Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: An article in The Australian -- "Open access a threat to grants" -- has wrongly implied that the Australian Research Council [ARC] OA policy would redirect research grant money toward the payment of OA journal publishing charges. What ARC has mandated is OA self-archiving ("Green OA"). It has definitely not proposed diverting research funds to OA publishing ("Gold OA").
    (1) The first OA priority is 100% OA itself, via Green OA self-archiving mandates.
    (2) The need to redirect funds toward Gold OA is hypothetical.
    (3) Any "Gold Rush" today is premature and unnecessary.
    (4) 100% Green OA does not take a penny from research.
    (5) But direct conversions to Gold now certainly do.
    (6) Most Gold journals don't charge publication fees today, but it is unlikely this will scale to 100% Gold OA.
    (7) It is not a bad idea to start thinking about how to prepare for that eventuality.
    (8) But it is misleading to think of and plan for the conversion to 100% Gold OA as a redirection of current research funds toward OA Gold publication charges.
    (9) The "redirection" that needs to be planned is from the (vast) funds that are currently being used to pay for (non-OA) publication -- namely, institutional subscription/license fees, if and when those are ever cancelled.
    (10) Hence pre-emptive redirection of scarce research funds to pay for Gold is premature and unnecessary today; what is necessary today is the Green mandates for which so many are now petitioning the European community.
    (11) Once Green OA prevails, we have 100% OA already.
    (12) Then, if/when Green OA causes unsustainable subscription cancellations, those very savings will pay the OA Gold publication costs without taking a penny from the current research pot.

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Peter Suber has excerpted in OA News the following passages from

Lane, Bernard (2007) Open access a threat to grants.
The Australian, January 23, 2007

"The historically low success rate for competitive grant applications could dip further as an unintended consequence of the move to open access publishing.

"The Australian Research Council [ARC], which has just adopted its first policy to encourage grant winners to make their results widely and freely available, said open access was shifting publication costs to authors.

"If authors were allowed to cover those costs from grant money, then a new administrative and financial burden would fall on agencies such as the ARC.

"Funding agencies would have to estimate publication costs before giving a grant and would probably have to audit this expenditure at project's end, the ARC says in a new submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into public support for science and innovation.

" 'If the agencies' budgets were not supplemented to cover those costs in full, then the proportion of grant funding devoted to research activity would diminish,' the ARC says...."

Mandating OA self-archiving ("Green OA") by researchers is what needs to be focussed upon, as that is the pressing issue today, and mandating self-archiving by its fundees is exactly what ARC has done. But ARC has definitely not proposed diverting research funds to OA publishing ("Gold OA"), as the Lane article incorrectly assumes and implies.

(1) The first OA priority today, and an immediately reachable one, once we reach for it, is 100% OA itself, via Green OA self-archiving mandates from funders and universities.

(2) The need to redirect funds toward Gold OA is hypothetical, not real and actual, like the need to mandate Green OA. And the constant speculative focus on hypothetical (Gold) economics is getting in the way of actual, reachable (Green) OA.

(3) In addition, as we see from the Lane article, as well as from the concerns occasioned by CERN's move toward immediate conversion to Gold in particle physics: This premature and unnecessary "Gold Rush" is generating opposition to OA itself, of either hue, on the grounds that it would take money away from research.

(4) In reality, of course, 100% Green OA does not take a single penny away from research.

(5) But direct conversion to Gold now certainly does divert money from research, in a number of prominent cases (PLoS, BMC, plus all the hybrids like Springer Open Choice, etc.).

(6) It is repeatedly pointed out, by way of mitigating this, that most Gold journals don't charge publication fees -- but this is rather hollow reassurance, since most Gold journals -- other than the prominent ones, which do charge -- are more minor journals. And, more important, no one has the faintest idea whether not charging for Gold OA would scale, if most or all journals were Gold. (I would say it is virtually certain that not charging would not scale, and that publication fees would have to be charged.)

(7) It is not a bad idea to start thinking about how to prepare for that eventuality. (I myself think 100% Green OA will eventually lead to a conversion to 100% Gold OA.)

"The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition" (Started Sep 1998!)

Harnad, S. (2006) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition

(8) However (and here is the crux of it), it is misleading in the extreme to think of and plan for the conversion to 100% Gold OA as a redirection of current research funds toward OA Gold publication charges.

(9) The "redirection" that needs to be planned is from the (vast) funds that are currently being used to pay for publication -- namely, institutional subscription/license fees! It is those funds that will need to be redirected toward Gold OA publication fees if/when subscriptions are cancelled, not today's research funds, which are already stretched to the limit. (I know that some research funds today already go toward library subscriptions: there the redirection will be direct and straighforward; but most institutional library subscription funds today do not explicitly come from a research pot.)

(10) Hence all this talk about OA costing more and taking money away from research is being generated by all the overhasty "Gold Fever" for direct, immediate conversion to Gold, rather than the rational, reachable intermediate step of "conversion" to 100% OA Green first, via the Green mandates for which so many are now petitioning the European community.

(11) For, once Green OA prevails, we have 100% OA already.

(12) Then, if and when Green OA should ever cause unsustainable subscription cancellations, that very eventuality will in and of itself generate the funds out of which to pay OA Gold publication costs without taking a penny from the current research pot. (And it will almost certainly generate substantial overall savings too.)

In short, the Gold Rush is premature, unnecessary, misleading, and counterproductive for OA at this time.

100% Green OA is not a funding issue today; it requires negligible resources, distributed across institutions. And preservation costs are not an issue either (even though preservation is of course being taken care of by Institutional Repositories [IRs]) as long as Green is merely a parallel supplement to subscription-based publishing, rather than a substitute for it. It is not Green self-archiving that bears the preservation burden for the journal literature at this time. And if/when there is a wholesale conversion to Gold, offloading all archiving and preservation functions onto the worldwide network of IRs, this will distribute the cost of archiving and preservation far more economically than it is distributed now (via subscriptions).

Once institutions are self-archiving 100% of their research output (thanks to Green mandates) instead of about 15%, as now, costs will not rise. (Just ask the (few) institutions that are already approaching 100%.) Green can manage on not much more than its negligible current budget for years to come.

We are not talking about "the cost of a new research dissemination system": we are talking about (mandating) 100% Green OA, which is merely a parallel supplement to the current "research dissemination system."

If and when there is indeed a transition to a new "research dissemination system," with all journal subscriptions cancelled, all access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the Institutional Repositories, and all journals converted to recovering their remaining costs via the Gold OA publication-fee model, then the funds to pay those fees will indeed be drawn from one institutional pocket to the other, out of existing funds, namely, the windfall subscription cancellation savings.

But before we can get there, we first have to get to the 100% Green OA that will both generate the OA and (perhaps) generate the cancellations and their attendant savings. (If not, then we are speculating for nothing, and the system just continues in parallel.) But going instead for direct conversion to Gold right now, without journal cancellations first, of necessity draws on existing research funds that are far better used for funding research itself (whilst researchers are busy providing OA to their findings via OA Green self-archiving).

In summary, The Australian (and many others) have the wrong end of the OA stick. We should all get the Gold Dust out of our eyes and get our fingers moving, to perform the few keystrokes that are in reality the only barrier between us and 100% OA today.

(Arthur Sale has since submitted an excellent critique of the Lane article to The Australian, bringing out every salient point and correcting all the systematic misunderstandings. It has also been posted on the American Scientist Open Access Forum.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum