Researchers and librarians attack Elsevier plan

A group of open-access proponents has said that Elsevier’s latest policies for sharing papers in university repositories will hamper scientific progress.

Elsevier, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, announced in April that it was updating its rules about how researchers can share their papers throughout the publishing process.

The publisher portrayed its updated guidelines as a way for authors to understand more easily how and when they could share their work. For instance, authors can share preprints freely, but once an article is accepted it can only be shared privately or on the arXiv and RePEc servers.