A blossoming experiment in allowing a form of open-access scientific publishing appears to have hit a roadblock, after the world’s largest journal publisher found that too many universities were moving to take advantage of it.
The publisher, Elsevier, has told universities that have built their own online repositories of journal articles written by their researchers that they now must respect waiting periods typically lasting a year or two before allowing free access to Elsevier-owned content.
Elsevier is describing the policy shift as merely a reiteration of what it always has required. “We are now communicating our embargoes more clearly,” Alicia Wise, the publishing company’s director of access and policy, said on Thursday.
But representatives of universities and their researchers are crying foul, saying Elsevier is reneging now that a movement to create university repositories — web-based storehouses of articles — is rapidly gaining momentum.
The perceived threat to Elsevier comes from a combination of the repositories and a subsequent series of faculty votes at various universities establishing the expectation that researchers contribute to them. Now more than 50 campuses have such policies, many of them major research institutions, said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an advocacy alliance of 225 institutions in the United States and Canada.
“When those policies started proliferating, in 2012, you could see that Elsevier got very nervous,” Ms. Joseph said.
Battle Lines Over Access
Elsevier publishes more than 2,000 journals, including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet. It has long been a focal point for groups such as Ms. Joseph’s coalition, which has argued that research financed by taxpayers should be immediately available to anyone. Thousands of researchers signed a pledge in 2012 to boycott the company. Elsevier and other publishers have pushed back, saying they need some period of exclusive access for paying subscribers so that they can finance the costs of editing and publishing scientific work.
The Obama administration has been part of the broad battle, saying it wants federal agencies to set policies requiring free access within 12 months to the results of research they finance.
The specific dispute this year with Elsevier stems from a 2004 company policy that, according to Ms. Joseph, allowed universities to create their own online repositories that gave outsiders free and immediate access to the plain text of articles that appeared in Elsevier journals.
Elsevier agrees that it let its authors post their articles on their own websites, Ms. Wise said. But the company technically did not extend that right to universitywide repositories, even if it did not seek out and shut down transgressors, she said.
As more and more universities began creating repositories and faculty members began urging their use, Elsevier in 2012 asked universities to negotiate agreements establishing the terms of how the repositories would operate, Ms. Joseph said. Then, one month ago, it set specific embargo periods for most of its journals, ranging from six months to 48 months, that it expected the repositories to observe before making articles freely available, she said.
More than 80 university-based groups, and more than 500 researchers and other open-access advocates, have now signed a letter to Elsevier protesting the action. “The policy has been adopted without any evidence that immediate sharing of articles has a negative impact on publishers’ subscriptions,” said the letter, organized by Ms. Joseph’s group and a Europe-based ally, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories.
The Association of American Universities, which represents dozens of leading research institutions in the United States, did not sign the letter but expressed support for it. “We’re disappointed also in Elsevier’s new policy,” said the group’s spokesman, Barry Toiv. “It curtails legitimate sharing that we believe does not threaten their business model.”
An Evolving Landscape
Elsevier, however, felt the emerging university-based repositories were getting too close to replicating the services it sells to survive, Ms. Wise said. Even the permission for individual scientists to post freely on their own websites might cross that line as the ability to search throughout the Internet improves, she said.
“Maybe we will continue to watch as the landscape continues to evolve, which it’s doing very rapidly,” Ms. Wise said. At the same time, she said, “it is clear that open access is an important part of the landscape and it’s here to stay, so we need to find ways to make it work, that are sustainable, and we’re doing that.”
“We’re learning as we go, as are other stakeholders,” Ms. Wise said.
And universities, for their part, apparently have not reached the point where they are so bothered by Elsevier and other publishers that they refuse to use their services altogether, Ms. Joseph acknowledged.
“Universities are pretty conservative organizations, and it’s taking them a long time” to understand the relative trade-offs in relying on private publishers, she said.
At least one concern appears to have been allayed: The protest letter organized by Ms. Joseph’s group said that Elsevier’s latest policy shift appeared to be retroactive, meaning universities might have to remove some articles already posted publicly in their repositories. Ms. Wise made clear in an interview, however, that the company was not making any such request.
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
