Elsevier's Latest Brilliant Idea: Adding Geoblocking To Open Access
from the how-about-no? dept
We've just written about a troubling move by Elsevier to create its own, watered-down version of Wikipedia in the field of science. If you are wondering what other plans it has for the academic world, here's a post from Elsevier’s Vice President, Policy and Communications, Gemma Hersh, that offers some clues. She's "responsible for developing and refreshing policies in areas related to open access, open data, text mining and others," and in "Working towards a transition to open access", Hersh meditates upon the two main kinds of open access, "gold" and "green". She observes:
While gold open access offers immediate access to the final published article, the trade-off is cost. For those that can't or don't wish to pay the article publishing charge (APC) for gold open access, green open access -- making a version of the subscription article widely available after a time delay or embargo period -- remains a viable alternative to enabling widespread public access.
She has a suggestion for how the transition from green open access to gold open access might be effected:
Europe is a region where a transition to fully gold open access is likely to be most cost-neutral and, perhaps for this reason, where gold OA currently has the highest policy focus. This is in stark contrast to other research-intensive countries such as the US, China and Japan, which on the whole have pursued the subscription/green open access path. Therefore one possible first step for Europe to explore would be to enable European articles to be available gold open access within Europe and green open access outside of Europe.
Blithely ignoring the technical impossibility of enforcing an online geographical gold/green border, Hersh is proposing to add all the horrors of geoblocking -- a long-standing blight on the video world -- to open access. But gold open access papers that aren't fully accessible outside Europe simply aren't open access at all. The whole point of open access is that it makes academic work freely available to everyone, everywhere, without restriction -- unlike today, where only the privileged few can afford wide access to research that is often paid for by the public.
It's hard to know why Elsevier is putting forward an idea that is self-evidently preposterous. Perhaps it now feels it has such a stranglehold on the entire academic knowledge production process that it doesn't even need to hide its contempt for open access and those who support it.
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Filed Under: academic research, geoblocking, gold open access, green open access, open access
Companies: elsevier
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That would permanently pull the teeth of such vipers as Elsevier. With prejudice.
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Re:
One of the requirements of the UK funding councils (public bodies) was that all research must be published open access. Part of the conditions for getting our research grant was that we had to allocate funds to cover the costs of publishing open access, precisely because it is publicly funded and must therefore be publicly available.
The other thing that we used to do was just upload the unpublished version to the university's institutional repository. The content was basically identical to the public version, but not covered by copyright and covered in highlights and unformatted, so you could read that version and just cite the published version.
It is a matter of great confusion to me as to why these kind of paywalls exist in academia at all. All the papers I've written I want to be read as widely as possible and as many copies to be made as possible so more people read them. As a researcher, "protection" does not help me at all. Unless I wanted to patent it or something, but then why would I publish at all?
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If you're not sure about piracy...
Just remember that 'geoblocking' is a politically correct way to say 'we discriminate against people based on their country of origin'.
And I'd be very interested to know how much Elsevier pays to authors when people pay to download their publications.
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Re: how much Elsevier pays to authors
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Re: If you're not sure about piracy...
0.
The job of scientific publishers is:
- to take papers written by government-payed scientists, optionaly even have them pay for submissions,
- hand those papers to other public-money-funded scientists to review and ensure they are good quality (for free)
- put the pdf online and charge (again) public institutions hundred of thousands of dollars for access or individuals about $30/pdf.
Every cent in this process goes exclusively to the publisher.
(Scientific publishers are among the most profitable companies in the world)
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Re: If you're not sure about piracy...
Correction: discriminate against people depending on where they happen to be sitting. Nobody will check your passport before blocking you from accessing Hulu after you land in a foreign airport, for example, though as a tourist I've made use of a free trial or 2 while I've been in the US.
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And this is why...
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Re: And this is why...
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They keep using that word...
If they have to qualify "open" access with various levels of restrictions, then isn't it---by definition---not open any more?
As the man said: "I don't think it means what you think it means."
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Prestigious international campuses
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