0) Depositing refereed articles in the author’s institutional repository to make them free for all online provides “value” for all those would-be users webwide who otherwise cannot afford to subscription access to that content.

1) A refereed, accepted final draft includes all illustrations, tables, etc.

2) Discoverability (interfaces that automatically serve related content or most-cited, etc) is provided by the growing number of harvesters of free web content (including Google Scholar, Scirus, Scopus, Citeseerx, BASE, etc.).

3) The real limit on re-use (and use) is failure to deposit! Along with free online access, the following also automatically comes with the territory: (1) clicking, (2) on-screen access, (3) linking, including (4) OA URLs in course-packs,(5) downloading, (6) local storage, (7) local print-off of hard copy, (8) local data-mining by the user, and (9) global harvesting and search by engines like google. (That includes “collections by topic, year-end compilations, etc.”)

4) The institutional repositories can easily support user generated content if desired. (What they need first is the content!)

5) Most institutional websites are indeed pretty lousy, but for one main reason: They are mostly empty! The exceptions are the ones where deposit is mandated. See ROARMAP: http://roarmap.eprints.org/

6) All authors can deposit their own refereed drafts in their institutional repositories. No permission whatsoever is needed from anyone for depositing. For authoritative references that clearly spell out publishers’ policies for making access to those deposits *open access* (rather than closed access), see:

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

and

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the “Fair Dealing” Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/

1) If a refereed draft includes the author’s submission only, things like illustration, tables, rubricks, etc added by publishers would not be present. These are significant value-adds in scientific/technical/medical literature.
2) Seems there would be little or no value-add around discoverability (metadata, interfaces that automatically serve related content or most-cited, etc).
3) It would also limit re-use (collections by topic, year-end compilations, etc) that are valuable discovery mechanisms.
4) The institutional sites likely wouldn’t support user generated content, which can be a rich source of content/context on leading publisher sites where serious people weigh in.
5) Most institutional websites I’ve seen are pretty lousy, so I’d be concerned about broken download links – moved pages without redirects, etc.

Stevan, can you provide authoritative references that clearly spell out the terms by which authors can self-archive? It will be interesting to know what, when and where authors can deposit to understand the value of self-archiving. Thanks.

Needless to say, traditional publishers are doing everything in their power to forestall their own demise, especially lobbying for legislation that entrenches very questionable business practices. The principle of public good is entirely lost in the lobbying process.

Excellent explanation regarding “why Elsevier?”:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/16/academic-publishers-enemies-science

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/869-.html

While the worldwide researcher community is again busy working itself up into an indignant lather with yet another publisher boycott threat, I am still haunted by a “keystroke koan”:

“Why did 34,000 researchers sign a threat in 2000 to boycott their journals unless those journals agreed to provide open access to their articles – when the researchers themselves could provide open access (OA) to their own articles by self-archiving them on their own institutional websites?”
Not only has 100% OA been reachable through author self-archiving as of at least 1994, but over 90% of all refereed journals (published by 65% of all refereed journal publishers) have already given their explicit green light to some form of author self-archiving — with over 60% of all journals, including Elsevier’s — giving their authors the green light to self-archive their refereed final drafts (“postprint”) immediately upon acceptance for publication…

So why are researchers yet again boycotting instead of keystroking, with yet another dozen years of needlessly lost research access and impact already behind us?

We have met the enemy, Pogo, and it’s not Elsevier.

(And this is why keystroke mandates are necessary; just keying out boycott threats to publishers is not enough.)

You were right the first time. It IS “effect change,” not “affect change.”

Sure, other academic publishers also do things which they should not be doing… but an Elsevier boycott is more focussed, for urgent, and therefore has a better chance of making a practical positive difference in our profession.

Elsevier is by far the scummiest, as well as the most prestigious, so they are the best choice to start with. They depend on the authors, so if the boycott catches on, it will hurt big time.