Open Access Archivangelism

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RETRACTION:
Yes, RCUK did follow almost the same lines that Robert Kiley helped set down in the Finch Committee.

Finch recommends only funding Gold and downgrading Green to preservation archiving. RCUK allows Green, but only if a publisher does not offer Gold. If a subscription publisher offers hybrid Gold as well as Green, RCUK authors must pick and pay for Gold.

Robert Kiley is right -- and the result is right disastrous, both for worldwide OA and for the UK's former leadership on OA policy.

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Robert Kiley [Wellcome Trust] wrote in GOAL:

My reading of the RCUK policy is somewhat different to Stevan’s. In short, I see clear parallels between what Finch recommended (disclosure – I sat on the Finch Working Group) and the RCUK policy...

Finch recommended gold OA and flexible funding arrangements to cover OA gold costs. RCUK have released a policy that allows for gold publishing, and provides flexible funding (via block grants to HEI’s) to support these aims.

Finch said when publishers didn't offer a mechanism to pay for OA gold, it was reasonable for funders to demand an embargo period of less than 12 months. [See paragraph 9.10 of the Finch Report]. The RCUK have followed this.

Finch said that support of OA publications should be supported by policies to “minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use”. RCUK have followed this, and indeed pushed further to require than when an APC is levied the article must be published under a CC-BY licence. This is identical to the policy change the Wellcome Trust announced at the end of June....

There were a long string of posts on this forum at the end of last week calling for an end to the counter-productive squabbling over the minutiae of differences between green and gold, the obsession with costing models, etc. The RCUK policy is entirely compatible with the recommendations of the Finch Report, and continually rubbishing Finch seems counter-productive on many levels.

In response to Robert, let's keep it simple and go straight to the heart of the matter:

1. Ever since the historic 2004 Report of the UK Parliamentary Select Committee which made the revolutionary recommendation to mandate (what has since come to be called) Green OA self-archiving as well as to fund (what has since come to be called) Gold OA journal fees, RCUK (and later the EC and other funding councils worldwide) have been mandating Green and funding Gold.

2. The Finch report recommended phasing out Green and only funding Gold.

3. RCUK and EC declined to follow the Finch recommendation and reaffirmed (and strengthened) their Green OA mandates.

That's the substance of the "squabbling over the minutiae of differences between green and gold".

The Finch Report is "compatible with the recommendations of the Finch Report" only in the sense that -A & B is more "compatible" with A & B than with A & -B. (RCUK could, I suppose, have retained its Green mandate but dropped its Gold funding, contradicting its own prior policy, but it did not…)

The Wellcome Trust's pioneering historic lead in OA has since 2004 alas hardened into rigid dogma, at the cost of much lost growth potential for OA (as well as of much potential research funding).

The 2004 UK's Parliamentary Select Committee's prescient recommendation eight years ago had been this:

“This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way... [T]o encourage… experimentation… the Report [also] recommends that the Research Councils each establish [an experimental] fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish...”

CC-BY is not nearly as urgent and important as "Gratis" OA (free online access): not all authors want it, most users don't need it, and it would immediately make endorsing un-embargoed Green ruinous to subscription publishers: so demanding it today, pre-emptively leads to less OA and longer embargoes (just as demand for pre-emptive Gold does). See: "Overselling the Importance and Urgency of CC-BY/CC-BY-NC for Peer-Reviewed Scholarly and Scientific Research."

(Lest it sound as if I am lauding the pre-emptive funding of Gold today: I am not. It was historically important to demonstrate that fee-based Gold OA is conceivable and viable, in order to fend off the publishing lobby's doomsday contention that OA would destroy publishing. So the early Gold OA proof-of-principle, especially by PLOS-Biology and PLOS-Medicine, was very timely and useful. But the subsequent mindless Gold Rush, at the expense of neglecting the enormous power of cost-free Green OA mandates to accelerate the growth of OA, not to mention the needless waste of money diverted from research to fund Gold pre-emptively, have been exceedingly detrimental to overall OA growth. The simplest way to summarize the underlying logic and pragmatics is that pre-Green-OA pre-emptive Gold OA, at today's inflated asking prices and while subscriptions still prevail, is extremely bad for OA progress: wasteful, unscalable, and unsustainable, it generates very little global OA, very slowly. In contrast, post-Green-OA, downsized Gold OA, once Green OA has prevailed globally, making subscriptions unsustainable and forcing journals to downsize and convert to Gold OA for peer review service alone, at a far lower cost, paid out of subscription cancelation savings instead of scarce research funds, will be affordable, scalable and sustainable)

Stevan Harnad

1. "Open Access" does not mean "Open Access Publishing."

2. "Open Access" (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed, published journal articles.

3. OA comes in two "degrees": "Gratis" OA is free online access and "Libre" OA is free online access plus various re-use rights. (Most of the discussion right now is about Gratis OA, which is the most important, urgent and reachable degree of OA.)

4. Authors can provide OA in two ways: (4a) by publishing in a subscription journal and making their final, peer-reviewed drafts free for all online by self-archiving them in their OA institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication ("Green OA") or (4b) by paying to publish them in an OA journal that makes them free for all online ("Gold OA").

5. Both Green OA and Gold OA is peer-reviewed: no difference there.

6. But Gold OA costs extra money (which the Finch Report proposes to take out of already-scarce research funds).

7. Green OA is free of extra cost (because subscriptions are still paying in full -- and handsomely -- for publication).

8. About 60% of journals officially recognize their authors' right to provide immediate Green OA, but about 40% impose an embargo of 6-12 months or longer before their authors may provide Green OA.

9. All the UK Research Councils (RCUK) mandate that their authors provide Green OA with a maximum allowable embargo of 6 months (12 for AHRC and ESRC). They also make some funds available to pay Gold OA fees.

10. The Finch report, under very strong lobbying pressure from publishers, recommended that cost-free Green OA be phased out and that only funded Gold OA should be provided.

11. Both RCUK and the EC demurred, and continue to mandates Green OA as well as funding Gold OA.

12. The tumult from researchers and OA advocates is about the diversion of scarce research funds to pricey Gold OA what Green OA can be provided cost-free.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed). The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

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. (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

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Professor Adam Tickell (pro-VC, U. Birminhgam): "Critically, the minister for universities and science wanted to ensure that all relevant stakeholders - universities, funders, learned societies and publishers - were represented"

The only "relevant stakeholders" are those by and for whom research is funded, conducted, refereed and reported. That does not include publishers, whether commercial or learned-society.

Professor Tickell: "Open access is not a significant issue for most academic researchers: we already have access to most research papers."

In searching the latest literature in his field, is Adam Tickell one of the rare academics who has not reached (frequently) an access-denied link offering pay-to-view with a hefty price-tag?

Is it not as evident in Birmingham that most universities can only afford to subscribe to a fraction of the peer-reviewed research journals published annually, and that even the university with the biggest serials budget -- Harvard -- has announced that it can no longer sustain it?

Professor Tickell: "Many UK-based learned societies rely on income from publishing - most of which is export income - to remain viable"

Are Green Open Access Mandates rendering anyone's publishing income nonviable?

And are learned societies' interests the interests of learned research or the interests of sustaining learned societies' publishing income?

Professor Tickell: "As green was unacceptable to funders unless learned societies and publishers were willing to allow it with minimal embargo periods (which would undermine their business models), the group recommended gold as part of a mix that includes elements of all forms of open access."

Are the interests of publishers, whether commercial or learned-society, the arbiters of what is in the interest of those by and for whom research is funded, conducted, refereed and reported? And what was the green part of the Finch "mix"? This?:

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]…"

Stevan Harnad