Open Access Archivangelism

Richard Poynder asks (in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

[1] Is it true that a Gold OA article-processing-charge model will create a situation in which "publishers are operating in a genuinely competitive market to offer a service that is good value for money"?

[2] If it is true, then is not Stevan Harnad's concern that before moving to Gold OA we must first "downsize publishing and its costs to just the costs of peer review" by "offloading access-provision, archiving and their costs onto the network of Green OA Institutional Repositories" a misplaced concern?

Excellent question(s)!

i. The answer to Question [1] would be "Yes" if all or most (refereed) journals today were Gold OA. But the vast majority of journals are non-OA. Hence the competition is just among a minority of journals (about 10-15%, and mostly not the top 10-15%).

ii. Meanwhile, without universal Green OA, the functions of access-provision and archiving -- and their costs -- continue to be a part of journal publishing, both Gold OA and non-OA, with all journals also still providing the PDF (with its costs) too. (I leave the issue of the print edition to those who are specialized in pondering Escher impossible-figures.) I just point out that this is a long way from providing just peer review alone. Nor does there look to be a transition scenario, in the absence of Green OA and a distributed network of Green OA Institutional Repositories to take over the function of access-provision and archiving.

iii. The answer to question [1] being hence "No," conditional question [2] becomes moot.

iv. There is a known, tried, tested way of scaling to 100% OA, and it has been demonstrated to work: Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates.

v. Unlike Gold OA, which not only faces substantial scaling problems but is not in the hands of the research community, Green OA is entirely in the hands of the research community and can be (and has been) mandated (and the mandates work).

vi. So what are we waiting for?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum