Open Access Archivangelism - Publishing Reform

Pre Green-OA Fool's Gold vs. Post Green-OA Fair Gold

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 26 May 2013 19:11:00 +0100

Comment on Richard Poynder's "The UKs Open Access Policy: Controversy Continues":

Yes, the Finch/RCUK policy has had its predictable perverse effects:

1. sustaining arbitrary, bloated Gold OA fees
2. wasting scarce research funds
3. double-paying publishers [subscriptions plus Gold]
4. handing subscription publishers a hybrid-gold-mine
5. enabling hybrid publishers to double-dip
6. abrogating authors' freedom of journal-choice [based on cost-recovery model, embargo or licence instead of on quality]
7. imposing re-mix licenses that many authors don't want and most users and fields don't need
8. inspiring subscription publishers to adopt and lengthen Green OA embargoes [to maxmize hybrid-gold revenues]
9. handicapping Green OA mandates worldwide [by incentivizing embargoes]
10. allowing journal-fleet publishers to confuse and exploit institutions and authors even more

But the solution is also there (as already adopted in Francophone Belgium and proposed by the UKèsHEFCE for REF):

a. funders and institutions mandate immediate-deposit
b. of the peer-reviewed final draft
c. in the author's institutional repository
d. immediately upon acceptance for publication
e. whether journal is subscription or Gold
f. whether access to the deposit is immedate-OA or embargoed
g. whether license is transfered, retained or CC-BY;
h. institutions implement repository's facilitated email eprint request Button;
i. institutions designate immediate-deposit the mechanism for submitting publications for research performance assessment;
j. institutions monitor and ensure immediate-deposit mandate compliance

This policy restores author choice, moots publisher embargoes, makes Gold and CC-BY completely optional, provides the incentive for author compliance and the natural institutional mechanism for verifying it, consolidates funder and institutional mandates; hastens the natural death of OA embargoes, the onset of universal Green OA, and the resultant institutional subscription cancellations, journal downsizing and transition to Fair-Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable price, paid out of institutional subscription cancellation savings instead of over-priced, double-paid, double-dipped Fool's-Gold. And of course Fair-Gold OA will license all the re-use rights users need and authors want to allow.

Why Green OA Needs To Come Before Gold OA: A Reply to Jan Velterop

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 20:45:02 +0000

Jan Velterop wrote:

(1) Stevan trades off expected speed of achieving OA against quality of the resulting OA. It's his right to do that. I just point out that that's what it is. That's my right. He calls it 'deprecating green OA'; I prefer to call it 'comparing outcome'.

(2) My 'jumping with a closed parachute' is not in any way a criticism of green OA or advocating green OA. It is a criticism of presenting green OA (in which the publication of articles is being paid for by subscriptions) as the only way until all scholarly literature is available as green OA, and only then considering alternatives to the subscription system. I consider that deeply unrealistic, utterly unfeasible and not viable, and I favour developing gold OA as a replacement of the subscription system alongside green OA, gradually replacing the subscription system.

(3) The agreement reached at the BOAI to pursue both strategies (later called green and gold) proved short-lived. This has been most unfortunate, in my view. Stevan has introduced the idea that gold and green are rivalrous. They aren't. They both contribute to growing OA. They both come with a transition price. In one case the price is lower quality of the resulting OA; in the other it is money.

TRADING OFF -- OR OFF-LOADING TRADE?
Green vs. Gold is not a question of rivalry, it's a question of priority.

The twin reasons why Green has to come first are very simple: (i) Gold OA journal publishing is vastly over-priced today and (ii) the money to pay for Gold OA (even if it is downsized to a fair, affordable price) is still locked into institutional journal subscriptions.

Green OA needs to come first in order to fix both these problems:

Over and above providing 100% OA (which is the primary objective of the OA movement), Green OA (which is now only at 25% when unmandated, but can be increased to 100% when mandated by institutions and funders) also provides the way both to (ii) release the subscription money to pay for Gold OA and to (ii) force journals to cut costs and downsize to a fair, affordable, sustainable price for Gold OA (namely, the price of managing peer review alone, as a per-review (sic) service: no more print edition; no more online edition; all access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories):

Institutions can only cancel subscriptions when the subscribed content is available as Green OA. Until then they can only double-pay (whether for hybrid subscription/Gold journals or for subscription journals plus Gold journals).

And publishers will not unbundle and cut costs to the minimum (peer review service alone, nothing else) until cancellations force them to do so.

And (before you say it): If a new Gold OA journal enters the market today with a truly rock-bottom price, for the peer-review service alone, the money to pay for it is still over and above what is being paid for subscriptions today, because the subscriptions cannot be cancelled until most journals (or at least the most important ones) likewise downsize to the bare essentials.

And most journals are not downsizing to the bare essentials.

And institutions and funders cannot make journals downsize.

All institutions and funders can do is pay them even more than what they are paying them already (which is exactly what the publisher lobby has managed to persuade the UK and the Finch Committee to do).

I do not call that a "parachute" toward a "soft landing": I call it good publisher PR, to preserve their bottom-lines. And for most institutions and funders, it not only costs more money, but it is even more unaffordable and unsustainable than the serials status-quo today (which is reputedly in crisis).

The promise from hybrid Gold publishers to cut subscription costs in proportion to growth in Gold uptake revenues, even if kept, is unaffordable, because it involves first paying more, in advance; and all it does is lock in the current status quo insofar as total publisher revenue is concerned, in exchange for OA that researchers can already provide for themselves via Green, since publication and its costs are already being fully paid for -- via subscriptions.

Nor is "price competition" the corrective: Authors don't pick journals for their price but for their quality standards, which means their peer-review standards. It would be nothing short of grotesque to imagine that it should be otherwise (think about it!).

The corrective is global Green OA mandates: That -- and not "price competition" between Gold OA journals -- will see to it that the huge, unnecessary overlay of commercially co-bundled products and services that scholarly journal publishing inherited from the Gutenberg (and Robert-Maxwell) era is phased out and scaled down, at long last, to the only thing that scholars and scientists really still want and need in the online era, which is a reliable peer review service, provided by a hierarchy of journals, in different fields, each with its own established track record for quality -- hence selectivity -- at the various quality levels required by the field.

So what's at issue is not a trade-off of "speed" vs. "quality" (whether peer review quality, or re-use/text-mining rights) at all, but a trade-off of speed vs. the status quo.

And yes, that's speed, in the first instance, toward 100% free online access (Gratis OA) -- of which, let us remind ourselves, we currently have only about 25% via Green and maybe another 12% via Gold -- because that is what is within immediate reach (although we have kept failing to grasp it for over a decade).

The rest of the "quality" -- Gold OA and Libre OA -- will come once we have 100% Green OA, and publishers are forced (by Green-OA enabled subscription cancelations, making subscriptions no loner sustainable) to downsize and convert to Gold.

But not if we keep playing the snail's-pace game of double-paying pre-emptively for Gold while research access and impact keeping being lost, year upon year -- all in order to cushion the landing for the only ones that are comfortable with the status quo (and in no hurry!): toll-access publishers.

And please let's stop solemnly invoking the BOAI as a justification for continuing this no-sum, no-win game of no-OA unless you double-pay.

Publication costs are being paid, in full (and fulsomely) today. What's missing is not more revenue for publishers, but OA.

And Green OA mandates will provide it.

The rest will take care of itself, as a natural process of adaptation, by the publishing trade, to the new reality of global Green OA.

Stevan Harnad

Jubilatio Praecox

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:11:58 +0100

Eric Van de Velde: "Green Open Access delivers the immediate benefit of access. Proponents argue it will also, over time, fundamentally change the scholarly-communication market. The twenty-year HEP record lends support to the belief that Green Open Access has a moderating influence: HEP journals are priced at more reasonable levels than other disciplines. However, the HEP record thus far does not support the notion that Green Open Access creates significant change"

Twenty years of Open Access in HEP is not a significant change?

Eric Van de Velde: "If SCOAP³ proves sustainable, it will become the de-facto sponsor and manager of all HEP publishing world-wide. It will create a barrier-free open-access system of refereed articles produced by professional publishers. This is an improvement over arXiv, which contains mostly author-formatted material."

Committing a worldwide institutional consortium into paying roughly the same as what it's paying now, in exchange for OA to publisher PDF instead of author versions?

"Those who observe with scientific detachment merely note that, after twenty years of 100% Green Open Access, the HEP establishment really wants Gold Open Access."

With still more detachment, it sounds as if HEP researchers really wanted -- and gave themselves-- a barrier-free open-access system of refereed articles 20 years ago.

The ones that seems to "really want" Gold OA are a consortium of institutional libraries

Have patience. HEP researchers provided Green OA unmandated. Once the rest of the world's researchers provide Green OA in response to mandates from their institutions and funders, the "market" changes many desire will follow:

What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA).

OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs.

With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal).

Then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals.

As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. So if and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.

And, yes, SCOAP3 is indeed pointless pre-emptive lock-in of the status quo (engineered by some academics and some libraries -- certainly not by "academia") in a field (HEP) that already has Green OA, unmandated, and could instead be doing so much more to support and promote mandated Green OA in all other disciplines.

But it's still far from over. Green OA mandates are imminent in the EU, Australia, and perhaps at long last in the US. And RCUK may still fix its policy into a workable one, despite the Finch Fiasco.

Green OA does not change the market, directly -- and certainly not until it's universal. But universal Green OA will certainly make journal affordability no longer the life-or-death matter it is now. (Think about it.)

SCOAP3 Gold OA "Membership": Unnecessary, Unscalable & Unsustainable

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 14:13:03 +0100

1. High Energy Physics (HEP) already has close to 100% Open Access (OA): Authors have been self-archiving their articles in Arxiv (both before and after peer review) since 1991 ("Green OA").

2. Hence SCOAP3 is just substituting the payment of consortial "membership" fees for publishing outgoing articles in place of the payment of individual institutional subscription fees for accessing incoming articles in exchange for an OA from its publisher ("Gold OA") that HEP already had from self-archiving (Green OA).

3. As such, SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription price agreement, except that it is inherently unstable, because once all journal content is Gold OA, non-members are free-riders, and members can cancel if they feel a budget crunch.

4. Nor does membership scale to other disciplines.

5. High Energy Physics would have done global Open Access a better service if it had put its full weight behind promoting (Green OA) mandates to self-archive by institutions and research funders in all other disciplines.

6. The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions.

7. Institutions can then cancel subscriptions and pay for peer review service alone, per individual paper, out of a portion of their windfall cancelation savings, instead of en bloc, in an unstable (and overpriced) consortial "membership."

Paralogic

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:47:33 +0100

Jan Velterop, OA advocate, wrote in The Parachute:
"The 'sin' that RCUK, Finch and the Wellcome Trust committed is that they didn't formulate their policies according to strict Harnadian orthodoxy. It's not that they forbid Harnadian OA (a.k.a. 'green'). It is that they see the 'gold' route to OA as worthy of support as well. Harnad, as arbiter of Harnadian OA (he has acolytes), would like to see funder and institutional OA policies focus entirely and only on Harnadian OA, and would want them, to all intents and purposed, forbid the 'gold' route... It is the equivalent of opening the parachute only a split second before hitting the ground. "

Peter Suber:

"In general I'm with Stevan on this. The RCUK policy and the Finch recommendations fail to take good advantage of green OA. Like Stevan, I initially overestimated the role of green in the RCUK policy, but in conversation with the RCUK have come to a better understanding. In various blog posts since the two documents were released, I've criticized the under-reliance on green. I'm doing so again, more formally, in a forthcoming editorial in a major journal. I'm also writing up my views at greater length for the September issue of my newsletter (SPARC Open Access Newsletter).

"For more background, I've argued for years that green and gold are complementary; I have a whole chapter on this in my new book . So we want both. But there are better and worse ways to combine them. Basically the RCUK and Finch Group give green a secondary or minimal role, and fail to take advantage of its ability to assure a fast and inexpensive transition to OA."

Stevan Harnad:

"If the UK first... clearly and unambiguously mandates Green OA for all UK research output then it is welcome to throw all the cash it has to spare on also subsidizing Gold OA if it so wishes. --- But not instead."
Finch on Green:
"The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories [so] the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should [instead] be developed [to] play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation [no mention of Green OA]"

Research Councils UK Policy on Access to Research Outputs:
[P]apers funded by the Research Councils must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy

The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if the journal provides [Gold]

The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access:

Where a publisher does not offer [Gold], the journal must allow [Green]

The crucial contingency, and the one that caused all the confusion about whether or not RCUK is truly continuing "to support a mixed approach" is that if a journal offers Gold, RCUK fundees must choose Gold. If so, the only thing that any subscription journal needs to do to ensure that RCUK authors cannot choose Green (and hence must pay for Gold) is to offer hybrid Gold.

That's the contingency that needs to be clearly and unambiguously dropped in order to fix the RCUK OA mandate and bring it into line with the EC mandate, as well as the adopted and planned OA mandates in the US.

Swan & Houghton's 2012 executive summary (as excerpted by Peter Suber in "Transition to green OA significantly less expensive than transition to gold OA" ):

"Based on this analysis, the main findings are: [1] so long as research funders commit to paying publication costs for the research they fund, and [2] publication charges fall to the reprint authors home institution, [3] all universities would see savings from (worldwide) Gold OA when article-processing charges are at the current averages, [4] research-intensive universities would see the greatest savings, and [5] in a transition period, providing Open Access through the Green route offers the greatest economic benefits to individual universities, unless additional funds are made available to cover Gold OA costs....[F]or all the sample universities during a transition period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing institutions around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university sampled. In a transition period, providing OA through the Green route would have substantial economic benefits for universities, unless additional funds were released for Gold OA, beyond those already available through the Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust...."
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.

Gold Fever, Finch Follies, and Junk Journals

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 21:38:14 +0100

The biggest risk from Gold OA (publishing) (and it's already a reality) is that it will get in the way of the growth of Green OA (self-archiving), and hence the growth of OA itself. That's Gold Fever: Most people assume that OA means Gold OA, and don't realize that the fastest, surest and (extra-)cost-free way to 100% OA is to provide (and mandate) Green OA.

The second biggest risk (likewise already a reality, if the Finch Follies are Followed) is that Gold Fever makes sluggish, gullible researchers, their funders, their governments and even their poor impecunious universities get lured into paying for pre-emptive Gold OA (while still paying for subscriptions) instead of providing and mandating Green OA at no extra cost.

The risk of creating a market for junk Gold OA journals is only the third of the Gold OA risk factors (but it's already a reality too).

Gold OA's time will come. But it is not now. A proof of principle was fine, to refute the canard that peer review is only possible on the subscription model.

But paying for pre-emptive Gold OA now, instead of mandating and providing Green OA globally first will turn out to be one of the more foolish things our sapient species has done to date (though by far not the worst).

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Harnad, S. (2005) Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold. Ariadne 42.

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

No Need to Wait for Universal Gold OA: Green OA Can Be Universally Mandated Today

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 02:01:41 +0100

Re: "Research intelligence - 'We all aspire to universal access'" Times Higher Education 11 August 2011

The publishing community can afford to be leisurely about how long it takes for open access (OA) to reach 100% (it's 10% now for Gold OA publishing, plus another 20% for Green OA self-archiving). But the research community need not be so leisurely about it. Research articles no longer need to be accessible only to those researchers whose institution can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published, rather than to all researchers who want to use, apply and build upon it. Lost research access means lost research progress. Research is funded, conducted and published for the sake of research progress and its public benefits, not in order to provide revenue to the publishing industry, nor to sustain the subscription model of cost-recovery.

The publishing community is understandably "wary" about Green OA self-archiving, mindful of its subscription revenue streams. But the transition to Green OA self-archiving, unlike the transition to Gold OA publishing, is entirely in the hands of the research community, which need not wait passively for the "market" to shift to Gold OA publishing: Springer publishers' projections suggest that at its current growth rate Gold OA will not reach 100% till the year 2029.

The research community need not wait, because it is itself the universal provider of all the published research, and its institutions and funders can mandate (i.e., require) that their authors self-archive their peer-reviewed final drafts (not the publishers' version of record) in their institutional Green OA repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication. And a growing number of funders and institutions (including all the UK funding councils, the ERC, EU and NIH in the US, as well as University College London, Harvard and MIT) are doing just that.

Green OA self-archiving mandates generate 60% OA within two years of adoption, and climb toward 100% within a few years thereafter. The earliest mandates (U. Southampton School of Electrons and Computer Science, 2003, and CERN, 2004 are already at or near 100% Green OA.

Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21(3-4): 86-93 /
ABSTRACT: Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA.

Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.
ABSTRACT: The primary target of the worldwide Open Access initiative is the 2.5 million articles published every year in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific fields. Without exception, every one of these articles is an author give-away, written, not for royalty income, but solely to be used, applied and built upon by other researchers. The optimal and inevitable solution for this give-away research is that it should be made freely accessible to all its would-be users online and not only to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it happens to be published. Yet this optimal and inevitable solution, already fully within the reach of the global research community for at least two decades now, has been taking a remarkably long time to be grasped. The problem is not particularly an instance of "eDemocracy" one way or the other; it is an instance of inaction because of widespread misconceptions (reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox). The solution is for the world's research institutions and funders to (1) extend their existing "publish or perish" mandates so as to (2) require their employees and fundees to maximize the usage and impact of the research they are employed and funded to conduct and publish by (3) depositing their final drafts in their Open Access (OA) Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication in order to (4) make their findings freely accessible to all their potential users webwide. OA metrics can then be used to measure and reward research progress and impact; and multiple layers of links, tags, commentary and discussion can be built upon and integrated with the primary research.

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59.
ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et als (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (Open Access, OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the worlds peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et als modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research.

Royal Society Endorses Immediate Green Open Access Self-Archiving By Its Authors

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:53:00 +0100

[updated 27/6/10]
The Royal Society is fully green again, endorsing unembargoed OA self-archiving of the author's final draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication, thereby reinstating the world's most venerable publisher on the side of the angels, where it belonged all along, historically.

With much gratitude from the research community and posterity!

In its OA FAQ, the Royal Society OA misdefines Green OA as follows:
"Green open access: Authors may deposit a pre-print of their article in a repository at any time and they may deposit the final, accepted manuscript version of their article in a repository from 12 months after publication."
Whereas one can be agnostic about the hybrid gold OA option that the RS and many publishers are offering (including the promise of transparency in translating hybrid Gold OA uptake increases into subscription price reductions), this takes on an entirely different complexion if the publisher is not Green (as, for example, CUP, APS, IOP, AAAS, Springer and Elsevier all are, whereas OUP and NPG, and now possibly the RS, are not).

For if the publisher imposes a 1-year embargo, that is tantamount to a constraint -- on any author that needs and wants immediate OA -- to pay for the hybrid Gold OA option instead of just providing Green OA.

~~See also: Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society (2005)~~

Open Access: The Historic Irony

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sun, 02 May 2010 06:21:32 +0100

Historians will look back on our planet's glacially slow transition to the optimal and inevitable outcome for refereed research dissemination in the online era -- free online access webwide -- and will point out the irony of the fact that we were so much quicker to commit scarce money to trying to reform publishing ("Gold OA") through projects like SCOAP3 and COPE than we were to commit to providing free online access ("Green OA") to our own research output (by depositing it in our institutional repositories, and mandating that it be deposited) at no extra cost at all.

Here is just the latest instance:

"SCOAP3 support in the United States almost complete! So far, over 150 U.S. libraries and library consortia have pledged a total of over 3.2 Million dollars to the SCOAP3 initiative. This is almost the entire contribution expected from partners in the United States. Worldwide, SCOAP3 partners in 24 countries collectively pledged around 7 Million Euros. These pledges represent about 70% of the SCOAP3 funding envelope, and the initiative is getting close to its next steps to convert to Open Access the entire literature of the field of High-Energy Physics."

Yet (mark my words) it will be Green OA self-archiving -- and Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders -- that actually bring us universal OA at long last, and not the limited and ineffectual "gold fever" that is "freeing" (already-free) high energy physics (SCOAP3) -- climbing toward 100% OA since 1991 and effectively there since about a decade now! -- nor the COPE commitment on the part of universities to pay to make a small portion of their own research output Gold OA -- without first committing to make all of it Green OA, cost-free.

[University presidents and provosts especially seem to be quite quick to sign open letters in support of their government's adopting an open access mandate, yet much slower to adopt an open access mandate for their own institutions!]

"Never Pay Pre-Emptively For Gold OA Before First Mandating Green OA"

"On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse"

"SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive "flip" model for Gold OA conversion"

"Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity [COPE]: Mistaking intent for action?"

"Putting Principled Support Into Practice: What Provosts Need to Mandate"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Replies to Questions of Retiring Editor of Poultry Science

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:11:23 +0000

Colin G. Scanes Editor-in-Chief Poultry Science (Poultry Science Association) wrote:

[T]here is self-interest from journals... whether... profit... or non-profit... in not supporting free open access. Equally there is strong self-interest in university libraries... supporting open access because they are likely to reduce their costs of purchasing journals.

-- There are also the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit it is conducted and published. That interest is in making the research accessible, immediately upon acceptance for publication, to all would-be users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access.

Hitchcock, S. (2010) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies

1. Who is to pay the very real costs of producing journals with this move to open access? Should it be the researcher, and, if so, where is the additional funding to come from? Is it realistic to consider that journals should absorb the costs

-- Open Access means free online access to published journal articles, not necessarily Open Access publishing. Authors can provide Open Access to their conventionally published articles by self-archiving their final refereed drafts free for all online.

2. At what point do libraries cease to purchase subscriptions for journals if their contents are available by open access?

-- No one knows whether and when libraries will cancel journals. Till they do, institutional subscriptions pay the cost of peer review and authors make their final drafts free for all online. If and when journal cancellations make subscriptions unsustainable because users prefer to use the free online drafts, journals will cut costs and downsize to providing peer review alone, paid for, per article, by authors' institutions, out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan.

3. If library subscriptions to journals are an essential part of the business plan of a journal or a professional society, how many journals will disappear if we go to a completely open access approach?

-- No journals will disappear as a result of Open Access. Open Access is provided by author self-archiving (now being increasingly mandated by their institutions and funders) and if and when subscriptions fail, journals will downsize to peer-review service provision alone, paid for on the open access publishing service-fee model.

4. As a journal editor with, at present, a positive cash flow, we can and do waive page charges from papers from institutions in developing countries that cannot afford to pay these. We will not be able to continue this if there is a major reduction in revenue. Forcing journals to adopt an author-pays model would have a stifling effect on the publication of work from authors in developing countries.

-- No need to change anything (except to make sure the journal endorses rather than obstructs author self-archiving). Universal self-archiving and self-archiving mandates will provide universal Open Access, and the rest depends on how long subscriptions remain sustainable, and on whether and when the downsizing and transition to the Open Access cost-recovery model occurs.

5. What is a reasonable embargo period between publication and the paper being available by free open access?

-- What is optimal for research -- and for researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit it is conducted and published -- is no embargo at all. What is helpful from publishers is if they endorse Open Access self-archiving by authors. The rest will all come as a natural matter of course either way (i.e., with or without publisher endorsement), as a result of Open Access mandates by institutions and funders. The Green publishers will simply have the historic satisfaction of having been on the side of the angels all along.

Poultry Science's self-archiving policy is not in Romeo and does not appear to be among the 63% of journals that endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving by its authors. It would be helpful if this were remedied:

Poultry Science Copyright Release: Copyright laws make it necessary for the Association to obtain a release from authors for all materials published. To this end we ask you to grant us all rights, including subsidiary rights, for your article. You will hereby be relinquishing to the Poultry Science Association all control over this material such as rights to make or authorize reprints, to reproduce the material in other Association publications, and to grant the material to others without charge in any book of which you are the author or editor after it has appeared in the journal.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Leo Waaijers' "Non-Proprietary Peer Review" Proposal

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:20:00 +0000

SUMMARY: Leo Waaijers suggests in Ariadne that funder OA mandates impose "unfair conditions" on authors because there are not enough Gold OA journals to publish in. So instead, funders should fund research on alternative "non-proprietary peer review" services. This is based on a misunderstanding of OA mandates (which are for author self-archiving of the final peer-reviewed drafts of articles published in peer-reviewed non-OA journals, i.e., Green OA, not Gold OA) as well as a misunderstanding of peer review, which needs to be neither reformed, replaced nor redirected: existing peer-reviewed articles need merely to be self-archived.

Leo Waaijers wrote in Ariadne, "Publish and Cherish with Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems":

LW: "More and more research funders require open access to the publications that result from research they have financed... Although there is a steadily growing number of peer-reviewed Open Access journals... the supply fails to keep pace with the demand... [A]s authors cannot all publish in Open Access journals... Open Access-mandating funders impose unfair conditions on authors."

There is a profound misunderstanding here. Funders who mandate Open Access (OA) impose no "unfair conditions." What they mandate is the self-archiving of all published articles ("Green OA"), not the publishing of all articles in Open Access (OA) journals ("Gold OA").

It cannot be pointed out often enough that Gold OA is not the sole or primary way to provide OA: The incomparably faster, easier, cheaper and surer way to provide OA is for authors to self-archive articles published in non-OA journals by depositing them in the author's Institutional Repository (IR) (Green OA). And that is exactly what funders and institutions are mandating. No need to wait for all publishers to convert to Gold OA. Hence no "unfairness."

Most of the top institutions already have IRs. All the rest can create them with free (and extremely powerful) software; moreover, the DEPOT repository is available (now internationally) for self-archiving by author's whose institutions do not yet have an IR or for authors who do not have an institution.

Hence Leo's point about "unfair conditions" by funder mandates is either misinformed or misinforming.

LW: "[A] conversion... from proprietary to non-proprietary systems of peer review... can be speeded up if disciplinary communities, universities, and research funders actively enter the market of the peer review organisers by calling for tenders and inviting publishers to submit proposals for a non-proprietary design of the peer review process"

This is a non sequitur. What is needed is Open Access to peer-reviewed articles (2.5 million articles per year, published in 25,000 peer-reviewed journals). Most of those articles are available today only via toll-access (institutional subscriptions). The solution is neither to keep waiting for those journals to convert to Gold OA, nor to try to invent alternative forms of peer review. That would be like thinking that the way to solve the problem of public smoking is not to mandate no-smoke zones but to invent an alternative form of cigarette, or instead of mandating medicare to invent alternative forms of medicine, or instead of mandating recycling to invent an alternative form of garbage.

Not only is there no need to try to replace existing journals and their peer review system, but the problem with peer review is not that it is a proprietary service (for which the service-provider -- the journal -- needs to be paid) but that the byproducts of the service -- the peer-reviewed articles -- are not openly accessible to all would-be users.

And the solution is for authors to self-archive (the final, peer-reviewed drafts of) their peer-reviewed articles (Green OA) -- and for authors' institutions and funders to mandate it (submit submit tenders soliciting research proposals for alternatives to peer review!).

There is no need (and certainly no time) to wait to re-invent peer review in new hands and try to persuade (mandate?) authors to publish in these new "non-proprietary systems of peer review" instead of their existing peer-reviewed journals; nor is there the need or time to persuade publishers (already sluggish about converting to Gold OA) or others to turn to "tenders" inviting them to design a new system of peer review.

What is needed is for authors' institutions and funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving, a non-hypothetical solution that has already been tested, works, and can scale to all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals as quickly and surely as it can be mandated.

LW: "The [funder]... requires that... published research appears as openly accessible peer-reviewed articles."

The way for the funder to require that published research should appear as openly accessible peer-reviewed articles is to mandate that the author's final peer-reviewed draft (not the publisher's proprietary PDF) must be self-archived in the author's OA IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. That's all. No need for "tenders" for "non-proprietary peer review."

And this is exactly what most of the existing and proposed OA mandates (by funders as well as institutions) require -- not the "unfair condition" of having to find and publish in a suitable Gold OA journal. Hence there is no need at all to create new Gold OA journals, let alone new forms of peer review, in order to provide universal OA, today. All that is needed is Green OA mandates.

But Leo instead recommends a highly speculative alternative for reforming peer review that is not only untested and unnecessary, but contains within the proposal itself the signs that it misunderstands how peer review itself works, and why it is needed for research and researchers:

LW: "In order to have appropriate review procedures in place to process these articles... The reviewing process must be independent, rigorous and swift..."

So far, so good (except Leo does not say how peer review should be speeded up, given the number of papers submitted daily for peer review, the number of qualified peer reviewers available, and the number of their waking hours that researchers can devote to peer reviewing. Let us agree, however, that there are indeed ways to make this process faster and more efficient in the online era.)

But now, the proposed system (for which, Leo recommends, funders should solicit proposals, instead of mandating Green OA):

LW: "As a result of the reviewing process, articles will be marked 1 [low] to 5 [high]... In review procedures the [funder] will weigh articles with marks 3, 4 and 5 as if they were published in journals with impact factors 1-3, 4-8 and 9-15 respectively... For articles marked 3 to 5 adequate Open Access publication platforms must be available (e.g. new Open Access journals). Alternatively, authors may publish their articles in any existing OA journal. Upon publication all articles will be deposited in a certified (institutional) repository."

This speculative notion of peer review imagines that peer review consists of giving papers marks.

(It does not. It involves assessing their contents and making concrete recommendations as to what needs to be done by way of revision -- if they are potentially acceptable -- and reasons for rejection if not. What users expect and need from journals is an all-or-none indication of whether an article has met that journal's established quality-standards for acceptance. Any internal ratings the referees might have used in the process of coming to a recommendation on acceptance or rejection are not for the user but the editor. The real ranking for the user -- and author -- is in the quality hierarchy among journals. Their quality standards -- meaning what percentage of articles meet their acceptance criteria -- are reflected in their track-records and known to users. They are also (sometimes) reflected in the journals' impact factor. But that impact factor -- which is objectively determined by journals' average citation counts -- is certainly not the same thing as referees' internal ratings.)

Leo suggests that these "marks" should be given (by someone), with marks 3-5 standing in for having been published in peer-reviewed journals with corresponding "impact factors," for which there must be a corresponding Gold OA journal (either new or existing) for them to appear in (created to ensure that "unfair conditions" are not imposed by the deposit requirement).

Then the paper can be deposited in a "certified" IR. (One wonders why? Since all articles, in Leo's hypothetical scenario, would be published in Gold OA journals that this peer-review reform proposal had miraculously generated, why do they need to be deposited in IRs at all -- "certified" or otherwise -- since they are all already OA?)

In other words, Leo has invented an imaginary problem with deposit mandates (viz, "there aren't enough Gold OA journals") -- whereas the mandates are not to publish in Gold OA journals but to deposit in Green OA IRs. And then he has invented an imaginary solution to the problem (viz, create new "non-proprietary peer-review services" and then publish the outcome in new Gold OA journals that no longer need to bother to implement peer review). All in order to be able to "fairly" deposit them in "certified" IRs?

My guess is that this rather complicated conjectural solution ("non-proprietary peer-review services") to an imagined problem ("unfair Gold OA mandates") was inspired by Leo's incorrect six assumptions:

(1) that what needs to be deposited in an IR in order to provide OA is the publisher's proprietary PDF, i.e., the canonical version of record (whereas what needs to be deposited for OA is just the peer-reviewed final draft ("postprint" which is merely a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- the canonical version of record);

(2) that depositing in Closed Access during any publisher embargo on OA would not fulfill the deposit mandate (whereas in fact it would, and especially with the help of the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button to tide over research usage needs during any embargo on OA);

(3) that peer review is largely just a rank-assignment (whereas in reality peer review is a dynamic, interactive, answerable system of detecting and correcting errors so as to meet a given journal's established quality standards);

(4) that OA means just Gold OA publishing (whereas Green OA self-archiving too is OA);

(5) that what research and researchers really need is not just Green OA, but Gold OA (whereas what they need is OA) and hence that

(6) IRs are just for digital preservation (whereas OA IRs are for OA-provision today, and digital preservation of the canonical version of record is an entirely different matter, unrelated to OA until and unless subscriptions become unsustainable, thus making the author's peer-reviewed final draft the canonical version of record!).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Critique of Criteria for "Full Membership" in OASPA ("Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association")

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:59:42 +0000

Commentary on "Why did OASPA admit the BMJ Group and OUP? and other questions about membership" (Caroline Sutton, Director, OASPA):

From the bylaws of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA):

"To be considered an OA scholarly publisher and eligible for full membership... the Publisher must... Publish at least one OA journal that regularly publishes original research or scholarship, all of which is OA... [which] includes... Copyright holders allow users to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship..." [i.e., "libre" OA]

Now let us look at what these criteria imply: Full OASPA membership for BMJ, for example, is perhaps arguable, because all refereed research articles in the flagship BMJ are OA and hybrid OA is available as an option for all 27 BMJ journals, but all BMJ authors are also free to provide immediate Green OA by self-archiving. In contrast, Oxford University Press (OUP) publishes 246 journals, only 6 of them full Gold OA; the rest of the OUP journals embargo Green OA self-archiving by authors for a year (90 of them offering authors the generous "option" of paying to do it immediately, if they pay OUP's hybrid Gold OA fee). (In contrast, Cambridge University Press (CUP) offers paid hybrid Gold OA for 15 journals, but endorses immediate Green OA self-archiving for every single one of its 283 journals. In other words, CUP hybrid Gold is a noncoercive OA option for authors who want to pay for hybrid Gold OA; OUP's is not. All CUP authors are free to provide immediate Green OA to their articles by self-archiving them; OUP authors are not. Yet OUP is a "full member" of OASPA and CUP is not.)

It is exceedingly difficult to see the value to OA itself of the following:

(1) OASTP officially includes, as "full members" of its "OA Scholarly Publishers Association," publishers that oppose immediate OA Self-Archiving by their authors. (Such publishers can now even proudly advertise themselves as "full OA" journal publishers in good standing if they publish one single libre Gold OA journal while forbidding Green OA self-archiving for their other 999 journals.)

(2) OASTP officially excludes from full membership in its "OA Scholarly Publishers Association" publishers every one of whose 999 journals are "gratis" Gold OA, perhaps not even charging a penny for it, as not being "full OA" journal publishers in good standing, because they are not "libre" Gold OA.

Richard Poynder seems to have been right (again): "officially" sanctioning this perverse play on words will not only:

(a) allow being an "OA publisher," "Gold OA publisher" and "full OA" publisher in good standing to be touted and promoted in a self-interested, word-bending way by publishers that are just about as far from being OA as a publisher can be,

(b) prevent publishers that are genuinely "full OA" publishers -- fully gratis OA, hence fully Gold, and hence fully Green, for all their journals, hence fully OA on any rational construal of "full OA publisher" -- from calling themselves "full OA publishers" in good standing, and

(c) add yet another unwelcome layer to the confusion about the meaning of "OA" as well as of being an "OA publisher" that we owe to the premature, persistent and counterproductive profusion of gold dust and publishing-economics in place of OA.

Full members should only be publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA (and all of whose journals are Green OA); otherwise just "Associate" members. (And gratis OA journal publishers should either be full OASPA members or we should stop repeating the slogan that "most OA journals do not charge for publication.")

Of course it is the publisher that represents the journal. But reserving full OASPA membership for publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA would rule out the obvious abuse of "full OA" status by a publisher that publishes a fleet of 1000 journals, only one of them OA, yet is currently entitled to call itself an official "OA publisher" in virtue of full membership in good standing in OASPA. Such a publisher would then simply be an Associate Member of OASPA. (An independent journal, by the way, not associated with a "publishing house," is simply its own publisher.) That would remedy abuse of full membership status by non-OA and anti-OA publishers.

But to remedy the very meaning of OA and OA journal, it would be just as important to admit as full members the publishers of (all or mostly) gratis OA journals (including gratis OA journals that do not charge either authors or their institutions/funders for publication, but make ends meet from subscriptions or subsidy). Yes, fee-free gratis OA journals represent a different "business model," but nevertheless they are "fully" OA in every OA-relevant respect.

(It also seems fine to accept hybrid Gold OA publishers as Associate Members, given that the Association's interest seems to be primarily in OA publishing business models rather than OA itself.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Comment on Richard Poynder's "Mistaking Intent For Action"

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:01:47 +0100

It would be churlish of me to criticize Richard Poynder's friendly article, with most of which I can hardly disagree. So please consider this a complimentary complement rather than a cavil:

Annual institutional subscriptions for annual incoming journals do not morph in any coherent or sensible way into annual institutional "memberships" for individual outgoing articles.

This is true of the multi-journal "Big Deal" subscriptions with journal-fleet publishers, and it is even more obvious with single journals: Are 10,000 universities supposed to have annual "memberships" in 25,000 journals on an annual pro-rated quota based on the number of articles each institution's researchers happen to have published in each journal last year? Or is this "membership" to be based on one global (and oligopolistic) "mega-deal" between a mega-consortium of publishers and a mega-consortium of institutions? (If this makes sense, why don't we do all our shopping this way, putting a whole new twist on globalisation?) Or is it just to save our familiar intuitions about subscriptions? Wouldn't it make more sense to scrap those intuitions, when they lead to absurdities like this?

Especially when they are unnecessary, as we can see if we remind ourselves what OA is really about. Open access is about access: about making all journal articles freely accessible online to all users. It is not about morphing institutional-subscription-based funding of publishing into institutional-membership-based funding of publishing. Indeed, it isn't about funding publishing at all, since it is not publishing that is in a crisis but institutional access.

Here's another way to look at it: The "serials crisis" is the fact that institutions cannot afford access to all the journal articles they need. They have to keep canceling more and more journals, thereby making their access less and less. If all institutions had free online access to all those journal articles then that would not make the journals any more affordable at current prices, but it would certainly make canceling them less of a big deal, because their content would be free online anyway.

And that is precisely the state of affairs that universal Green OA self-archiving mandates would deliver virtually overnight.

So why are institutions instead wasting their time and money fussing over how to fit the round peg of institutional subscriptions into the square hole of institutional memberships today, via pre-emptive Gold OA funding commitments that generate a lot of extra expense for very little extra access -- instead of providing Open Access to all of their own journal-article output by mandating Green OA self-archiving today?

That "the access and affordability problems are part and parcel of the larger serials crisis" is altogether the wrong way to look at it. The OA problem is access, and affordability is part and parcel of that problem today only inasmuch as alternatives to journal subscriptions increase access today -- which is very little, and at high cost, insofar as Gold OA is concerned (today).

So instead of waiting passively for journals to convert to the Gold standard, and instead of throwing scarce money at them pre-emptively to try to make it worth their while, why don't institutions simply make their own journal article output Green OA, today? That will generate universal (Green) OA with certainty, today.

If and when that universal Green OA should in turn eventually go on to generate journal cancellations to the point of making subscriptions unsustainable for covering the costs of publication, then that will be the time for journals to cut obsolete products and services for which there is no longer a market (such as the print edition, the PDF edition, archiving, access-provision and digital preservation, leaving all that to the global network of Green OA institutional repositories), along with their associated costs, and convert to Gold OA for covering the costs of what remains (largely just implementing peer review).

Unlike today -- when paid Gold OA is at best a useful proof-of-principle that publishing can be sustained without subscriptions and at worst a waste of scarce cash based on a premature and incoherent hope of morphing directly into universal Gold OA -- after universal Green OA each institution will have more than enough money to pay those much reduced publication costs (on an individual article basis, not via an institutional membership) from just a small fraction of its annual windfall savings if and when they decide they can cancel all those subscriptions in which that money is tied up today.

Hence it is mandating Green OA that will rewire the "disconnect" between user and purchaser that Stuart Shieber deplores, putting paid to the inelastic need and demand of institutions for subscriptions (today) because of their inelastic need and demand for access (otherwise unavailable today). The reconnect will not come from ("capped") Gold OA Compacts (like COPE and SCOAP3 but from the cancelation pressure that universal Green OA will eventually generate -- once the demand for the obsolescent extras currently co-bundled with peer review fades out as the planet goes Green.

In other words, even if it is the affordability problem rather than OA that exercises you, the coherent way to morph from institutional subscriptions to universal Gold OA is via the mediation of universal Green OA mandates, not via a pre-emptive leap directly from the status quo to Gold via funding commitments, regardless of the price and modus operandi. Meanwhile, along the way, we will already have universal OA, at last solving the access problem, which is what OA itself is all about.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Please Commit To Providing Green OA Before Committing To Pay For Gold OA!

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:04:42 +0100

What follows is a critique of the "Compact for Open-Access Equity." The Compact states:

"We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the beneﬁts of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

"Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufﬁcient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature."
/signed/

My critique is based on points that I have already made many times before, unheeded. All I can do is echo them yet again (and hope!):

Regardless of the size of the current asking price ("reasonable" or unreasonable), it is an enormous strategic mistake for a university or research funder to commit to pre-emptive payment of Open Access (OA) journal ("Gold OA") publishing fees today -- until and unless the university or funder has first mandated OA self-archiving ("Green OA") for all of its own published journal article output (irrespective of whether the article happens to be published in an OA or a non-OA journal).

There are so far five signatories to the "Compact for Open-Access Equity." Two of them have mandated Green OA (Harvard and MIT) and three have not (Cornell, Dartmouth, Berkeley). Many non-mandating universities have also been committing to the the pre-emptive SCOAP3 consortium.

If Harvard's and MIT's example of first mandating Green OA is followed, and hence Green OA mandates grow globally ahead of Gold OA commitments, then there's no harm done.

But if it is instead pre-emptive commitments to fund Gold OA that grow, at the expense of mandates to provide Green OA, then the worldwide research community will yet again have shot itself in the foot insofar as universal OA -- so long within its reach, so urgent, and yet still not grasped -- is concerned.

The fundamental problem is not that of needlessly overpaying for Gold OA by paying prematurely and pre-emptively and at an arbitrarily inflated asking price (although that is indeed a problem too).

The fundamental problem is that focussing on a commitment to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA today gives institutions the false sense that they are thereby doing what needs to be done in order to provide OA for their own research output, whereas this is very far from the truth:

No institution can or will pay for Gold OA publication of all (or even most) its research output because

(1) not all (or even most) journals offer Gold OA today,

(2) not all (or even most) Gold OA journals' asking price is reasonable or affordable today, and

(3) most of the money to pay for Gold OA is still tied up in institutional journal subscriptions today.

But most important of all is the fact that

(4) OA can be provided for all of an institution's research output today by mandating Green OA self-archiving, which moots (1) - (3).

(1) - (4) jointly comprise the reason pre-emptive Gold OA payment is not at all what is needed today. What is needed is OA itself, and that is what Green OA provides, regardless of journal funding model (subscription or Gold OA).

Once Green OA has been mandated universally and is being universally provided by institutions, journals will eventually adapt, under subscription cancellation pressure, downsizing to provide peer review alone and converting to Gold OA to cover costs. Meanwhile, institutions' own windfall subscription cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay journals for Gold OA publication at this much-reduced price.

But none of that can happen today, through pre-emptive payment for Gold OA. And meanwhile research progress and impact keep being lost, needlessly, because institutions are focusing on funding Gold OA when what they urgently need to do is mandate Green OA.

Once an institution has mandated Green OA, it no longer matters (for OA) what it elects to do with its spare cash. It is only if an institution elects to focus on spending its cash to pay for Gold OA instead of mandating Green OA that an institution does both its research and its pocketbook a double disservice, needlessly.

The creation of high-quality, self-sustaining Gold OA journals such as the PLoS and BMC journals was historically important and timely as a proof-of-principle that peer-reviewed journal publication is viable even if universal Green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. But what is urgently needed now is not more money to pay for Gold OA but more mandates to provide Green OA, hence OA itself.

Finding money to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA while subscriptions still prevail and OA itself does not is an extremely counterproductive strategy, if access to refereed research -- rather than publishing reform -- is the real raison d'être of the Open Access movement (as it certainly is and always has been for me).

Gold OA is not the end, but merely one of the means (and by far not the fastest or surest means) of providing universal OA. Full speed ahead with (mandating) Green OA; publishing will adapt naturally as the time comes.

Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos.

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.

Conflicts of Interest in Open Access

nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad) — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:32:00 +0100

[Background: See "Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again"]

A Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) article (29 April) writes:

"The research councils are looking at what more they can do to support open access to research results after an independent study found that their current policies were having a 'limited impact'."

First, the SQW/LISU study is simply incorrect in opining that current Green OA deposit mandates (when adopted and monitored) are "having a 'limited impact'." As objective deposit-counts for the NIH mandate have shown, the NIH deposit rate jumped from 4% to over 60% within a year of mandate adoption. Much the same is true for university self-archiving mandates.

Rather, the ambivalence seems to be largely originating from EPSRC, the last of the adopters of the least clearcut of the seven UK research council policies. What EPSRC had finally mandated was not unequivocal deposit, like the other six councils, but rather a hybrid between Green OA deposits and Gold OA journal publishing.

"The councils have previously baulked at requiring all council-funded researchers to deposit papers in openly available repositories."

This is incorrect: Six of the seven UK research councils have required all fundees to deposit all published articles in an open access repository: Only EPSRC leaves it open whether (1) to publish in a subscription journal and deposit in a repository or (2) to publish in an open-access journal (and pay publishing fees, if any). This is the EPSRC policy:

EPSRC Council agreed at its December [2008] meeting to mandate open access publication, but that academics should be able to choose whether they use the so-called green option (ie, self-archiving in an on-line repository) or to use the gold option (ie, pay-to-publish in an open access journal).

It is interesting how the divergent view of the last and most ambivalent -- but also the biggest -- of the councils to adopt a mandate is now being presented as the new prevailing view among the seven. (Is it, really? And has EPSRC really thought it through, or are a few strongly held opinions ruling the roost?)

"Now, after a study by SQW Consulting concluded that open access is increasingly popular with UK researchers and that institutions are setting up their own repositories, the councils... will have to tread carefully because open access threatens to undermine the business model of publishers and learned societies."

This sounds like a non sequitur. OA is becoming increasingly popular with researchers and institutions (and at least 6 of the 7 funders) and yet now funders must "tread carefully" because of publishers' business interests? How did publishers' business interests get into this?

(I suspect that in the case of EPSRC, this may partly be driven by an ongoing experiment in paying pre-emptively for Gold OA publishing in (part of) the physics community: Instead of just mandating Green OA deposits and letting subscriptions continue to pay for publication until and unless Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, the SCOAP3 consortium of institutions is simply redefining their institutional subscription fees as "institutional Gold OA publishing fees" in exchange for the publishers providing Gold OA. It is virtually certain that this ill-thought-out experiment cannot and will not scale beyond parts of physics, but meanwhile it is yet another retardant on the growth of Green OA mandates. Here it is not just publishing-lobby self-interest, but institutional serials-budget myopia that are (each for its respective reasons, both of them irrelevant to the primary interests of the research community) doing the all-too-familiar conflation of the journal-affordability problem with the research-accessibility problem, to the great disadvantage of the latter.)

"The study also reports that more than three quarters of 2,100 council-funded researchers surveyed were unaware of the councils' current mandates."

It would seem that a more straightforward remedy for unawareness of funders' grant fulfillment conditions would be to increase the awareness of fundees and their institutions of the conditions on the funding they have received -- and to monitor and reinforce compliance with those conditions, just as with other grant fulfillment conditions. It would seem an unusual remedy to instead spend scarce research funds on paying publishers to do what fundees are neglecting to do, for free, as a condition of their funding.

"Paul Gemmill, chair of the research outputs group at Research Councils UK, said the next stage was to decide whether a specific model should be adopted. He said the process would involve learned societies, publishers and academics."

How did the publishing community come to thus dominate a research community issue? (Both publishers and learned-society publishers are publishers.) This is really quite puzzling. One can quite well understand why they would try to do so, but how did they succeed? Could it be that the publisher-budget defenders and the library-budget defenders are making common cause with pre-emptive Gold OA, at the expense of cost-free Green OA and the interests of the research community and research itself? Or is this just blind a-priori ideology (regarding "publishing reform") in place of the direct of interests of research that are the real concern of the research funding councils (as well as the research community itself)?

"Open-access advocate Stevan Harnad, professor of electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton, said scarce research money should not be used to pay open-access journal fees, where the costs normally borne by the publisher are picked up by funders."

The costs of publishing are borne by subscribing institutions, not by funders.

"'If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate repositories,' he said."

What he said was:

"If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate Green OA for now, and then let supply and demand decide, given universal Green OA, whether and when to convert from subscriptions to Gold OA, and for what product, and at what price."

For now, subscriptions are paying for publication, and what is needed is more Green OA, not a new non-research expense (Gold OA publication fees) on which to squander the little research money there is to go round. Wait till universal Green OA actually causes subscriptions to become unsustainable (if and when it ever does do so) and then the subscription cancellation savings themselves can be used to pay for the Gold OA -- that's then, when it's actually needed, rather than using research money to pay for Gold OA pre-emptively, now, when Gold OA is not even needed yet.

Drawn by
Judith Economos
(feel free to use to promote OA and to bait "pit-bulls")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum