Self-Archiving Mandates

Gold OA institutional "membership" is incoherent and does not scale. It only gives the illusion of making sense if you think of it locally, and myopically. Annual institutional subscriptions to journals containing the annual outgoing refereed research of all other institutions do not morph into annual institutional memberships for publishing each institution's own outgoing refereed research. There are 25,000 journals and 10,000 institutions! Is every single institution to commit and contract in advance to pay for its authors' (potential) fraction of annual submissions to every single journal? Is that a "membership" or a distributed dismemberment? And is every journal to commit and contract in advance to accept every institution's annual fraction of submissions? (Is that peer review?) This is a global oligopolistic illusion that would fit publishers just about as well as it would fit McDonalds, except there are at least 25,000 different journals to "join", and institutions each have thousands of author-consumers with diverse dietary needs, varying day to day and year to year.

Part of the illusion of coherence comes from thinking in terms of journal-fleet publishers instead of individual journal article submissions. But this is merely another variant of the "Big Deal" strategy that has done nothing to solve either the accessibility or the affordability problem. The reality is that (Gold) OA publishing is premature today, except as a proof of principle. What is needed first is for universal (Green) OA self-archiving mandates to be adopted by institutions and funders. That will provide universal (Green) OA, which may eventually generate cancellation pressure that will induce journals to cut obsolete costs and products/services by downsizing to just providing peer review, paid for by individual institutions on an individual outgoing article basis out of a fraction of their annual windfall savings from their institutional subscription cancellations. To buy into "memberships" with fleet publishers now, pre-emptively, and at current prices, while the money is still tied up in subscriptions (which cannot, of course, be cancelled in advance, before OA) is both penny- and pound-foolish -- and downright absurd if a "member" institution has not even first mandated Green OA self-archiving for all of its own refereed research output...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum