Elsevier may have enough clout with take-down notices to 3rd-party service providers like academia.edu, ResearchGate or (its own!) Mendeley (and might be able to weather the fierce backlash blizzard that will now follow) — but not if they try it with authors or institutions self-archiving the refereed final drafts of their own research output.

This latest incident is yet another cue to push worldwide for the adoption of immediate institutional deposit mandates (and the repositories’ automated copy-request Button) by all research institutions and funders.

Since 2004 Elsevier formally recognizes their authors’ right to do immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving of their refereed final drafts (not the Elsevier PDF version of record) on their institutional websites.

And even if they ever do try to rescind that, closed-access deposit is immune to take-down notices.

(But I don’t think Elsevier will dare arouse that global backlash by rescinding its 9-year-old policy of endorsing unembargoed Green OA by Elsevier authors — they will instead try to hope that they can either bluff authors off with their empty double-talk about “systematicity” and “voluntariness” or buy their institutions off by sweetening their publication big-deal on condition they don’t mandate Green OA?)