permanent? Is this article to be archived in a third-party repository in case the publisher one day decides that the free period is over?
Is the full-text available not only as pdf, but also in machine-readable format for data-mining (e.g. XML & MathML)?
Can you and others reuse, host and modify the data and article, in whole or in part, freely?
Some others are questioning what sponsored article status means - certainly Elsevier make a point of not referring to it as open access, maybe we all should too?
Posted by Chris Leonard at 09:12 Comments (0)
