Open Access Archivangelism

The Finch Report, under strong and palpable influence from the publishing lobby, instead of recommending extending and optimizing the UK's worldwide lead in providing Green OA, cost-free, through institutional and funder self-archiving mandates, has recommended abandoning Green OA and Green OA mandates and instead spending extra money (£50-60 million yearly) on paying publishers' Gold OA fees as well as a UK blanket national site-license fee to cover whatever is not yet Gold OA (i.e., all the journals that UK institutions currently subscribe to, rather like the "Big Deals" publishers have been successfully negotiating with individual institutions and consortia):

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]…"

Finch on Gold: "Gold" open access, funded by article charges, should be seen as "the main vehicle for the publication of research"… Public funders should establish "more effective and flexible arrangements" to pay [Gold OA] article charges… During the transition to [Gold] open access, funding should be found to extend licences [subscriptions] for non-open-access content to the whole UK higher education and health sectors…

Now here are some of the actual figures behind the above assertions. Let readers come to their own conclusions about the relative success, cost, benefits, cost-effectiveness, growth potential and timetable of mandating Green OA vs funding Gold OA:

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1. Mandated vs. Unmandated Green OA (20% vs 70%+):

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2. Rise of Green Mandates:

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3. Rise of Green OA, 2009-2011:

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4. Rise of Gold OA 2003-2011 (from Nature, 2012)
(N.B.: Re-scaled at right for accurate comparison with rise of Green, above):

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5. Projected rise of Gold OA (70% in 2020 or 2026; 100% in 2022 or 2029):

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6. Relative Green and Gold OA Worldwide in 2010

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7. Relative Green and Gold OA in United Kingdom in 2010 (from Nature, 2012)

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8. The OA Citation Impact Advantage: (OA vs. non-OA)

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9. The OA Economic Advantage for the United Kingdom:

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Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLoS ONE 5(6): e11273.

Finch, Dame Janet et al (2012) Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications. Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5 (10) e13636

Gargouri, Yassine; Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Stevan Harnad (2012) Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline. In, 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

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. (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. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59.

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

Hitchcock, Steve (2012) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.

Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2009) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

Houghton, John, Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2011) Access to research and technical information in Denmark. Report to The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (FI) and Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF)

Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, et al. (2011) The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961

Poynder, Richard (2011) Open Access by Numbers. Open and Shut, 19 June 2011

ROAR Registry of Open Access Repositories

ROARMAP Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies

Van Noorden, Richard (2012) Britain aims for broad open access. Nature News 19 January 2012.