Open Access Archivangelism

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For more details, please see:
http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/oa-advocate-stevan-harnad-withdraws_26.html

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THE ECONOMICS OF HYBRID GOLD OA
WHEN SUPPORTED BY ILL-DESIGNED OA MANDATES
Suppose you're a subscription journal publisher. Adding a Hybrid (Subscription/Gold) Open Access (OA) option means you keep selling subscriptions as before, but -- on top of that -- you charge (whatever you like) as an extra fee for selling Gold OA, for a single article, to any author who agrees to pay extra for it.

How much do you charge? It's up to you. For example, if you publish 100 articles per year and your total annual revenue is $X, you can charge 1% of $X for hybrid Gold OA per article.

Once you've got that for 1% of your articles (plus your unaltered subscription revenue of $X) you've earned $X + 1% for that year.

Good business.

And now in the UK -- thanks to the Finch committee recommendations and the revised RCUK OA policy -- if the UK provides 6% of the world's research articles yearly, then on average 6% of the articles in any journal will be fee-based hybrid Gold OA. That means worldwide publisher revenue -- let's say it's $XXX per year -- will increase :

from $XXX per year to $XXX + 6% per year
at the UK tax-payer's (and UK research's) expense.

Not bad.

Publishers are not too dense to do the above arithmetic. They've already done it. That is what hybrid Gold is predicated upon. And that is why publishers are so pleased with Finch/RCUK: "The world purports to want OA? Fine. We're ready to sell it to them -- on top of what we're selling them already."

In the UK, Finch and RCUK have obligingly eliminated hybrid Gold OA's only real competition (Green OA) -- Finch by ignoring it completely, and RCUK by forcing fundees to pay for Gold -- rather than to provide cost-free green -- whenever the publisher has the sense to offer hybrid Gold.


Of course, publishers will say (and sometimes even mean it) that they are not really trying to inflate their already ample income even further. As the uptake of hybrid Gold increases, they will proportionately lower the cost of subscriptions -- until subscriptions are gone, and all that's left, like the Cheshire Cat's grin, is Gold OA revenue (now no longer hybrid but "pure") -- and at the same bloated levels as today's subscriptions.

So what? The goal, after all, was always OA, not Green OA or Gold OA or saving money on subscriptions. Who cares if all that money is being wasted?

I don't.

I care about all the time (and with it all the OA usage and impact and research progress) that has been lost for so many years already, and that will continue to be lost, if the ill-informed, short-sighted and profligate Finch/RCUK policy prevails instead of being (easily) corrected.

Uncorrected, both global OA growth and precious time will continue to be wasted. The joint thrall of Gold Fever (the belief that "OA" means "Gold OA," together with an irresistible desire to have Gold OA now, no matter what the cost, come what may) and Rights Rapture (the irresistible desire for certain further re-use rights, over and above free online access, even though only a few fields need them, whereas all fields urgently need -- and lack -- free online access) keeps the research community from mandating the cost-free Green OA that is already fully within their reach and would bring them 100% OA globally in next to no time. Instead, they are left chasing along the CC-BYways after gold dust year upon year, at unaffordable, unnecessary, unsustainable and unscalable extra cost.

RESCUING RCUK
Let's hope that RCUK will have the sense and integrity to recognize its mistake, once the unintended negative consequences are pointed out, and will promptly correct it. The current RCUK policy can still be made workable with two simple patches, to prevent publisher-imposed embargoes on Green OA from being used to force authors to pay for hybrid Gold OA:

RCUK should:

(1) Drop the implication that if a journal offers both Green and Gold, then RCUK fundees must pick Gold

and

(2) Urge but do not require that the Green option must be within the allowable embargo interval.

(The deposit of the refereed final draft would still have to be done immediately upon publication, but the repository’s “email-eprint-request” Button could be used to tide over user needs by providing “Almost-OA” during the embargo.)

That way RCUK fundees (i) must all deposit immediately (no exceptions), (ii) must make the deposit Green OA immediately or as soon as possible and (not or) (iii) may pay for Gold OA (if the money is available and the author wishes):

Green OA:
(a) Immediate repository deposit of (at least) the final draft is required
(b) Making access to deposit Gratis OA immediately is urged
(c) Maximal Gratis OA embargo of 6 months (12 months for AHRC & ESRC) is allowed
(d) Libre OA license adoption wherever possible, and desired by author, is recommended

OR
Gold OA:
(e) Immediate repository deposit of (at least) version of record is required
(f) Making access to deposit OA immediately is required
(g) Adoption of Libre OA License (if desired by author) is urged

This ensures that publishers (1) cannot use embargoes to force authors to pay for hybrid Gold and that authors (2) retain their freedom to choose whether or not to pay for Gold, (3) whether or not to adopt a Libre license (where it is possible) and (4) which journal to publish in.

Stevan Harnad

Image: Judith Economos; license: CC-BY.