Open Access Archivangelism - Publishing Costs

UK Gold Open Access Infrastructure

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:03:39 +0100

What UK institutions (and RCUK) need far more urgently than an RCUK compliance mechanism to collect, monitor and disburse the UK funds for Gold double-payments (sic) is an RCUK compliance monitoring mechanism for cost-free Green OA -- and HEFCE/REF have proposed a natural way to accomplish this:

1. HEFCE proposes to make immediate deposit of the final draft of peer reviewed articles in the institutional repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication, a requirement for eligibility for submission to REF 2020.

2. Immediate deposit is required (a) irrespective of whether the deposited draft is made immediately OA or embargoed for an allowable interval, (b) irespective of whether it is published in a subscription journal or a Gold OA journal, (c) irrespective of whether further re-use rights are licensed (e.g., CC-BY).

3. The immediate-deposit would apply immediately, since researchers cannot foresee which 4 articles will prove to be their best (and hence submitted to REF) 6 years hence, and delayed deposit would make the articles ineligible.

4. Hence the natural procedure for each institution is to systematically collect and store the calendar date of the acceptance letter as well as the date of deposit for all articles published. (The former can be made a repository meta-data field; the latter already is.)

That done, institutions can go back to counting the gold chicks allotted them by RCUK's golden hen, knowing that their RCUK mandate requirements are already fulfilled via Green. No worries about running out of money to pay for publication.

And the added bonus is that if the Gold is not spent on paying publishers even more money than is being spent already for subscriptions, any leftover can now be spent on facilitating and implementing Green OA and monitoring compliance (see replies of Doug Kell to the BIS Parliamentary Select Committee about what can be done with the RCUK Gold OA funds if there is no need to spend them on Gold OA).

The natural next step toward global OA will be to integrate institutional and funder mandates worldwide to make them convergent and mutually reinforcing. HEFCE/REF have shown the way to do so.

This will also put the UK back into the worldwide OA leadership role it had from 2004-2012 and then lost with the Finch Committee's egregious proposal to mandate paid Gold (by restricting UK authors' right to choose their journals for their quality standards alone, rather than their cost-recovery model, and by redirecting scarce research funds to double-pay publishers for Gold OA instead of just providing cost-free Green OA).

What Open Access Needs Today Is Mandates, Not Money

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:31:48 +0100

European Union requires Open Access: "Money is essential in OA, and only governments are able to provide sufficient funds on a major scale."

This conflates author-pays publishing in "Gold" OA journals with cost-free author self-archiving of articles published in subscription journals ("Green" OA).

No extra money is needed for Green OA self-archiving. It just requires a clear mandate (requirement) to self-archive, by depositing the author's final, peer-reviewed draft in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. The deposit should be made OA immediately (or after an embargo period whose allowable length should be as short as possible).

Research Councils UK, under the influence of the publisher lobby, has adopted a mandate that prefers to pay for Gold OA, though it also (reluctantly) allows Green OA. Fortunately, however, HEFCE (Higher Education Founding Council of England) has proposed to mandate immediate deposit of all articles as a precondition for eligibility for evaluation in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), an important source of top-sliced research funding for UK universities.

The EU OA mandate should be for Green OA only, with immediate deposit required (and no embargoes allowed to exceed 6 months). No extra money should be provided for Gold OA. Publication costs today are still being covered in full by worldwide institutional journal subscriptions. So paying for Gold OA today entails double-paying: subscriptions plus Gold OA fees (poached from scarce research funds).

Journal subscriptions cannot be canceled until all journal articles are available by some other means. Globally mandating Green OA will provide that other means. Then subscriptions can be cancelled, releasing the institutional funds to pay for Gold OA without having to double pay -- and also driving down the price of Gold OA (currently vastly inflated) to fair, affordable, sustainable levels, by offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide distributed network of Green OA institutional repositories (phasing out the publisher's print and online edition and their costs):

Post-Green Gold OA will be "Fair Gold." Today's pre-emptive, Pre-Green Gold OA is profligate "Fool's Gold."

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

____ (2008) Waking OAs Slumbering Giant: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68

____ (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

____ (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

____ (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.

____ (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine 18: 9/10

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold" D-Lib Magazine 19: 1/2

The Golden Road and the Green Driver

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 13:08:56 +0000

Quote/commentary on the replies of Johannes Fournier [JF] to Richard Poynder in
"The Open Access Interviews: Johannes Fournier, speaking for the Global Research Council."

JF: "Personally, I see one definite advantage of the Golden Road: it brings with it clear regulations as regards re-use. Contrastingly, self-archiving will often not provide the legal basis that allows for specific forms of re-use like text-and data-mining."

This is the classic example of "letting the 'best' become the enemy of the 'better'".

Free-access ("Gratis OA") is within reach (via universal Green OA mandates), free-access-plus-re-use-rights ("Libre OA") is not.

Re-use is use-less without access, and we are nowhere near having free-access to all, most, or much of the journal-article corpus.

Or, to put it another way, the first and foremost "use" is access. So losing more of the precious time (and use) that has already been lost by continuing to over-reach for re-use rights when users don't even grasp the use that is already within reach, is, for want of a better word, a persistent head-shaker in the slow, sad saga of OA.

JF: "My views on self-archiving mandates are grounded in the philosophy of the organisation that employs me. The DFG is self-governed by researchers And researchers dont like to be forced to do things, they like to be supported and encouraged. For that reason, the DFG encourages open access by funding opportunities that facilitate providing research results in open access."

If one thing has been learnt from the slow, sad saga of OA (now at least two decades old) it is that mandating OA works, but encouraging it doesn't.

And neither the DFG nor DFG researchers are any different in this regard. The notion that mandating OA would be an illegal constraint on academic freedom in the DFG remains just as wrong-headed today as it has been since the first day it began to be endlessly parroted -- as wrong-headed as the notion that mandating "publish or perish" (which is, of course, mandated in the DFG, just as it is everywhere else in the research world) would be an illegal constraint on academic freedom in the DFG.

JF: "a dichotomy between Green and Gold tends to obscure the question we really need to ask ourselves: what kind of mechanisms could be designed in order to shift money from acquisition budgets into publication funds? Because the transition to open access will only succeed if we find ways to reinvest those funds which are already used to pay for information provision."

The goal of Open Access to research is Open Access to research. If we had universal OA to research, the "serials crisis" would instantly become a minor matter rather than the life/death issue it is now (Think about it.)

But, yes, universal, sustainable OA will indeed entail a "shift [of] money from acquisition budgets into publication funds." The missing causal component in this irreproachable reasoning, however, is: "what will drive that shift?".

And that missing causal component (again: think about it) is universal mandatory Green OA self-archiving. (I will not, yet again, spell out the causal contingencies. See here and here.)

JF: "the need to buy the subscription content remains. Yet although the transition requires additional money, it might not be necessary to really pay twice: one could operate more economically if the subscription prices for a local library or for a consortium were adjusted to the growth of publication fees. Thats how to avoid so-called double-dipping I know this sounds very simple and might be rather complex in its implementation, especially because the implementation is likely to require that the funding streams are readjusted."

The "implementation" might be rather complex indeed, without mandatory Green OA to drive down costs and force the shift. About as complex as alleviating world hunger, disease or poverty by likewise "readjusting funding streams"...

On "Diamond OA," "Platinum OA," "Titanium OA," and "Overlay-Journal OA," Again

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:33:09 +0000

1. Green/Subscription Co-Existence. Subscriptions might co-exist peacefully with Green OA for some time, even after the world has reached 100% Green.

(As long as mandatory Green OA generates 100% Green OA, this is no problem for OA, and it certainly does ease the hardship of the serials crisis, since with 100% Green, subscriptions become a luxury rather than a painful necessity, as they are now.)

2. The Green/Gold Distinction.The definition of Green and Gold OA is that Green OA is provided by the author and Gold OA is provided by the journal. This makes no reference to journal cost-recovery model. Although most of the top Gold OA journals charge APCs and are not subscription based, the majority of Gold OA journals do not charge APCs (as Peter Suber and others frequently point out).

These Gold OA journals may cover their costs in one of several ways:

(i) Gold OA journals may simply be subscription journals that make their online version OA
(ii) Gold OA journals may be subsidized journals
(iii) Gold OA journals may be volunteer journals where all parties contribute their resources and services gratis
(iv) Gold OA journals may be hybrid subscription/Gold journals that continue to charge subscriptions for non-OA articles but offer the Gold option for an APC by the individual OA article.

All of these are Gold OA (or hybrid) journals.

It would perhaps be feasible to estimate the costs of each kind. But I think it would be a big mistake, and a source of great confusion, if one of these kinds (say, ii, or iii) were dubbed "Platinum."

That would either mean that it was both Gold and Platinum, or it would restrict the meaning of Gold to (i) and (iv), which would redefine terms in wide use for almost a decade now in terms of publication economics rather than in terms of the way they provide OA, as they had been.

(And in that case we would need many more "colours," one for each of (i) - (iv) and any other future cost-recovery model someone proposes (advertising?) -- and then perhaps also different colors for Green (institutional repository deposit, central deposit, home-page deposit, immediate deposit, delayed deposit, OAI-compliant, author-deposited, librarian-deposited, provost-deposited, 3rd-party-deposited, crowd-sourced, e.g. via Mendeley, which some have proposed calling this "Titanium OA").

I don't think this particoloured nomenclature would serve any purpose other than confusion. Green and Gold designate the means by which the OA is provided -- by the author or by the journal. The journal's cost-recovery model is another matter, and should not be colour-coded lest it obscure this fundamental distinction. Ditto for the deposit's locus and manner.

3. "Overlay Journals." I have a longstanding problem with the term "overlay journal" that I have rehearsed before. Overlay of what on what?

The notion of an "overlay journal" was first floated by Ginsparg for Arxiv. Arxiv contains authors' unrefereed, unpublished preprints and then their refereed, published postprints. Ginsparg said that eventually journals could turn into "overlays" on the Arxiv deposits, corresponding roughly to the transition from preprint to postprint. The "overlay" would consist of the peer review, revision, and then the journal title as the "tag" certifying the officially accepted version.

But in that sense, all Gold OA journals are "overlay journals" once they have phased out their print edition:

The "overlay" of the peer review service and then the tagging of the officially accepted version could be over a central repository, over distributed institutional repositories, or over the publsher's (OA) website.

Even a non-OA subscription journal would be an "overlay" journal if it had phased out its print edition: The peer review and certification tag would simply be an "overlay" on an online version, regardless of where it was located, and even regardless of whether it was OA or non-OA. (Once we get this far, we see that even for print journals the peer review and certification is just an "overlay").

What I think this reveals is that in the online era (and especially the OA era) the notion of "overlay" is completely redundant: Once we note that the print edition was just a technical detail of the Gutenberg era, we realize that journal publishing consists (and always implicitly consisted) of two components: access-provision and quality-control/certification (peer-review/editing). The latter is always an "overlay" on the former. And once the print edition is gone, it's an overlay on a digital template that can be here, there or everywhere. It is simply a tagged digital file.

Now my own oft-repeated scenario is that universally mandated Green OA self-archiving will eventually lead to journals abandoning their print versions, then abandoning their digital versions and offloading all access-provision and archiving of the digital version onto the global network of Green OA repositories.

This is, in a sense, an "overlay" scenario. But a much simpler and more natural way of looking at it is that from the multiple functions that journals formerly performed, and the multiple co-bundled products and services they formerly sold via subscription -- print edition, online edition, distribution, storage and peer review/editing -- Green OA will induce a down-sizing to the sole remaining essential function for a peer-reviewed journal in the networked online medium: peer review.

Peer review is hence an unbundled service provided by a post-Green Gold OA journal. I don't think it is realistic to try to assess its costs independently, as a form of journal publication "overlaid" on something or other -- independent of what that something or other is, and how it gets there!

So although it is likely that 100% Green will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable and force a transition to Gold, there may be a long co-existence interregnum in between. (And the main unpredicatable factor determining that will be author/reader habits, including how long they will want to keep paying for print, and how much and how long they value the publisher's version-of-record.)

That's why it is far less important how long 100% Green will co-exist with subscriptions than how long it will take to get to 100% Green (and what's the fastest and surest way to get us there?)!

Berners-Lee, Tim, De Roure, Dave, Harnad, Stevan and Shadbolt, Nigel (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.

Universal Green is the Path From Fool's Gold to Fair Gold

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:30:51 +0000

The price of Gold OA today is absurdly, arbitrarily high.

Most journals (and almost all the top journals) today are subscription journals. That means that whether you pay for hybrid Gold to a subscription journal or for "pure Gold" to a pure-Gold journal, double-payment is going on: subscriptions plus Gold. Institutions have to keep subscribing to the subscription journals their users need over and above whatever is spent for Gold.

In contrast, Green OA self-archiving costs nothing. The publication is already paid for by subscriptions.

So it is foolish and counterproductive to pay for Gold pre-emptively, without first having (effectively) mandated and provided Green.

(That done, people are free to spend their spare cash as they see fit!)

So what RCUK should have done (and I hope still will) is to require that all articles, wherever published, be immediately deposited in their authors' institutional repository -- no exceptions. (If it were up to me, I'd allow no OA embargo; but I can live with embargoes for now -- as long as deposit itself is immediate and the email-eprint-request Button is there, working, during any embargo: Universal immediate-deposit mandates will soon usher in the natural and well-deserved demise of OA embargoes.)

(That done, whether or not authors choose to publish or pay for Gold is left entirely to their free choice.)

Paying instead for Gold, pre-emptively, for the sake of CC-BY re-use rights , today, is worth neither the product paid for (Gold CC-BY) nor, far more importantly, all the Green OA thereby foregone (for the UK as well as for the rest of the world) whilst the UK's ill-fated Gold preference policy marches through the next few years to its inevitable failure.

So it's not about the price of the Gold. It's about the price of failing to grasp the Green that's within immediate reach today -- the Green that will not only pave the way to Gold (and as much CC-BY as users need and authors want to provide), but the same Green whose competitive pressure will -- (here comes my unheeded mantra again) -- drive the price of Gold down to a fair, affordable, sustainable one, by making subscriptions unsustainable, forcing publishers to cut costs by downsizing, jettisoning the print and online editions, offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the Green OA institutional repositories, and converting to Fair-Gold in exchange for the peer review service alone, paid for out of a fraction of the institutional subscription cancelation savings windfall.

The difference between paying for Gold then, post-Green OA -- and hence post-subscriptions and double-payment -- and double-paying for it now, pre-emptively, is the difference between Fair Gold and Fool's-Gold.

Publishers Offering Hybrid Gold Without Allowing Immediate, Unembargoed Green Is Extortion

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:35:14 +0000

RCUK allowing hybrid Gold payment only if the publisher allows the Green option within the RCUK 6-12-24+ embargo limits is no solution for the perverse effects of the new RCUK policy.

The only solution is for RCUK to allow hybrid Gold payment only if the publisher allows an immediate un-embargoed Green option -- and RCUK must leave the choice between Green or Gold options completely up to the author (no "preference," no "decision tree").

A subscription publisher that pits paid hybrid Gold against embargoed Green is practicing extortion, with or without the help of RCUK's perverse policy.

Embargoes are a complicated story that will soon have to be told forthrightly.

Publishers embargo green under the pretext that it's the only way to protect themselves from sure ruin.

That is utter nonsense, of course.

What embargoes really do is to delay (i.e. embargo) the natural, inevitable evolution from subscription publishing to Fair-Gold OA publishing at a fair, affordable, sustainable price by "protecting" double-payment at today's grotesquely inflated Fool's-Gold price.

Embargoes embargo both OA and Fair Gold, in order to lock in current subscription revenues and Fool's Gold.

Think about it.

But the compromise of an immediate-deposit/optional-access (ID/OA) mandate (in which deposit must be immediate but access to the deposit may be embargoed), once globally adopted, will ensure that publishers will be unable to keep embargoing the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, researchers and the tax-paying public much longer.

Whatever else it does, RCUK should immediately and unambiguously adopt (and ensure compliance with) an ID/OA mandate.

Sustainable Post-Green Gold OA

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:25:09 +0000

It is definitely a canard that all, most or even the majority of OA is Gold OA.

It is also definitely untrue that all, most or even the majority of Gold OA is APC-based (Article Processing Charge).

But I think it is also true that the majority of non-APC-based Gold OA journals are not among the top journals in most fields -- the ones most institutions need to subscribe to, and the ones that also tend to be the journals indexed by ISI (and that doesn't just mean preoccupation with journal impact factors: those are also the journals that have established a track-record for high quality peer review standards).

I may be wrong, but I think it is misleading to equate the canard about OA being Gold OA with the misimpression that most Gold OA is APC-based: It's not, but there's more to it than that.

And I also think that although it's true that today's limited and patchy Green OA has not caused journal cancelations, once OA becomes universally mandatory, Green OA will go on to make subscriptions unsustainable, and journals will have to cut costs, downsize, and find another source of revenue to cover the remaining costs. And that other source of revenue will be Gold OA APCs, per paper submitted for peer review, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid out of a portion of each institution's annual windfall savings from the subscription-cancellations induced by universal Green OA.

That will be affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (as compared to today's Fool's Gold OA, double-paid alongside subscriptions at an absurdly inflated price). But I do not believe that either parallel subscription income, alongside universal Green -- or subsidies, or (as some imagine) pure voluntarism and thin air -- will be sustainable ways of paying for the much-reduced but still non-zero cost, per paper submitted, of post-Green peer-reviewed journal publishing.

"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world... At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]
Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on Going for Gold D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

Unilateral Gold is the losing choice in a Prisoners Dilemma. If an institution, funder or country unilaterally mandates Gold OA Publishing (with author publication charges) today, instead of first (effectively) mandating Green OA self-archiving (at no added cost) then that institution/funder/country has made the losing choice in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma (see below):

	Unilateral Green (rest of world):	Unilateral Gold (rest of world):
Unilateral Green:	win/win	win/lose
Unilateral Gold:	lose/win	win/win

RCUK & Gold OA: Counting the Needless Doubled PC/APC Costs

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 15:15:26 +0000

SUMMARY: RCUK's preference for pre-emptively double-paying publishers "Article Processing Costs" (APCs) in exchange for Gold OA today is unnecessary, premature, over-priced, and a waste of scarce UK research funds while UK and worldwide subscriptions are still paying all publication costs (PCs) in full -- and Green OA can hence be provided cost-free. The insistence on CC-BY is likewise premature and unnecessary.

In Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs, Ariadne 70 (2012), Theo Andrew [TA] points out some of the prominent problems with Gold OA costs and RCUK policy, but he misses some of the most important ones:

TA: "RCUK stated that Gold OA is the preferred mechanism of choice to realise open access for outputs that they have funded and have announced the award of block grants to eligible institutions to achieve this aim. Where a Gold OA option is unavailable, Green OA is also acceptable; however, RCUK have indicated that the decision will be ultimately left up to institutions as to which route to take."

Theo states the policy correctly but fails to point out that as it stands, the policy is self-contradictory:

1. RCUK prefers Gold.

2. Choosing Green is acceptable where Gold is unavailable.

3. Institutions are free to choose Green or Gold.

So is or isn't the choice of Green unacceptable where Gold is available? Is or isn't the fundee free to choose Green?

RCUK has since grudgingly conceded, in supplementary statements, that the institution and author are indeed free to choose Green or Gold even when a journal offers both; but RCUK have still stubbornly refused to fix the official policy wording, which continues to state that Green can only be chosen if the journal does not offer Gold, rather than stating, simply and forthrightly:

"Fundees may choose Green or Gold."

(Perhaps this incoherence and ambiguity is left in so as to bias confused authors and institutions toward RCUK's preferred choice [1]...)

TA: "There is a general expectation that over time APCs will settle to a reasonable rate and similarly journal subscriptions will lower to reflect the gradual change in business model from subscription fees to APCs. "

General expectations, and speculations. (Whose? and on what evidence are they based?)

But meanwhile, if the RCUK expectations and speculations are wrong then RCUK authors are being "preferentially" pushed toward paying an unreasonable APC rate (and perhaps also toward renouncing their preferred journals).

(And publishers are being tempted towards offering hybrid Gold OA, at their choice of price, to cash in on the prospect of UK Gold double payment. And the ambiguity about the allowability of Green when hybrid Gold is offered tempts hybrid publishers to adopt and lengthen Green embargoes beyond RCUK's allowable limits, to further increase their chances of collecting a UK Gold APC, over and above their worldwide subscription revenues.)

Nor will subscription prices be lowered because of publishers' UK APC windfalls: Subscriptions are worldwide matters; the UK only produces 6% of worldwide research.

And if the goal of the RCUK policy is to provide Open Access to UK research -- rather than to test Finch/RCUK expectations and speculations at the expense of UK research funds -- then RCUK need only have mandated Green.

But in any case, UK researchers, if they can find their way through the RCUK policy's formal double-talk, can comply by choosing to provide Green OA without paying any APCs.

Moreover, the PCs (sic) (publishing costs) are already being paid, in full -- by (UK and worldwide) subscriptions.

TA: "Much of this transition period to full open access will have to be navigated through uncharted territory, where no one has a clear handle on the costs involved. "

Yes, the transition to Gold OA is indeed uncharted; moreover, the destination is a global one. It is not at all evident that the UK is in a position to steer the world on this uncharted course by unilaterally conducting its expensive and heavy-handed experiment -- or it is merely needlessly wasting a lot of scarce UK research money to double-pay publishers.

The most likely outcome of the UK experiment, however, will be that the vast majority of UK researchers choose Green rather than Gold.

Moreover, if RCUK does not implement a mechanism for monitoring and ensuring compliance with the Green OA option, the RCUK mandate will not even generate Green OA.

(All RCUK compliance considerations are so far focused exclusively on how to spend the Gold funds, and what to do when they run out; not a word has been said yet on how to ensure that Green is actually provided, when chosen.)

TA: "[E]ven with guaranteed funding from HEFCE, and other funders of research, large research-intensive universities will not be able to pay for all of their research to be published under Gold OA. "

And here is an instance of this blinkered focus on how to spend HEFCE Gold: If researchers and their institutions manage to read through the RCUK double-talk, they will see that what they can do if the HEFCE Gold subsidy runs -- or even while the HEFCE funds are still available to double-pay publishers -- is to choose to provide Green OA, at no extra cost in APCs.

(Please recall that the UK and the rest of the world are still paying for publication costs, in full, via subscriptions; and that those subscriptions cannot be cancelled, anywhere, until and unless all of that journal content, from everywhere, is accessible by another means: That other means is Green OA.)

TA: "[There is] a positive correlation between APCs and impact factor"

And a moment's reflection will show that the causality underlying that correlation cannot possibly be that paying more money for APCs raises articles' citation counts! Obviously the journals with the higher impact factors are charging higher APCs.

TA: "[P]ublication in hybrid journals (n=185) was significantly more popular than publishing in full OA journals (n=75). This may be due to the fact that there are more hybrid journals to publish in. the average APC cost for hybrid journals was £1,989.79 compared to £1,128.02 for full OA journals a difference of £861.77."

Of course there are more established journals that have offered hybrid Gold OA as an option (potential double-earners for them, super-easy to offer, at no cost or risk) than there are new start-up Gold OA journals. And of course it is the established journals that have the track-record for quality, rather than new start-ups.

And obviously a track-record for quality is more "popular" with authors than a pig-in-a-poke.

What's not obvious is why any author would prefer to pay their journal-of-choice for hybrid Gold OA, when they can provide Green OA at no cost.

But that is precisely the practice that the RCUK OA policy was meant to have remedied, by mandating Green OA (with an effective system to ensure compliance) rather than throwing money needlessly and pre-emptively at Gold while PCs (sic) are still being paid, in full -- by (UK and worldwide) subscriptions.

TA: "Research-intensive institutions are likely to be hit twice; since they publish more articles and more frequently in higher-impact journals, their share of Gold OA bills is likely to be disproportionally larger."

This is Theo's biggest oversight: Productive institutions are being hit thrice, not twice!

Not only do more productive institutions (1) publish more articles, (2) in higher-quality (hence higher-APC) journals, but, by far the most important of all, they are (3) still paying in full for PCs, via subscriptions, over and above any APCs they are paying for Gold (whether hybrid or "pure"). Indeed all institutions that produce any research at all are double-paying for whatever OA they buy via Gold APCs, high or low.

In a nut-shell: Paying pre-emptively for Gold OA APCs today is unnecessary, premature, over-priced, and a waste of scarce research funds while subscriptions are still paying (in full) for publication costs (PCs).

It is only if and when mandatory Green OA becomes universal worldwide, and makes it possible for institutions to cancel subscriptions by offering an alternative way of accessing all published research, that journals will need to convert to Gold OA -- and institutions can then use their annual windfall subscriptions savings to pay their APCs.

And those post-Green APCs will be far lower than today's Gold APCs; hence they will be affordable and sustainable (rather than bloated arbitrary double-payments, as now). Why? Because the cancelation pressure from global Green OA will force publishers to cut obsolete goods and services and their costs (like the print edition and the publisher PDF) and to offload all access-provision and archiving functions onto the global network of Green OA institutional repositories, leaving nothing to charge APCs for but the management of the peer review (which the peers do, as always, pro bono).

Moreover, the APCs for the post-Green Gold OA peer-review management will be "no-fault", which means that they will be charged uniformly for each actual round of refereeing, for all submitted articles -- regardless of whether the outcome is acceptance, revision/resubmission or acceptance -- rather than bundling the APCs for refereeing the rejected articles into the APC of each accepted article.

Journals will not earn more by trying to charge a higher APC for refereeing: they will earn more by establishing higher quality standards for evaluation (and those may indeed be worth a higher refereeing price). But in any case, refereeing prices will be so low, compared to the windfall subscription cancelation savings, that affordability will no longer be the life/death matter that it is for journal subscription PCs today.

This is all hypothetical, of course (just like RCUK's "general expectations and speculations"). But the fundamental and all-important fact that Green OA is already paid for, in full, by subscriptions today -- and hence can provide OA cost-free -- is not at all hypothetical.

TA: "The causes of significantly higher APC costs for high impact factor and hybrid journals are hard to identify and the suggestions made here are purely speculative..."

The principal reason higher quality journals (which are often, but not always, higher-impact-factor journals) can and do charge higher APCs is obviously that they are the journals that are more in demand, and hence can name their price.

As to the other potential factors:

TA: "[Possible causes of higher APC coats:] Higher rejection rates"

Yes, higher-quality journals reject more articles. Hence, in a pre-Green Gold APC system, they bundle the costs of rejected articles into the costs of accepted ones.

Post-Green, this arbitrary bundling will no longer be necessary; and meanwhile, pre-Green, it is not necessary to pay Gold APCs for OA: Green OA will provide OA at no extra cost in APCs over and above PCs.

TA: "[Possible causes of higher APC coats:] Reprints: various publishers have commented that they maximise their income streams by selling commercial reprints. A fully open licence (for example Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY) would remove this as users are free to distribute and reuse without further payment. "

These days most authors respond to reprint requests with eprints, not hard-copy.

But just as pre-emptive Gold is neither urgent nor necessary, CC-BY is neither urgent nor necessary in most fields. Some fields may indeed need CC-BY more than others, but all fields need free online access: it's much easier and cheaper to provide (and mandate), and yet we do not have even that yet.

Moreover, for online articles, most uses already come with the territory, with Green (Gratis) OA.

TA: "[Possible causes of higher APC coats:] Value: Related to the issue of brand, there is a commonly held view that having high costs for publishing articles in high impact journals is justified as this is a valued service for which researchers are willing to pay a premium."

The value of a journal comes from its track-record for quality, which in turn comes from its peer review standards. Higher quality journals are in higher demand, by both authors and users, so when they double-charge for hybrid Gold, pre-Green, they can ask for higher APCs.

Gold OA APCs post-Green for peer review alone will be so much lower that any price differences will be negligible.

(I also suspect that after the post-Green conversion to universal Gold APCs for peer review alone, it may well turn out to be the lower-quality journals that charge more, for faster, lower-standard refereeing, rather than the higher-quality journals.)

TA: "[Possible causes of higher APC coats:] Commercial publishers may seek to set the APCs at a price point which they think the market can bear. "

But pubishers would have more trouble doing this if it were not for RCUK's double-talk about author choice: It would certainly help keep pre-Green Gold prices down if RCUK fundees had a clear idea that whenever they did not wish to pay (or could not), they could always provide Green for free instead of paying for Gold.

TA: "In theory, researchers can choose exactly where to publish and are free to publish elsewhere if they don't like the prices. "

Better still, they can provide Green and not pay any price at all (if they can see their way through the RCUK red tape obscuring this fact.)

TA: "[W]ith an inelastic market - researchers are unlikely to shop around - and where the costs are sheltered - central funds mean that researchers are not exposed directly to costs - the APCs would remain high because normal market forces would not drive costs down."

If RCUK authors have sense, they will not waste scarce research money on double-paying publishers for Gold OA APCs at all while subscription PCs are still being paid: They will simply provide Green.

TA: "Hybrid journals seem to be more popular venues for Open Access publication"

This was already explained earlier: Established journals are likely to be hybrid Gold rather than pure-Gold start-ups, and they are also likely to be (rightly) in greater demand. -- But there's also no need to double-pay them for hybrid Gold. RCUK fundees can simply choose Green.

TA: "Hybrid journals generally charge more than full OA journals independent of journal impact factor"

That's probably because unlike pure-Gold OA journals, hybrids still have to provide a print edition (with its associated costs); so if they publish N articles per year, they probably charge somewhere around 1/Nth of their total annual subscription PC revenue (or at least 1/Nth of their total annual publication costs) for each hybrid Gold double-payment.

TA: "There is a positive correlation between APC cost and impact factor for both hybrid and full OA journals."

Supply and demand: High quality/impact journals are in greater demand, allowing them to get away with a higher hybrid APC price.

TA: "Open Access policies require rigorous compliance monitoring to be successful, and seem to be more effective when punitive sanctions are imposed."

"Punitive" is overstating it. Mandate effectiveness needs both carrots and sticks, but RCUK has so far only specified how it will monitor Gold compliance. For Green, RCUK would do well to look to the Belgian model.

TA: "Research-intensive institutions are likely to be hit by a cost double whammy; they not only publish more articles, but they also publish them more frequently in high-impact-factor journals."

Triple whammy: Besides any Gold APCs, they also have to keep paying subscription PCs.

FURTHER READING

Gargouri, Y, V Lariviere, Y Gingras, T Brody, L Carr & S Harnad (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness arXiv:1210.8174

Harnad, S (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer Issue

______ (2012) Research Works Act H.R.3699: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton

______ (2012) Hybrid gold open access and the Chesire cats grin: How to repair the new open access policy of RCUK. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog September Issue http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/342582/

______ (2012) There's no justifying RCUK's support for [hybrid] gold open access. Guardian HE Network.

______ (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine 18: (9/10)

______ (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012

______ (2102) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on Going for Gold D-Lib Magazine (forthcoming)

Poynder, Richard (2012) OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy. Open and Shut, July.

Suber, Peter (2012) Tectonic movements toward OA in the UK and Europe Open Access Newsletter 165

Swan, A. and Houghton, J.W. (2012) Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: Further economic modelling, Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group (July 2012).

Houghton Report on OA Cost/Benefits in Germany

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:10:00 +0000

General cost analysis for scholarly communication in Germany: results of the 'Houghton Report' for Germany by John W. Houghton, Berndt Dugall, Steffen Bernius, Julia Krönung, Wolfgang König
Management Summary: Conducted within the project Economic Implications of New Models for Information Supply for Science and Research in Germany, the Houghton Report for Germany provides a general cost and benefit analysis for scientific communication in Germany comparing different scenarios according to their specific costs and explicitly including the German National License Program (NLP).
Basing on the scholarly lifecycle process model outlined by Björk (2007), the study compared the following scenarios according to their accounted costs:
- Traditional subscription publishing,
- Open access publishing (Gold Open Access; refers primarily to journal publishing where access is free of charge to readers, while the authors or funding organisations pay for publication)
- Open Access self-archiving (authors deposit their work in online open access institutional or subject-based repositories, making it freely available to anyone with Internet access; further divided into (i) CGreen Open Access self-archiving operating in parallel with subscription publishing; and (ii) the overlay services model in which self-archiving provides the foundation for overlay services (e.g. peer review, branding and quality control services))
- the NLP.
Within all scenarios, five core activity elements (Fund research and research communication; perform research and communicate the results; publish scientific and scholarly works; facilitate dissemination, retrieval and preservation; study publications and apply the knowledge) were modeled and priced with all their including activities.
Modelling the impacts of an increase in accessibility and efficiency resulting from more open access on returns to R&D over a 20 year period and then comparing costs and benefits, we find that the benefits of open access publishing models are likely to substantially outweigh the costs and, while smaller, the benefits of the German NLP also exceed the costs.
This analysis of the potential benefits of more open access to research findings suggests that different publishing models can make a material difference to the benefits realised, as well as the costs faced. It seems likely that more Open Access would have substantial net benefits in the longer term and, while net benefits may be lower during a transitional period, they are likely to be positive for both author-pays Open Access publishing and the over-lay journals alternatives (Gold Open Access), and for parallel subscription publishing and self-archiving (Green Open Access). The NLP returns substantial benefits and savings at a modest cost, returning one of the highest benefit/cost ratios available from unilateral national policies during a transitional period (second to that of Green Open Access self-archiving). Whether Green Open Access self-archiving in parallel with subscriptions is a sustainable model over the longer term is debateable, and what impact the NLP may have on the take up of Open Access alternatives is also an important consideration. So too is the potential for developments in Open Access or other scholarly publishing business models to significantly change the relative cost-benefit of the NLP over time.
The results are comparable to those of previous studies from the UK and Netherlands. Green Open Access in parallel with the traditional model yields the best benefits/cost ratio. Beside its benefits/cost ratio, the meaningfulness of the NLP is given by its enforceability. The true costs of toll access publishing (beside the buyback of information) is the prohibition of access to research and knowledge for society.

Some Comments:

Like previous Houghton Reports, this one has carefully compared unilateral and global cost/benefits for Gold Open Access Publishing and Green Open Access Self-Archiving. In this case, the options also included the German National License Program (NLP), a negotiated national site license providingGerman researchers with access to most of the journals they need.

As it found in other countries, the Report finds that Green OA self-archiving provides the best benefit/cost ratio in Germany too.

It needs to be noted, however, that among the scenarios compared, only subscription publishing (including licensed subscriptions) and Gold OA publishing are publishing models. Green OA self-archiving is not a substitute publishing model but a system of providing OA under the subscription/licensing model -- by supplementing it with author self-archiving (and with self-archiving mandates adopted by authors' institutions and funders).

"Open Access self-archiving [is] further divided into (i) Green Open Access self-archiving operating in parallel with subscription publishing; and (ii) the overlay services model in which self-archiving provides the foundation for overlay services (e.g. peer review, branding and quality control services))"

Strictly speaking, the "overlay services model" is just another hypothetical Gold OA publishing model, but one in which the Gold OA fee is only paying for the service of peer-review, branding and quality control rather than for the all the rest of the products and services journals that are currently still being co-bundled in journal subscriptions and their costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, hosting, archiving).

This hypothetical Gold OA model is predicated, however, on the assumption that there is universal Green OA self-archiving too, in order to perform the access-provision, hosting and archiving functions of what was formerly co-bundled under the subscription model.

Hence for existing journals the "overlay" Gold OA model is really just the second stage of a 2-stage transition that begins with the Green OA self-archiving access-provision system. In such a transition scenario, although Green OA would begin as a supplement to the subscription model, it would become an essential contributor to the sustainability of the overlay Gold OA model.

"comparing costs and benefits [of] open access on returns to R&D over a 20 year period we find that the benefits of open access publishing models are likely to substantially outweigh the costs and, while smaller, the benefits of the German NLP also exceed the costs."

Again, it needs to be kept in mind that what are being compared are not just independent alternative publishing models, but also supplementary means of providing OA; so in some cases there are some very specific sequential contingencies and interdependencies among these models and scenarios.

"The NLP returns substantial benefits and savings at a modest cost, returning one of the highest benefit/cost ratios available from unilateral national policies during a transitional period (second to that of Green Open Access self-archiving)."

I presume that in considering the costs and benefits of German national licensing the Houghton Report considered both the unilateral German national licensing scenario and the scenario if reciprocated globally. In this regard, it should be noted that OA has both user-end benefits [maximized access] and author-end benefits [maximized impact]: Unilateral national licenses provide only the former, not the latter. Both unilateral Green and unilateral Gold, in contrast, provide only the latter but not the former. So what needs to be taken into account is global scalability and sustainability: How likely are other nations (and institutions) to wish -- and afford - to reciprocate under the various scenarios?"Whether Green Open Access self-archiving in parallel with subscriptions is a sustainable model over the longer term is debatable"
First of all, if subscription publishing itself is not a sustainable model, then of course Green OA self-archiving is not a sustainable supplement either.

But in the hypothetical "overlay" Gold OA model it is being assumed that Green OA self-archiving is indeed sustainable -- as a practice, not as a substitute form of publishing. (It is naive to think of spawning 28,000 brand-new Gold OA peer-reviewed journals in place of the circa 28,000 journals that exist today: A conversion scenario is much more realistic.)

And probably the most relevant sustainability question is not about the sustainability of the practice of Green OA self-archiving (keystrokes and institutional repositories), nor the sustainability of subscription publishing, but the sustainability of subscription publishing in parallel with universal Green OA self-archiving. One natural possibility is that globally mandated Green OA self-archiving will make journal subscriptions unsustainable, inducing a transition in publishing models, with journals, under cancelation pressure, cutting inessential products and services and their costs, and downsizing to what is being here called the "overlay" Gold OA model (though that's probably not the aptest term to describe the outcome), while at the same time releasing the subscription cancelation funds to pay the much lower peer review service fees it entails.
"The results are comparable to those of previous studies from the UK and Netherlands. Green Open Access in parallel with the traditional model yields the best benefits/cost ratio."
And what also need to be taken into account are sequential contingencies and priorities: Green OA self-archiving is not only the cheapest, fastest and surest way to provide OA, but it is also the natural way to induce a subsequent transition to affordable, sustainable Gold OA. But in order to be able to do that, it has to come first.
"Beside its benefits/cost ratio, the meaningfulness of the NLP is given by its enforceability.|
Green OA self-archiving mandates are enforceable too. And global scaleability and sustainability has to be taken into account too, not just local access-provision.
"The true cost of toll access publishing (beside[s] the [cost of the] "buyback of information) is the prohibition of access to research and knowledge for society."
But when toll access publishing is globally supplemented by mandatory Green OA self-archiving, the "prohibition" is pre-empted, at next to no extra cost.

Gold OA Costs: Pre-Green vs. Post-Green

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:20:34 +0000

Claudio Aspesi, BernsteinResearch: We estimate that a full transition to OA could lead to savings in the region of 10-12% of the cost base of a subscription publisher.
Richard Poynder, on the Global Open Access List (GOAL): "The key question: if that estimate is accurate, will those savings be passed on to the research community?"

I think that what Richard is worrying about here is whether the cost-cutting that a transition from subscription publishing to Gold OA publishing would make possible (e.g., curtailing the print edition) would be reflected in lower Gold OA charges to the author/institution or they would simply be absorbed by the publisher (Aspesi's (2012) test case being Elsevier), leaving Gold OA charges higher than they need to be.

I join this speculation and counter-speculation only reluctantly, for two reasons:

(1) I think there are significant transition factors that none of the economic analyses has yet fully taken into account, and hence that the potential savings are still being considerably underestimated.

(2) I also think this focus on predicting the costs of Gold OA just reinforces the excessive preoccupation with estimating the costs and benefits of pre-emptive Gold OA rather than the costs and benefits of OA itself, and what is needed, practically, for facilitating a transition to OA itself, rather than just a direct transition to Gold OA in particular.

Post-Green Gold will cost far less than the pre-emptive pre-Green Gold that the economic analyses keep estimating.

We keep counting the "savings" from generic Gold OA publishing without reckoning how to get there, and whether the transition itself might not be a major determinant in the potential for savings (from OA as well as from Gold OA).

I am not an economist, so I will not try to do anything more than to point out the main factor that I believe the economic analyses are failing to take into account:

If Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories is mandated globally by institutions and funders, this will have two major consequences:

I. First, not only will globally mandated Green OA provide universal OA (and all of its benefits, scientific and economic) alongside subscription publishing, at minimal additional cost (because (a) repositories are relatively cheap to create and maintain, (b) most research-active institutions have created repositories already, and (c) have done so for multiple purposes, OA being only one of them).

II. Second, mandating Green OA globally (unlike pre-emptive Gold OA) also puts competitive pressure on subscription publishers to cut obsolete costs, because the universal availability of the Green OA version makes it much easier for cash-strapped institutions to cancel their journal subscriptions.

Not only can the print edition and its costs be phased out under cancelation pressure from global Green OA, but so can the publisher's online edition and version of record: The worldwide network of Green OA repositories and their many central harvesters are perfectly capable of generating, hosting, archiving and providing access to the version-of-record. No more PDF or XML needed from the publisher; nor archiving; nor access provision; nor marketing; nor fulfillment. Nor any of their associated expenses.

All that's needed from the publisher is the service of managing the peer review (peers review for free) and the certification of its outcome with the journal's title and track-record.

That's post-Green Gold OA publishing. Compared to that, all the economical estimates of savings are under-estimates.

Nor will there be any need -- with post-Green Gold OA -- for mega-publishers (like Elsevier), publishing vast fleets of unrelated journals; nor for mega-journals (like PLoS ONE, now the biggest journal in the world, twice as big as the next-biggest one), publishing vast flocks of unrelated articles. There are many narrow research specialities, a few wider ones, and a few even wider, multidisciplinary ones. They each have their own peers and readerships, and they each need their own peer-reviewed journals; depending on the size of the field, some fields will need several journals, forming a pyramid of quality standards, the most selective (hence smallest) at the top.

There may indeed have been economies of scale for multiple journal production in the Gutenberg days. But in the PostGutenberg era, with post-Green Gold OA journals, providing solely the service of peer review, there will be no need for generic refereeing being mass-marketed by generic editorial assistants for mega-publishers or mega-journals, where no one other than the referee (if competently selected!) knows anything about the subject matter.

So besides scaling down to the post-Green OA essentials, post-Green Gold OA journals will also revert to being the independent, peer-based titles that they were before being jointly bought up for by the post-Maxwellian publisher megalopolies. The online-era economies will come from restoring journals to their own natural speciality scale rather than from agglomerating them into generic multiple money-makers for superfluous middlemen who simply commodify what scholars give away and seek.

Aspesi, C (2012) Reed Elsevier: Transitioning to Open Access - Are the Cost Savings Sufficient to Protect Margins? BernsteinResearch November 26

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2010a) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2010b) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59.

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest. Comments and clarifications on Going for Gold

Open Access and the Prisoner's Dilemma

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 22:46:13 +0000

Unilateral Gold OA instead of Green
is the losing choice
in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma
(think about it!)

	UniGreen (World):	UniGold (World):
UniGreen (UK):	win/win	win/lose
UniGold (UK):	lose/win	win/win

Houghton & Swan 2012:

"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA.

However, we are not in an OA world...

"At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university.

"Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]
Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on Going for Gold

Economic Evidence against Finch Hypothesis on Gold & Green OA Priorities

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 12:58:57 +0000

John Houghton and Alma Swan have published several important and influential economic analyses of the costs and benefits of Open Access (OA), Gold OA publishing and Green OA self-archiving worldwide and for the UK.

The specific implications of their findings for the UK Finch Committee recommendations and RCUK OA Policy as well as for worldwide OA policy are very clearly and explicitly stated in their latest paper (Houghton & Swan 2012):

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012)
Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest
Comments and clarifications on Going for Gold

SUMMARY
      "The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the Finch report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned that there may be some misinterpretation of this work.

      "This short paper sets out the main conclusions of our work, which was designed to explore the overall costs and benefits of Open Access (OA), as well as identify the most cost-effective policy basis for transitioning to OA at national and institutional levels.

      "The main findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world, nor are we likely to be in such a world in the foreseeable future.

      "At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university.

      "Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]

Further References:

Finch, Dame Janet et al (2012) Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications. Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings.

Harnad, S. (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer Issue

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1) 55-59.

Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2010) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus 28 (1) 41-54

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009) Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, Report to The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) by Victoria University & Loughborough University.
See also the related addendum

RCUK (2012) Policy on Access to Research Outputs RCUK Research Councils UK

Swan, A. and Houghton, J.W. (2012) Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: Further economic modelling, Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group (July 2012).

Open Access Via National and Global McNopoly? (Part 2 of 2)

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 20:57:21 +0100

Comments on "Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal"
Richard Poynder's interview of publisher Jan Velterop in Open and Shut

Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part II:
Comments on Jan Velterop's Responses to Poynder Interview

Jan Velterop:Gold is to a large degree developed by new entrants, not the traditional publishers. It should be built up alongside green. That is more likely to force the traditional publishers hands than green alone.

Not if the UK motivates traditional publishers to offer optional hybrid Gold, while continuing to collect subscriptions (and adopting and increasing embargoes on Green). (Jan seems to systematically misunderstand or forget hybrid Gold, thinking instead that the contest is just between pure Gold and subscriptions.)

Jan Velterop:
The New Big Deal unlike the old Big Deal would comprise both a national licensing agreement that gave researchers free-at-the-point-of-use access to all the papers still sitting behind subscription paywalls, plus a national procurement service. The latter would buy free-at-the-point-of-use OA publishing services for UK researchers, allowing them to publish in OA journals without having to foot the bill themselves.

Except if both are being offered by and paid to the very same journals, because subscription journals go hybrid for UK Gold.

Jan Velterop:
Yes, the subscription model as applied in the academic world has the drawback that it's not the user who pays. Neither in his role of reader, nor in his role of author. But that is a very widespread problem with any common resource. Think of the roads, or mail, or rail, or police, or schools, or hospitals.

Managing peer review (provided for free by researchers) is a public good, like roads or hospitals??

Whats wrong with authors paying for the peer review service alone, per paper, once its been unbundled and liberated from the obsolete publishing functions and their costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving) by mandatory Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories -- and then using just a fraction of the institutional savings from cancelling subscriptions to pay for just that peer review alone?

Jan Velterop:
The benefit principle (only those who actually make use of the provision pay) can only apply in a limited way, if at all, for common provisions. There is a perennial tension between common interests and the ego-system

Wheres the tension with no-fault peer review services, paid by authors, out of their institutions subscription savings?

And how is the management of a peer review service (performed by unpaid peers) a common that warrants McNopolistic national licensing instead of just per-piece payment for the service itself? And especially while the service is still co-bundled with a lot of other obscolescent products and services and their costs?

Jan Velterop:
a shift to an author-side payment for the service of arranging peer review and publication is a logical one

The service of arranging peer review I understand.

But whats the rest? Whats Arranging publication? Once a paper has been peer-reviewed, revised and accepted, whats left for publishers to do (for a fee) that authors cant do for free (by depositing the peer-reviewed, revised, accepted paper in their institutional repository)?

And how to get there, from here -- and at a fair price for just peer review alone? Publishers wont unbundle, downsize and renounce revenue until theres no more market for the extras and their costs and Green OA is what will put paid to that market. Pre-emptive Gold payment, while subscriptions are still being paid, will not and especially not hybrid Gold.

Jan Velterop:
Authors publish a given paper in only one journal, and more often than not they have a real choice, at least to submit. This introduces market mechanisms that are lacking in the subscription system

Except that the authors choice is based on the journals quality standards, not its price.

(And what about the journals choice? Unless the peer-review is no-fault, why would a journal choose quality over income especially when readership is no longer a price-factor?)

And wheres the author choice in a national McNopoly?

Jan Velterop:
the benefit principle is possibly not the best model, but the only one that makes OA possible and sustainable. The green model is often portrayed as cheaper, but that's only the case if the subscription model continues to be paid for. And those costs need to be added to the green model, in my view

There is no benefit principle. The publication costs are already being paid today as subscriptions without providing OA. So theres nothing to add but Green OA. And then it is the availability of Green OA that will drive downsizing all the way down to just no-fault peer review alone, at a fair, affordable and sustainable price, paid for on the post- Green Gold OA model, out of the subscription cancellation savings.

Jan Velterop:
Any transition from subscription to OA is hampered by the fact that in one model the research-consumption-intensive institutions pay more; in the other the research-production-intensive institutions. They are rarely the same, but the difference is pretty much ironed out if looked at on a large enough scale a national one

The differences are also ironed out if the price drops so low as to no longer make a difference. No-fault peer review will be uniform and affordable by all (out of a fraction of institutional subscription cancellation savings). The only differences between journals will be (as now) in their subject matter and their quality standards. (Authors, as always, will try to meet the highest standards they can meet; and journals will find their niche in the hierarchy.)

Jan Velterop:
the benefit principle is possibly not the best for academic knowledge sharing the money now used to pay for the system via subscriptions, on the readers side, could be used to pay for the system on the authors side. It comes pretty much from the same ultimate source, after all

But only globally mandated Green OA can force the downsizing to peer review alone, and release the money to pay for it in the form of Gold OA fees. Publishers wont unbundle and downsize on their own, if double-paid for Gold in advance, and on top of subscriptions. They will just do as they are doing now: preserve their current revenue streams, which in turn makes even a transition to Gold OA at par take an eternity, if ever.

Meanwhile, year in and year out, research access and impact are being lost, even though that and not journal economics is the real, urgent, and completely soluble problem, fully within the reach of the research community, and still not grasped (by mandating Green OA).

Jan Velterop:
The potential advantages of a system based on payment for publication, rather than on payment for access, are enormous

The advantages of McNopoly hybrid Gold payment for preserving publishers income streams are evident -- but not the incentive to un-bundle and downsize to fair, no-frills no-fault peer review service costs alone. Nor the publisher incentive for providing global OA any time soon

Jan Velterop:
If done properly, and on a national scale, IDEAL-like arrangements might be possible, covering all institutions in the country, for no more, or even less, than is being paid now.

As already discussed above, that would be a governmental consortium of all UK institutions bargaining with a publisher cartel of all worldwide publishers all in order to preserve a subscription/license-like cartels current grotesquely bloated revenue streams.

And yet Jan agrees that the only essential service at issue is a peer-review service, per individual article.

This sort of national consortial bargaining scheme could, as Ive often said, be used to pre-pay for daily Big Macs for every UK citizen: A national McLicense McNopoly.

Does anyone stop to think why we would never dream of doing that for anything else -- apart from Jan Velterops common goods like roads and hospitals? But is that really the kind of life-and-death common good that managing the peer review service is, too?

And isnt there something to be said for keeping service-providers independent and competing (for submission quality as well as APC quantity), as with other products and services, rather than combined and colluding? (Not to mention that no-fault peer review prevents journals from lowering acceptance standards for more revenue: they get paid regardless of the outcome (accept, revise or reject) and the higher-standard ones will get more authors competing for acceptance.)

Jan Velterop:
For traditional publishers with hybrid options, such a membership and a national licence could be combined. When I was at Springer we had such a combined deal with The Netherlands for a few years. I dont think it is still in place the librarians couldnt reach consensus to extend it. I am in no doubt that a truly national approach could have achieved more lasting success.

Why no doubts, if it did not prove sustainable even in a small country like the Netherlands? (What would be evidence that would make Jan doubt the sustainability of a McNopoly, then, if failure to sustain it is not evidence enough?)

Jan Velterop:
On a world scale the same tension exists between research-consumption-intensive countries and research-production-intensive ones as exists between institutions

But once journal publishing has been downsized by Green OA mandates to just the essentials -- a no-fault peer-review service, per submission, unbundled from the obsolete hold-overs from the print era -- the cost will be so low that the consumption/production difference makes no difference. (My guess is about $100-$200 per round of peer review -- paid for out of a fraction of institutional subscription cancellation savings.)

Jan Velterop:
If indeed the author-side paid OA model introduces a market mechanism, hybrid journals can be as expensive as they wish, but they wont have any OA articles, since those would go to cheaper journals

Does Jan really think that authors would pick journals for their price rather than their quality level? Does he think peer-review standards are generic and uniform? (And has Jan forgotten that with hybrid journals we are talking about the very same journals that authors are publishing in today?)

Jan Velterop:
Hybrid OA doesnt exist. It is just gold OA. OA in a hybrid journal is the same as OA in a fully OA journal for any given article.

Gold OA is indeed Gold OA whether the journal is hybrid or pure (and whether the Gold is Gratis or CC-BY)

But hybrid does not refer to a kind of OA, it refers to a kind of journal: the kind that charges both subscriptions and (optionally) Gold OA fees.

That kind of journal certainly exists; and they certainly can and do double-dip. And thats certainly an expensive way to get (Gratis) Gold OA.

And the Finch/RCUK policy will certainly encourage many if not all journals to go hybrid Gold, and publishers, to maximize their chances of making an extra 6% revenue from the UK, will in turn jack up their Green embargoes past RCUKs permissible limits.

Jan Velterop:
The double-dipping argument is a red herring. There seems to be a notion that subscription prices should be proportional to the number of articles in a journal. How would that work? There are journals with 100 subscribers and journals with thousands of subscribers. There are journals that publish 25 articles a year and journals that publish 25 or more articles a week.

Double-dipping is not about the number articles or subscribers a journal has, but about charging subscriptions and, in addition, charging, per article, for Gold OA. That has nothing to do with number of articles, journals or subscribers: Its simply double-charging.

Jan Velterop:
The cost, and indeed the revenue, of an individual article can only usefully and realistically be expressed as an average, and then probably company-wide. What would otherwise be the situation for a loss-making hybrid journal that receives in one year 10% of its articles as gold, and the next year only 2%? Impossible to work out. A subscription system is inherently lacking in transparency

Nothing of the sort, and extremely simple, for a publisher who really does not want to double-dip, but to give all excess back as a rebate:

Count the total number of articles, N, and the total subscription revenue, S.

From that you get the revenue per article: S/N.

Hybrid Gold OA income is than added to that total revenue (say, at a fee of S/N per article).

That means that for k Gold OA articles, total hybrid journal revenue is S + kS/N.

And if the journal really wants to reduce subscriptions proportionately, at the end of the year, it simply sends a rebate to each subscribing institution:

Suppose there are U subscribing institutions. Each one gets a year-end rebate of kS/UN (regardless of the yearly value of k, S, U or N).

(Alternatively, if the journal wants to give back all of the rebate only to the institutions that actually paid for the extra Gold, dont charge subscribing institutions for Gold OA at all: But that approach shows most clearly why and how this pre-emptive morphing scheme for a transition from subscriptions to hybrid Gold to pure Gold is unscaleable and unsustainable, hence incoherent. It is an Escher impossible figure, either way, because collective subscriptions/memberships including McNopolies -- only make sense for co-bundled incoming content; for individual pieces of outgoing content the peer-review service costs must be paid by the individual piece. There are at least 20,000 research-active institutions on the planet and at least 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, publishing several million individual articles per year. No basis or need --for a pre-emptive cartel/consortium McNopoly.)

Jan Velterop:
If journals should reduce their subscription price when they get a percentage of papers paid for as gold, what should happen if they lose the same percentage (for completely different reasons) of subscriptions?

Less Gold the value of the year-end institutional rebate -- kS/UN is less that year.

Jan Velterop:
What if a journal which decided to go hybrid has published a steady amount of 50 articles a year for ages and all of a sudden attracts an extra 10 gold OA articles? By how much should it reduce its subscription price?

By exactly10S/50U per subscribing institution U.

Jan Velterop:
If an article is worth £2,000 to have published with OA in a full-OA journal, why is it not worth the same £2,000 if published in a hybrid journal?

Simple answer: its not worth the price either way. Both prices are grotesquely inflated. No-fault peer review should cost about $100-200 per round.

Jan Velterop:
In my view, without CC-BY no article is worth the label OA

Fine, let those who want and need CC-BY pay extra for it, if they wish, and can.

But mandate that everyone most provide Gratis Green, whether or not they wish to pay for CC-BY.

Jan Velterop:
Of course, publishers could price themselves out of the market. And then they would simply go under

Not hybrid Gold publishers. They stay in the market no matter what they charge for Gold, as long as subscriptions hold.

But they will probably be careful not to charge more than 1/Nth of their revenue per article to be sure to get the extra RCUK Gold subsidy

Jan Velterop:
Stevans solution has characteristics of having ones cake and eating it. It is saying we want open access but we want the dysfunctional market system of subscriptions to survive, too

Not in the least. Its saying: The cakes paid for already, through subscriptions. Let everyone eat (OA).

And we want OA now, and can provide it via Green OA self-archiving.

If and when that goes on to make subscriptions unsustainable, the dysfunctional market will downsize to peer review service alone, paid for, per article, out of the subscription savings, as post-Green Gold OA, fairly, affordably, scalably and sustainably.

But the purpose of OA is OA access to research for all users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscriptions.

Whether and when Green OA will fix the dysfunctional journal market is a secondary matter. Its sure that 100% Green OA will provide 100% OA, solving the research access problem and thereby making the journal affordability problem a much less important matter.

If global Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, forcing journals to unbundle, cut costs and downsize to peer review alone (as I think it is eventually likely to do) all the better. It will have fixed the dysfunctional market too.

But what is urgently needed now, and already a decade overdue even though it is fully within reach, is 100% OA through global Green OA mandates from institutions and funders.

Jan Velterop: I think it is more likely that [it is not because of publisher lobbying that] the Finch group has adopted the view that gold is indeed the most straightforward, scalable (proportional to the research effort and funding), and particularly because of this proportionality, economically sustainable model. After all, the green model needs subscriptions to be maintained, and the cost of those needs to be taken into account when comparing what is financially the best option for the country.

See above.

But its not just subscription publishers that were doing the lobbying: so were Gold OA publishers (pure and hybrid). And there was also (very valid and timely) lobbying for Open Data (CC-BY) as well, but the latter was unwittingly was conflated by Finch/BIS with the urgent need in some fields only (e.g., crystallography) for CC-BY data-mining rights for journal articles too.

Not only is there no need, but it makes no sense to pay extra for CC-BY gold for all UK journal articles, when most fields only need Gratis OA (which can be provided via cost-free Green). And even for the few fields that do urgently need CC-BY Gold, the UK paying for it pre-emptively will only provide CC-BY for 6% of worldwide journal articles in the field, which is no use when what is needed is data-mining rights for 100% of worldwide output.

Meanwhile, subscriptions are already being paid by the UK and the rest of the world, covering the costs of publication in full and fulsomely. An effective Green OA mandate can provide Gratis OA to 100% of UK output at no extra cost. And if Green OA mandates eventually globalize and make subscriptions unsustainable, it will also provide the means to downsize journal publishing affordably to just the peer review service alone, and will release the subscription funds to pay for it instead of gratuitously paying extra, pre-emptively, today, out of already scarce research funds, as Finch/BIS proposes (under the lobbying of publishers, for which that would of course be the optimal outcome, at the expense of research and researchers).

And that, in turn, will usher in as much CC-BY as users need and authors wish to provide, with no constraints from publishers, embargoes or copyright transfer.

Jan Velterop:
What I genuinely don't understand is the enthusiasm of the publishers for the gold model (apart from the OA publishers, of course). The current per-article revenues are, in my estimate, on average well over $5,000, whereas for APCs it's well less than $3,000. This is revenues, not list-price.

What difference does it make for subscription publishers who go hybrid Gold? Their bets are hedged. Its win/win, thanks to their UK subsidy (and any others who care to pay for hybrid Gold): S + kS/N

Besides, publishers all no doubt see the OA writing on the wall and see hybrid Gold, subsidized by the UK, as their best bet for preserving their current revenue levels. So they characterizing Green OA to Finch/BIS as inadequate and a failure and, for good measure, adding that if Green grows then it will destroy journal publishing as well as peer review. (Odd effect for something inadequate)

Jan Velterop:
Privately, some publishers have expressed concern about gold. The ones I've talked to recently much prefer green on the premise that the take-up is likely to be relatively low, in spite of mandates, and chaotic, and difficult to find, with some articles of a given journal available in OA and others not, and most only after a delay

Stay tuned. You havent seen how effective Green OA mandates work yet. (And their anarchic growth is a strength, not a weakness.)

Besides, one of the reasons mandates need to be strengthened is because many publishers who prefer Gold are at the same time doing their level best to (1) stave off Green mandates with embargoes (making the delay they complain of into a self-fulfilling prophecy) and (2) to talk RCUK out of mandating Green at all (because it is inadequate as well as ruinous)!

But if the inadequacy is that Green OA articles are hard to find, publishers should wake up and smell the coffee (and surf, say, Google Scholar). The only content that is hard to find is the content that is not there because it has not been made Green OA, thanks to publishers efforts to prevent it. It is disingenuous (but rather endearing, because of its utter transparency) for publishers to tout as an inadequacy of Green OA obstacle created by publishers themselves!

Jan Velterop:
National arrangements would deal with Stevans problem of increasing APCs for hybrid journals

My problem is not increasing APCs! Its increasing Green embargoes -- and being forced to pick and pay for Gold (out of scarce research funds) instead of being able to fulfill the RCUK OA mandate with cost-free Green.

Jan Velterop:
[With Gold], the market mechanism is transposed to a national level from an individual scientist level and not inflationary like the traditional subscription system market mechanism [Gold] keeps unwarranted inflationary price increases at bay [UK should] use some of Willetts £10 million transition fund to hire some good negotiators progressively try to offset subscription prices against OA fees so overall costs for UK don't increase

Let Jan keep speculating about economics and McNopolies, and let publishers keep negotiating licenses to their hearts content but let RCUK mandate (gratis) Green so we can have OA in the meanwhile, at no added cost.

Jan Velterop:
I dont buy the argument that a transition to gold OA were possible only if done globally and simultaneously. As you say, that would render it impossible.

A global transition to Gold OA is only possible when institutional subscriptions are no longer being paid for freed up by cancellations to pay for Gold OA, at a fair price.

Pre-emptively subsidizing hybrid Gold OA will not bring any of that about: Mandating Green OA will.

And subscriptions cant be cancelled till all or nearly all journal contents are accessible by another means (Green OA). This is why anarchic growth is possible, and a strength rather than a weakness of mandating Green OA globally.

Jan Velterop:
I dont mind green. What I dont see as remotely realistic is the idea that green should first force the publishers into submission before gold is being built up

And I dont mind voluntary Gold as long as Green is first made mandatory.

Green can and will first provide global OA and thats what this has all been about, for over two long decades now.

Whether and when it makes subscriptions unsustainable, and forces downsizing to peer review and a transition to Gold OA at a fair, affordable, sustainable price is a far less urgent and important matter. Green OA will solve the access problem in the online era. Publishing -- a service profession -- will adapt.

Jan Velterop:
Gold is to a large degree developed by new entrants, not the traditional publishers. It should be built up alongside green. That is more likely to force the traditional publishers hands than green alone.

That would be fine. But RCUK is forcing (hybrid) Gold. And the objective is OA, not Gold.

Jan Velterop:
Green, especially with embargoes, risks setting the subscription system in aspic... The defence of traditional publishers is more likely to consist of an increase of subscription prices to compensate for any loss of subscribers as a result of green. And to refuse articles unless they come with a full copyright transfer as well as to impose long embargoes.

1. Because of the distributed, anarchic nature of the growth of Green article by article and institution by institution rather than journal by journal Green cannot cause cancellations till it is at or near 100% globally.

2. Green can grow regardless of whether publishers raise journal prices.

3. The most effective Green mandate (ID/OA + the Button) is immune to embargoes.

4. If embargoes are lengthened, its more likely to be because of Finch/RCUK hybrid Gold mandates rather than Green mandates.

5. The purpose of Green mandates is not to fix the subscription system but to get all articles deposited immediately, to provide OA as soon as possible, and to provide Almost-OA via the semi-automated email-eprint-request Button during any embargo.

Jan Velterop:
Not being able to persuade RCUK to change its OA policy will be good for OA. And it will only cost more if institutions fail to come together and collectively negotiate what they pay for subscriptions in order to be able to compensate for the cost of APCs

If RCUK is not fixed, it will fail: researcher resistance, resentment and non-compliance.

And the problem is not how good a McNopoly Deal the UK negotiates for hybrid Gold but the negative effects of the RCUK U-Turn on worldwide OA growth, because it provides a gratuitous incentive to publishers to offer hybrid Gold and lengthen Green embargoes.

Jan Velterop:
Of course there is the risk however unlikely that this happens only in the UK and nowhere else in the world. In that case, cuts will have to be made in subscriptions. Whats new?

Nothing new, and not much OA to show for all the time and money that will be lost because of Finch/BIS gullibility and RCUK somnambulism.

Jan Velterop:
Open access is a means to an end, not an end in itself Hence the call for CC-BY, or libre OA if you wish

Actually, OA is an end in itself -- for research and researchers.

But so far we have not even grasped -- though its fully within reach -- the means to the means, which is to mandate Green OA in order to have, at long last, global (Gratis) OA instead of access denial and impact loss. The rest can come only after we have reached at least that.

Jan Velterop: I foresee a situation where a price is being paid for publishing services and keeping the minutes of science, via APCs or even via subscriptions, whereas the knowledge contained in publications is freely and openly shared. Now we see keeping the record and knowledge sharing as being the same, but that need not be the case in the future.

And I foresee researchers doing research using the full resources of the online medium (which is perfectly capable of storing and preserving its own minutes), with peer-reviewed research openly accessible to all users, and what used to be called publishing now reduced to the management of the peer-review service -- with that, and only that, being paid for via post-Green Gold OA fees.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed). The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

Harnad, S (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer

Harnad, S (2012) Hybrid gold open access and the Chesire cats grin: How to repair the new open access policy of RCUK. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog September Issue

Harnad, S (2012) There's no justifying RCUK's support for [hybrid] gold open access. Guardian HE Network.

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012

Harnad, S (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012

Harnad, S (2102) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

Swan, Alma & Houghton, John (2012) Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: further economic modelling. Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group. JISC Information Environment Repository.

Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part I:
Comments on Richard Poynders Overview of Velterop Interview

Open Access Via National and Global McNopoly? (Part 1 of 2)

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 17:14:39 +0100

Comments on "Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal"
Richard Poynder's interview of publisher Jan Velterop in Open and Shut

Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part I:
Comments on Richard Poynders Overview of Velterop Interview

Richard Poynder:
The scholarly communication system has been in serious difficulties for several decades now, a problem generally referred to as the serials crisis. the price of scholarly journals has consistently risen faster than the consumer price index the Big Deal [single or multiple institutions committing to continue to pay single or multiple publishers the asking price for site licenses to all the journals to which they already subscribe in exchange for co-bundled access to all the journals to which they do not subscribe, at no extra cost] is by its very nature monopolistic it locks libraries into an expensive and inflexible system that they can only extricate themselves from with great difficulty. Keen to find an alternative approach, the research community began to take an interest in Open Access (OA)."

It is important to keep in mind throughout this discussion that the origin and objective of the OA movement was not the serials crisis but the research accessibility problem: making peer-reviewed research accessible to all users, not just to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published. The two problems are related, but they are not the same problem, and the solution to one is not necessarily a solution to the other.

Richard Poynder:
The Big Deal meant that anyone working in a higher education (HE) institution in the UK got free-at-the-point-of-use access to APs entire journal portfolio

What about UK users not working at a HE institution?

Richard Poynder:
most subsequent Big Deals were signed not with national funding bodies but with library consortia

What about UK users other than those at consortial institutions?

Richard Poynder:
to find an alternative approach [to the serials crisis], the research community began to take an interest in Open Access (OA). If papers were made freely available on the Internet, they reasoned, not only would researchers have access to everything they needed, but self-archiving (or green OA as it later became known) might ease the affordability problem, by enabling libraries to begin to cancel some of their journal subscriptions

OA self-archiving was born not as an alternative approach to the serials crisis but as a natural way to use the new online medium to maximize research usage and access. (But, yes, the thought was and is that it will eventually solve the serials crisis too.)

Richard Poynder:
bulk purchase membership schemes that OA publishers like BioMed Central and Springer began to offer… bought the institutions researchers the right to publish in OA journals without having to pay on a per-article basis

This is not the same deal when journal is pure Gold and hybrid Gold.

Pure Gold is pure membership (how many peer-reviewed articles per journal per institution are publishable per year, per membership deal? is acceptance guaranteed? how many journals in the deal?).

Hybrid Gold is consortial subscription membership (incoming), plus pay-to-publish membership (outgoing) (raising the same questions as above).

Richard Poynder:
[there was the] belief that OA publishing would impose price restraint on publishers with author-pays-OA, the buying decision is made by researchers themselves, not by an intermediary. And since authors are able to publish in a variety of different journals, they can shop around

Authors pay, but journals accept/reject. Author-pays creates conflict of interest for the journal (quality standards versus revenue). And authors dont want the cheapest journal but the highest quality journal. (There is a solution no-fault peer review but it can only work after publishing has been forced by global Green OA to downsize to just the peer-review service alone.)

Richard Poynder:
Membership schemes also tend to push authors in the direction of those publishers that their library has a publishing contract with, thus limiting choice

Correct. And this choice constraint is perhaps even worse for authors own outgoing articles than for their incoming reading matter.

Richard Poynder:
[With] gold OA funds the money does not come from the authors own research budget, so price is unlikely to be a deciding factor when an author is looking for an OA journal in which to publish

Why should it be? Shouldnt quality standards be the deciding factor? And why should publication be paid out of a researchers (scarce) research funds? (After Green OA has become universal, the no-fault peer review service can be paid out of a fraction of the institutions annual subscription cancelation windfall savings.)

Richard Poynder:
as self-archiving took off, subscription publishers soon concluded that it posed a serious threat to their revenues. And insisted on self-archiving embargoes

Under researcher pressure for OA (e.g., PLoS petition in 2001, BOAI, Berlin Declaration), 60% of publishers (including most of the top publishers) endorsed immediate, no-embargo Green OA.

(But I dont doubt that, unless fixed, the recent Finch/RCUK U-turn, the result of successful publisher lobbying, will motivate publishers to adopt and lengthen embargoes and accept still more UK money instead for hybrid Gold OA)

Richard Poynder:
hybrid OA allows publishers to double dip i.e. earn revenues from both APCs and subscriptions.

If the UK paid publishers extra fees for Gold OA to all of its research output, that would increase publishers total subscription revenues by about 6%, and then the UK would get back 6% of that extra 6% as a rebate on their contribution to lowering worldwide subscription fees by 6%.

But lets suppose instead that -- in a remarkable feat of collective vendor-cartel vs. consumer-consortium bargaining -- a cartel of all the worlds publishers (now all transformed into hybrid subscription/Gold publishers + pure Gold publishers) -- faithfully converted every penny of UK Gold revenue into UK subscription reductions for a consortium of all UK HE institutions. This would be tantamount to giving UK HE subscribers the bonus of hybrid Gold OA to their own outgoing research output at the same price that they are currently paying via subscriptions for incoming research output from the UK [6%] and the rest of the world [94%].

Here are some questions to ask about the probability, desirability, sustainability and scalability of such an arrangement:

Probability: Can the UK government negotiate on behalf of all potential UK users of research journals not just HE institutions, but industries, big and small, public and private libraries, etc. using UK tax revenues ear-marked for research, in order to ensure that they all have not only Gold OA to UK research output, but also subscription access to non-UK output (94%)?

And once thats settled, can and would all the worlds publishers, Gold and Hybrid, collaborate in such a cartel? (Though long urged by journal publishers, this sort of McNopolistic collective producer-cartel/consumer-consortium bargaining is not notably successful in the case of global necessities such as water, food and oil -- and those are not even hybrid otherwise surely McDonalds and Burger King would surely get into the whopping national prepaid Big Mac licensing business too.)

Desirability: Do we really want to lock in publishers current revenue streams in exchange for Gold OA? Are we so sure publishers are providing anywhere near fair value for fair cost today, with their current prices and current co-bundled print-era products and services (text-production, print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving and peer review)? Do we want to lock in all those add-ons and price-tags year upon year, inescapably, with no hope of phasing out the inessentials, cost-cutting and downsizing?

As you read on, below, keep in mind that in promoting this Whopping New Deal -- Cartel/Consortial McLicense McNopoly bargaining -- Jan Velterop seems to agree (I'm not sure) that managing peer review is really all thats left that publishers need to do in the OA era:

Is managing peer review for (say) 200,000 outgoing UK paper submissions per year (peers review for free) really worth locking in what the UK is currently paying for incoming subscriptions in perpetuo?

Because thats what a Gold OA McNopoly would be, if peer review services were bought and sold nationally en bloc, instead of per individual paper, at a fair per-paper price for just the peer review management alone.

And the difference in price is roughly of the order of $1000-$5000+ per paper (as co-bundled today) versus $100-$200 per paper, per round of review, unbundled: in other words, a difference of the order of more than 10/1.

(An editor picks the referees; software plus an editorial assistant manage the review; the editor does the disposition once the reviews are received. -- I know how it goes: I edited a rigorously peer-reviewed journal for a quarter century.)

Does this sort of simple per-paper service transaction really warrant a national (or global) McNopoly, locking in all the obsolete co-bundled extras, and their prices?

Sustainability: Would paying a UK collective cartel/consortial McNopoly McLicense in exchange for Gold OA be stable year after year, with waxing and waning national finances? Subscriptions can be cancelled by the piece (journal), but wheres the bargaining power in a McNopoly? Lower your price or Ill revert to subscriptions (and lose Gold OA)?

Scalability: Is it likely that other countries have the finances (or desire) to follow suit, and make similar national McNopoly arrangements too? Would little Belgium willingly lock itself into its current total national subscription outlay, in exchange for Gold OA for its outgoing (say) 20,000 papers a year? (Remember that the ratio between the print-subscription era cost and the downsized peer-review-alone cost is probably over 10/1.)

Richard Poynder:
As a result, rather than reducing costs, Finch estimated that its proposal would require an additional £50-60 million a year, £38m of which would be needed to pay APCs

Correct. But the worst of it is not that the UK pays more in exchange for making UK research Gold OA, instead of just mandating Green OA at no extra cost, but that the RCUK policy incentivizes publishers worldwide to offer hybrid Gold OA and increase their Green OA embargoes, thereby reducing Green Open Access to the rest of the worlds research (94%).

Richard Poynder:
as directed by Finch, RCUK will require that authors prioritise gold over green, with institutional repositories relegated to the role of preservation and data archiving

Not quite. Finch declared the latter (i.e., that Green is just good for preservation, not for OA), but RCUK still allow Green for OA if the chosen journal does not offer Gold.

(Mark Thorleys clarification of the intended meaning of the where a publisher does not offer Gold journal must allow [Green] wording as meaning You may choose Gold or Green, does suggest that fundees may freely choose Gold or Green though it is not at all clear why RCUK does not wish to fix the wording so that it says so.)

Richard Poynder:
Nevertheless, [RCUK] has refused to change the wording of its policy, which clearly states that researchers must prefer gold over green

And that, in itself, is a curious fact, especially if, as Mark Thorley keeps repeating, the wording actually means that researchers are free to pick either gold or green. (Ambivalence? Feeling the pinch from Finch or rather, the bite from BIS?)

Richard Poynder:
With Finch/RCUK, says Harnad, publishers get their grotesquely inflated revenues, and the world gets gold OA in exchange

Gold OA to UK research, that is (6%)

Richard Poynder:
The question is whether at some point this could morph into Velterops New Big Deal and, if it did, whether such an approach would solve the affordability problem.

Hybrid Gold can certainly morph into pure Gold, at the same total price as current subscriptions. (But the remaining 94% of the world is not going to follow the UKs lead in double-paying for it pre-emptively instead of mandating Green, and letting that provide OA, and perhaps eventually also forcing publishers to downsize to peer review service alone, paid, per submission, via fair and affordable Gold.)

Richard Poynder:
“…UCLs David Price would like to see a kind of Big Deal approach used to help the transition to OA what he calls a true national licence

A UK national hybrid license (subscription + Gold) cannot possibly give the UK Gold OA to the UKs own 6% output (plus subscription access to the rest of the worlds 94% output) for less than or even the same amount as the UK is paying for subscriptions today. Think it through:

If worldwide publishers subscription revenue were increased by 6% over what it is now, through hybrid Gold payment, and publishers were to give it all back to the UK in the form of a subscription rebate, then that would be exactly the same as saying We will give you Gold OA for free, over and above what you are already paying us for subscriptions. So if hybrid publishers do give back any of their 6% windfall, it is unlikely to be right back to the UK, but distributed to subscribers worldwide. The UK only gets back about 6% of that 6% (assuming the UKs buy-in costs are about the same as its share of total research output).

So I think David Price should not be advocating a national hybrid Gold license but a national Green OA mandate (by RCUK, as well as by UK universities).

(And the mandatory deposit locus should be each institutions repository -- where compliance can be verified by the institution, and the institution can showcase its own research assets -- not in some central institution-external repository.)

David Price (in interview with Richard Poynder):
to help the UK transition to OA For an agreed amount, publishers allow access to their content by all sectors in society

Not quite. A national hybrid Gold license would mean the whole world gets OA to the UKs 6% output, fine.

But then what about access to all the rest of publishers content for all sectors in UK society? How does that work? Free UK-wide online access to all content (both the UKs 6% Gold and the rest of the worlds 94% subscription content?)?

More likely, this would just mean that UK HE institutions plus designated industrial user sites and libraries get subscription access to the rest of the worlds 94% output, at about the same cost to the UK as the cost of the UKs current subscription costs, plus the Gold OA surcharge (say, 6% of publishers current worldwide subscription revenue, minus a rebate to the UK of 6% of 6%).

Thats a pricey transition for the UK in exchange for OA to its own research output compared to just mandating Green OA at no added cost -- but its also an unaffordable, unscalable solution for the rest of the world (and probably not sustainable in the UK either). So its certainly not a transition scenario for global OA, but rather an obstacle to it (inducing publishers to offer hybrid Gold and to lengthen their Green embargoes).

Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part II:
Comments on Jan Velterop's Responses to Poynder Interview

The UK's 6% Factor and the "Gold Trumps Green" Principle: Perverse Effects

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 21:05:19 +0100

[Note: I am using very approximate estimates here, but, within an order of magnitude, they give a much-needed sense of the proportions, if not the exact amounts involved.]

If the Finch/RCUK OA Policy is not revised, worldwide publishers' subscription revenues stand to increase by c. 6% (the approximate UK percentage of all annual peer-reviewed research published) over and above current global subscription revenues, at the expense of the UK taxpayer and UK research, in exchange for Gold OA to UK research output.

(This essentially amounts to the author's buying back a copyright license from a hybrid subscription/Gold publisher, in exchange for c. $1000 per article for c. 60,000* articles per year, while letting the publisher continue to sell the article as part of the journal's subscription content. The c. $1000 per article hybrid Gold OA fee is approximately 1/Nth of total worldwide subscription revenue for journals publishing N articles per year.)

I don't know how much the UK as a whole is paying currently for subscriptions. If the UK publishes 6% of worldwide research, perhaps we can assume it pays 6% of publishers' worldwide subscription revenues (if the UK consumes about the same amount as it produces), hence another 60 million dollars.

If so, that means that paying pre-emptively for Gold OA for all UK research output approximately doubles what the UK is paying for publication. (And even if publishers make good on their promise to translate their double-dipping hybrid Gold revenues into proportionate reductions in their worldwide subscription rates, for the UK that only means a 6% rebate on the 100% surcharge that the UK alone pays to make its own output Gold OA -- i.e., $36 million back on a total UK expenditure of $60 million for subscriptions + $60 million for pre-emptive Gold OA license buy-backs.)

And it gets worse: The UK can't cancel its subscriptions, because UK researchers still need access to the other 94% of annual research worldwide.

Nor is that all: By (1) giving subscription publishers the incentive to offer a hybrid Gold OA option (in exchange for 6% more revenue at virtually no added cost to the publisher, since CC-BY is simply a license!) as well as (2) giving subscription publishers the incentive to increase the embargo length on the Green option (cost-free for authors), Finch/RCUK's "Gold trumps Green" policy also denies UK (and worldwide) researchers access to what could have been Green OA research from the rest of the world (94%) for those institutions and individuals in the UK and worldwide who cannot afford subscription access to the journal in which articles they may need are published.

And the perverse effects of RCUK's "Gold trumps Green" policy also make it harder for institutions and funders worldwide to adopt Green OA mandates, thereby reducing the potential for worldwide Green OA (which is to say, worldwide OA) still further.

And that suits subscription publishers just fine! It's win/win for them, just so long as funders and institutions don't mandate Green.

That's why subscription publishers lobbied so hard for the Finch/RCUK outcome -- and applauded it as a step in the right direction when it was announced.

What is more of a head-shaker is that "pure" Gold OA publishers lobbied for "Gold trumps Green" too, hoping it would drive more business their way (or, to be fairer, hoping it would force subscription publishers to convert to pure Gold).

But the only thing the promise of Finch/RCUK's Grand Gold Subsidy (6%) actually does is inspire subscription publishers to create a hybrid Gold option (cost-free to them) and to stretch embargoes beyond RCUK's allowable limits, to make sure RCUK authors who wish to keep publishing with them pick and pay for the Gold option (whether or not RCUK gives them enough of the funds BIS co-opted from the UK research budget to pay for it all), rather than the cost-free Green option (which Gold trumps).

Ceterum censeo...: But all these perverse effects can be eliminated by simply striking 9 words from the RCUK policy, making the Gold and Green options equally permissible ways of complying.

Apart from that, what is needed is to shore up the RCUK mandate's compliance verification mechanism. See: "United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak" (appears in D-Lib tomorrow, Friday, September 14).

*The percentage of all peer-reviewed journals indexed by Ulrichs that are "pure" (not hybrid) Gold is about 13%, using the numbers in DOAJ. An analysis of the Thomson-Reuters-ISI subset of all articles published in 2007-2011 with a UK affiliation for the first author yielded 324,587 UK articles (65K/year) of which 13,260 articles (3K/year) (4%) were published in pure Gold OA journals -- i.e., not double-dipping hybrid subscription Gold journals.