In the middle of February, Times Higher Education ran a piece by Elsevier boycott originator Tim Gowers, entitled Occupy publishing .

David Roberts just commented on the last-but-one post, Winkling licence information out of Elsevier, bit bit bit : David Roberts Says: March 6, 2012 at 11:41 pm e The extra rights for sponsored articles page is now linked to from http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/sponsoredarticles And he’s right: here’s a screenshot of the Sponsored Articles page: {.size-full .wp-image-5495

This post is part three in what, astonishingly, seems now to be an ongoing series about trying to discover what Elsevier’s licenses are.  For parts one and two, see: What actually is Elsevier’s open-access licence? What have we learned about Elsevier’s open-access licence? Today I read an article that I think was meant to be encouraging, but which instead I found disturbing.

I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education that JSTOR “turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles” every year.  365.25 × 24 × 60 × 60 = 31557600 seconds per year, which means that 4.75 attempts to access papers on JSTOR are refused every second . Every second, five people somewhere around the world try to enrich their understanding of science, and are prevented from doing so.

A quick note to remind everyone that although the RWA is dead, that only brings us back to the status quo.  At present, it’s still the case that the great majority of US government-funded research goes behind paywalls .  Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a public access policy that is resulting in a lot of papers being posted for general access at PubMed Central, the NIH is only one of a dozen U.S.

Well, I’ve had most of the day now to digest the news that Elsevier have withdrawn their support of the Research Works Act; and a few hours to get used to the idea that the Act itself is now dead.  I’ve had some time to think about what it all means. My first reaction was to be really delighted: the banner headline suggested a genuine change of direction from Elsevier, such as I had challenged them about a few weeks ago.

I just received this notification that Issa and Maloney have pulled the Research Works Act, presumably in response to Elsevier’s withdrawal of support.  So far, what’s at that link is all I know — I’ve not found a more official source for the text of the statement.  But it makes me happy that it includes language like: That represents a realism and progressiveness that I didn’t honestly expect to see from these quarters.

Amazing, but it seems to be true: based on this statement on their own website, Elsevier has withdrawn its support for the Research Works Act! Could this be evidence that they really are listening?  Two weeks ago I publicly challenged Elsevier to do just this, as a first step towards winning back the support of authors, editors and reviewers who have been deserting them in droves.

Hurrah for the Copyright Transfer Agreement, that happy convention that frees us authors from the wearisome encumbrance that is owning the copyright to our own work.  Back when I was young and foolish, I used to think that it was a good thing for us to hold our own copyrights; but fortunately I was put right by Kent Anderson of the Scholarly Echo Chamber blog: So now I know better.

The story so far As we all know by now, barrier-based publishers like Elsevier and Springer sometimes offer authors a choice to upgrade their papers to open access by payment of a fee: Elsevier calls this a “sponsored article”, Springer calls it “Open Choice”, and other publishers have other names for similar facilities.