Knowledge institutions and organizations are denouncing a new sharing and hosting policy recently adopted by publisher Elsevier. Their concern: the policy undermines open-access policies at learning institutions and also prevents authors from sharing publicly their work.

Elsevier, which publishes thousands of journals, introduced the policy last month. It aims to strike a balance between making sharing “simple and seamless” and “being consistent with access and usage rights associated with journal articles,” the publisher said in a blog post.

Many librarians and open-access advocates, however, see the policy as an attack on institutional repositories, where colleges collect and make available research their faculty members produce. The new policy does not allow authors to share their journal article manuscripts publicly through those repositories, only privately “with a colleague or with an invitation-only online group.” Availability through the repositories is subject to journals’ embargo periods, which in some cases last for several years.

There is mounting pressure on Elsevier to reconsider its policy. Open access organizations, libraries and Creative Commons from countries such as the U.S., Canada, China, Australia, Brazil and the U.K. released joint statement asking Elsevier to adopt more open access friendly policy.

Those organizations criticize Elsevier’s open access policy from the view point that ‘it creates unnecessary barriers for Elsevier-published authors.’ according to them Elsevier’s policy hinders the dissemination and use of research knowledge. Moreover, those organizations blame Elsevier for formulating this policy without even thoroughly studying how immediate sharing of articles impact publishers’ revenue.

In a statement, Elsevier made clear that it was surprised by the reaction its open access policy received. Nevertheless, it still believes that its new policy is ‘more liberal’ which aims at facilitating the dissemination and consumption of research output.

“At each stage of the publication process authors can share their research: before submission, from acceptance, upon publication and post publication,” said Elsevier’s director of access and policy Alicia Wise. She added, “For authors who want free immediate access to their articles, we continue to give all authors a choice to publish gold open access with a wide number of open-access journals and over 1,600 hybrid titles.”

For open-access advocates this policy is an attack against open access. It’s primarily designed, they suspect, to undermine institutional repositories. They argue, in 2012, Elsevier put a restrictive policy in place which discourages authors’ from depositing their research manuscripts in institutional repositories.

‘The latest policy update is an attempt to slow down the spread of open-access policies,’ said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or SPARC.

Wise said the policy is not “intended to suddenly embargo and make inaccessible content currently available to readers.” She added that Elsevier is “happy to have a dialogue to discuss these, or any other, issues further.”

Source: Inside Higher ED