Is the Library Community Friend or Foe of OA?

Rick Anderson (University of Utah Librarian) has posted the following on multiple lists:

Rick Anderson: if I know that a publisher allows green deposit of all articles without embargo, then the likelihood that we'll maintain a paid subscription drops dramatically

Rick Anderson has made a public announcement that he may think serves the interests of University of Utah's Library and its users:

It does not, because it is both arbitrary and absurd to cancel a journal because it is has a Green policy (i.e., no embargo) in Green OA rather than because its contents are otherwise accessible or their users no longer need it. About 60% of subscription journals are Green and there are no data whatsoever to show that the percentage of the contents of Green journals made OA by their authors is higher than the percentage for non-Green journals -- and, more important, the percentage of articles that are made OA today from either Green or non-Green journals is still low, and the subset is an arbitrary and anarchic sample, by article and by author, not journal-specific.

But more important than any of that is the gross disservice that gratuitous public librarian announcements like this do to the OA movement: We have been objecting vehemently to the perverse incentive Finch/RCUK have given publishers to adopt or lengthen Green OA embargoes and offer hybrid Gold in order to get the money the UK has foolishly elected to throw at Fool's Gold unilaterally, and preferentially.

Now is it going to be the library community putting publishers on public notice that unless they adopt or lengthen Green OA embargoes, libraries plan to cancel their journals?

With friends like these, the OA movement hardly needs enemies!

May I suggest, though, that such postings should not go to the GOAL, BOAI or SPARC lists? Please keep such brilliant ideas to the library lists.

And please don't reply that "it's just one factor in our cancelation equation." There's no need for the OA community to hear about librarians' struggles with their serials budgets when it's at the expense of OA.

Stevan Harnad

PS This series of postings was apparently prompted by a query from RA seeking a list of Green OA publishers -- publishers that do not embargo OA (so such publishers can be considered for cancellation by U. Utah Libraries). The database mentioned is SHERPA/Romeo. Romeo was funded and created to help authors provide OA and to help their librarians help them provide OA by letting them know the rights policies of publishers regarding OA. I have long inveighed against the excess weight and exposure that SHERPA/Romeo has solemnly conferred on arbitrary details and quirks of journal policy having nothing to do with helping authors or librarians provide OA, and sometimes even at odds with it (such as whether or not the publisher considers an institutional repository to be an author website, whether the journal endorses OA just for the refereed draft ["blue"] or for both the refereed draft and the unrefereed draft ["green"], and whether the right to provide OA is retained by the author for voluntary OA but not for mandatory OA). It would be ironic indeed if the use that (some) librarians now made of SHERPA/Romeo were not to help them help authors provide OA for those journals that don't embargo OA, but to help librarians cancel journals that don't embargo OA!