Open Access Archivangelism

Excerpts from ongoing discussion:

Glyn Moody:

OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy - if true, this looks disastrous for UK :Open and Shut?: OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy

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Cameron Neylon:

Disagree strongly with Stevan here. His main objection is that this will annoy researchers but to be honest the Wellcome has been taking this line for some years with no signs of revolt. Yes the question of pricing is core but what the RCUK policy does is push those purchasing decisions exactly where they should be, at the institutional/researcher level.

Its not a bug, its a feature.I disagree a lot of Stevan on strategy, which is fine, but from a tactical perspective I don't think what he's doing is at all helpful. He's basically alienating all the people we need to work with to get the implementation right. And because he has such a loud voice it is assumed that he speaks for a larger group than he does.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

+Cameron Neylon From reading the interview it seems to me that +Stevan Harnad's main objection is not that it will annoy researchers but that it creates a loophole for publishers to force authors to pay atronomical prices for Hybrid Gold OA instead of using Green OA. This does sound rather serious to me.

However I agree with you that instead of attacking the RCUK so harshly in public, he should instead just have talked to them directly, point out the problem he discovered and present his solution to them. He seems to be convinced that the RCUK opened the loophole by mistake and not on purpose, so they should be open to his recommendation.

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Cameron Neylon:

It's not a mistake its quite deliberate. RCUK position as I understand it is that they want to ensure there is a market - if authors don't like the price that journals are charging they should go elsewhere. I would prefer a green option in these cases myself but they're prepared to take the flack. What they can't do is set prices...as a QUANGO this would be illegal - what they can do is set up a system where there is price sensitivity and that's what they've done.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

But isn't that was Finch is aiming for as well?

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Cameron Neylon:

Finch doesn't really aim for anything - it suggests what the priorities are, but it's main weakness in my view was precisely in not providing a mechanism that constrains prices. Several routes to this: one is ensure a green option is allowed and viable (one sentence to this effect in Finch would have changed the whole tone). The second is to force researchers to be price sensitive - which seems to be the RCUK route. A third is for the funder to take on the price negotiations - this is the Wellcome approach.

An awful lot depends on how publishers respond. On previous evidence they will cave in, set prices as high as they think they can get away with, but not so high no-one will pay...which will get us close to a net neutral position, but with a functioning market that will then bring prices down.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

It seems that this is really the central question: How important will price be for authors? Will they favor a less well-known journal with similar quality but lower price, or will they stick with the prestigious journals, no matter the price?

Moving the decision to the authors is definitely a good start. I agree that with subscription-based journals the fact that authors don't have to care about the subscription price and can always go for the most prestigious journal is a huge problem.

Now we'll see how fast authors will adapt their decision process.
I surely will, since for me price will be a lot more important than Impact Factor - I aim for other ways of getting my work known anyway.

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Thomas Pfeiffer

I also wonder what +Peter Suber has to say about this?

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Peter Suber:

Hi +Thomas Pfeiffer: In general I'm with Stevan on this. The RCUK policy and the Finch recommendations fail to take good advantage of green OA. Like Stevan, I initially overestimated the role of green in the RCUK policy, but in conversation with the RCUK have come to a better understanding. In various blog posts since the two documents were released, I've criticized the under-reliance on green. I'm doing so again, more formally, in a forthcoming editorial in a major journal. I'm also writing up my views at greater length for the September issue of my newsletter (SPARC Open Access Newsletter).

For more background, I've argued for years that green and gold are complementary; I have a whole chapter on this in my new book . So we want both. But there are better and worse ways to combine them. Basically the RCUK and Finch Group give green a secondary or minimal role, and fail to take advantage of its ability to assure a fast and inexpensive transition to OA.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:
 

Thank you for stating your opinion here, +Peter Suber. I know that you have been promoting Green OA and I've read about your opinion on the Finch report and your initial very positive reaction to the RCUK policy. Seems like I missed your posts about your opinion on RCUK after a re-examining it, so it was interesting to know what you think about it by now.

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Cameron Neylon:
 

It's probably worth saying that I broadly agree with +Peter Suber 's position (and even to an extent Stevan's) but I disagree with Stevan's tactics. I don't think that the RCUK position is so bad - but its a question of degree. It also has to be understood in the context of the philosophical background to the policies. Stevan has generally argued from a public good perspective - more research available for researchers to read is a public good - rather than a technological or industrial policy perspective.

RCUK and Finch are coming from a much more innovation and industry focussed perspective. Their central motivation is to ensure that research is maximally available for exploitation. They don't want to rapidly get to a public access environment and then have to fight through to a CC-BY OA environment - they want CC-BY as the immediate goal and see this as the fastest way to get there. So the goals are somewhat different - which leads to a difference in tactics - but we can also disagree over whether the tactics are optimal given the goals.

FWIW I agree with Eve, the publishers know exactly how weak their position is and are unlikely to resort to extensive gouging. In turn we can use the differences in policy between the US, Europe, and the UK as a pincer to tackle both sets of issues (access and rights) simultaneously.

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

I concur. Until now I hadn't realized that the differences between preferring Gold or Green OA depended on the philosophical stance, but the way Cameron explains it, it absolutely makes sense. However I can't really say which position seems more valid to me, they both have good reasons speaking for them.

I can only say that most of my colleagues prefer Green OA - for the obvious reason that they want their research to be widely available but still want to publish in prestigious journals without paying high prices for it. 

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Cameron Neylon:

Yeh, the trouble I have with the whole "its free!" argument is that of course, it isn't. That seems to be getting missed in the discussion somewhere. We are paying for this - and we should be able to do this by at worse zero-sum with some transitional costs. Frustrating that people still believe the current system is "free".

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Stevan Harnad:

reply to +Cameron Neyon

1. PRIORITIES

Yes, free online access to refereed research (Gratis OA) + various re-use rights (Libre OA) is better than Gratis OA alone.

But free online access is incomparably more urgent and important for research and researchers than Libre OA today.

Universal Gratis OA worldwide is also fully reachable today, free of extra cost, via effective Green OA mandates from funders and institutions.

RCUK's is an ineffective mandate as currently formulated, insisting on paying extra for Libre Gold OA out of scarce research funds instead of providing cost-free Gratis Green OA. 

In its present form, the RCUK mandate will be resented and resisted by UK researchers and is unscalable to the rest of the world.

I hope its drafters will have the good sense and integrity to fix the RCUK mandate: It just needs two simple patches to make it effective and scalable.

Once Green OA is effectively mandated worldwide, affordable Gold OA and all the re-use rights users need and authors want to provide will follow.

But not if UK -- till now the worldwide leader in OA policy and provision -- instead cleaves to a needless, costly and unscalable RCUK OA policy.

2. ZERO-SUM REASONING AND ZENO'S PARALYSIS

Green OA self-archiving of articles published in subscription journals is completely free of extra cost while subscriptions are paying (in full, and fulsomely!) the cost of publication.

If and when global Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, then, and only then, should the (remaining, much reduced) costs of publication be paid for via Gold OA, out of a fraction of the subscription savings.

Not now, pre-emptively, before Green OA prevails -- or instead.

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Richard Poynder:

+Cameron Neylon wrote: "Stevan has generally argued from a public good perspective - more research available for researchers to read is a public good - rather than a technological or industrial policy perspective. RCUK and Finch are coming from a much more innovation and industry focussed perspective." 

I am not sure what industry Cameron is referring to here. Certainly, if Stevan is correct then the publishing industry has a great deal to gain from RCUK and Finch. However, I suspect he means that CC-BY can turn research papers into raw material that new businesses can use (by, for instance, mining their content). That's fine, but at what price?

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Stevan Harnad:

DECLARATION OF INTERESTS

@Thomas Pfeiffer wrote: "Until now I hadn't realized that the differences between preferring Gold or Green OA depended on the philosophical stance"

Thomas, I don't think the difference is a matter of philosophical stance. I think it depends on whose and what interests are motivating one's position on OA, Green OA and Gold OA.

I am happy to declare mine: They are the interests of research, researchers, and the general public whose taxes pay for the research and for whose ultimate benefit the research is funded and conducted. 

To a certain extent, the R&D industry also figures in this equation, but primarily as a user and applier of the research, just like researchers, and hence as a net contributor to the public good -- not merely as another proprietary means of creating wealth for itself, in the way the research publishing industry is doing. 

This applies especially to secondary content-based industries (e.g., Thomson-Reuters ISI, or Google or Connotea... or Mendeley) that now have a financial interest in "technologically enhancing" OA research output -- in much the same way that publishers stress that they are "technologically enhancing" their proprietary research content, in arguing that it should remain locked in their hands and continue to be paid for. 

Ironically, the interests of the OA-content enhancing industry can generate surprising stances, such as favouring extra payment for Gold OA over cost-free Green OA because it buys a form of Libre OA that is necessary for their product or service. This is a direct conflict of interest with the interests of research, researchers, and the general public who funds the research and for whose ultimate benefit the research is funded and conducted. 

Another ironic similarity between the interests of the content-enhancing industry is that they too, like the publishing industry, keep stressing that research -- both raw research and peer-reviewed research -- is "not free": Publishers stress this in defending the price of subscriptions or the price of Gold OA; content-enhancers stress this, again, in arguing for Gold OA payment for the Libre OA they need for their products and services. This is again in direct conflict of interest with the interests of research, researchers, and the general public who funds the research and in whose interest the research is being done. (It also makes no sense, because the costs in question are not the ones at issue: the publishing industry many times aired the canard that their access-tolls are somehow justified because the Internet is "not free"!)

I urge commentators, before they reply, to have another look at my short posting on PRIORITIES. Gold OA and Libre OA are secondarily beneficial to research, researchers and the public too, one because it may eventually reduce the proportion of potential research funds spent on publication instead of research, the other because it may eventually increase technologically the use and usefulness of research publication, communication and collaboration. 

But both of these are potential secondary benefits of OA. The most important and urgent benefit of OA is the primary one: making research accessible to all of its potential users, not just to those who can afford subscription access. And that means Gratis, Green OA.

And that is why it is quite disappointing when OA advocates opt, today, for paid Gold OA over cost-free Green OA, or Libre OA over Gratis OA. They are opting for the eventual, potential secondary benefits of OA over the actual, primary and long overdue benefits of OA for research, researchers and the public.

And doubly ironic, because making sure Green Gratis OA is provided today, through global Green Gratis OA mandates by funders and institutions worldwide, is the fastest, surest and by far the most affordable way to get from the status quo today not only to the Gratis OA that will at long last fulfill the primary needs of research, researchers and the public today, but eventually also to the Libre and Gold OA that will fulfill the secondary needs and further potentials as well. Hence delaying or deterring the former in the service of the latter, by favouring paid Gold over cost-free Green, is a real head-shaker (to me, at least). and not a philosophical one...

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

Thank you, +Stevan Harnad, for your detailed reply. Especially the reasoning about priorities and using Green OA for the transition from subscription to Gold OA makes sense to me.

Two things are still not clear to me about your interview and I'd be glad if you could clarify them:

1. Don't Green OA mandates restrict the choice of journal/publisher as well? Not all publishers allow self-archiving...

2. Have you presented your patches to their policy directly to RCUK yet? And if you did, what was their reaction? If they left open that "loophole" for Hybrid OA accidentally, I think they should be welcoming your suggestions.

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Cameron Neylon:

+Richard Poynder 
You ask about costs. Realistically the transitional costs should be somewhere between nothing and maybe £15M pa for a few years. The £50M is in many ways a rather silly figure. But the real answer is that the worst case scenario is  we do 1.5% less research for a few years - and frankly that is in the noise. It's such a small figure in the overall research budget that it seems silly to worry about that when we know that there are much bigger inefficiencies that can be addressed by OA.

But even if it did cost £50M to deliver OA to all RCUK funded outputs from April next year, wouldn't that be a bargain? We can start to save several hundred million on subscriptions, start to address the nearly £1B of lost economic activity due to SMEs not having access, we can get efficiencies in the research process of maybe 10%, maybe 50%, maybe 100%. Even if that costs £200M over four years and if its restricted to the UK I'd say its still a bargain.

And that's what the RCUK policy, even in its current form delivers. Authors have precisely two choices. Go to a journal that offers a gold option and take it. Or go to a journal that offers a green option with no more than 6 month embargoes. It reduces author choice but so does any effective mandate. It's working for Wellcome so I think it can be made to work here as well. But bottom line the policy delivers OA to the UK's RC funded output from April 2013 with at worst a six month embargo. The only real risk is that publishers form a cartel to agree to charge high prices. And that cartel is already broken by a range of OA publishers who charge much less than the average.

What I find frustrating is that I actually agree that it would be a more effective policy would be to offer the option to go green if Gold is too expensive - at least in the short term. I'm arguing for this - the PLOS position supports this because I argued for it internally - and I'm talking to folks about the details of implementation and arguing for it with the relevant people. But the firebombing of comment threads, the shouting at people who should be our allies is making my job harder and strengthening the hand of the publishers to ask for more money, on weaker terms, because they can represent the OA movement as being unreasonable, shouty, and fragmented.

What would be helpful is clear rational argument that supports the principle direction of both Finch and RCUK towards OA as fast as possible, but offers advice on the implementation - rather than outright rejection or acceptance. Making the economic case for green based on real numbers and offer it as advice, not as a shouting match, to the people who are on our side. Telling those in government and RCUK who are expending significant political capital to drive the OA agenda that they are idiots is not helpful. Claiming that green is free is not helpful. Showing how it is a cost effective as a strategy, engaging with those people and giving them the detailed modelling of how costs would pan out, is. Offering to help game out the different ways policy might have an impact, is. But doing it constructively, not combatively, and NOT IN ALL CAPS!

And finally there needs to be more listening and understanding of other's positions and perspectives. Stevan says above he speaks for the interests of researchers but he doesn't represent mine. Access to the literature isn't a problem for me, I can get any paper I want if I put my mind to it, albeit (possibly) illegally. Discovery of the right literature is a problem, aggregation of data is a problem. Similarly you dismiss the potential for enhancing innovation in your reply to me, but that is the government perspective. If you don't engage with that then they will give up and move on, and we will probably get some half baked licensing or public library scheme. 

We need to stop claiming we talk for people and starting talking with people. There are many different interests served by OA, some served perfectly well by Green or Gratis and some that are not. For those of us with needs not served, Green could be a dangerous distraction, just as Gold looks this way for those who believe Green is the fastest route to universal access.

But it doesn't have to be this way - we can use the strengths of both approaches and each in our own way push on both routes as far and as fast as we can. There's no need for this to be competitive. Paying for Libre in no way diminishes the value of Gratis and nor does having Gratis diminish the value in continuing to push for Libre. And both Green and Gold approaches can be complementary in keeping transitional costs under control. We can have both, arguably we need both, so lets get on with enabling both and let the market and communities decide which route works for them.

I wrote a long comment originally and lost it in an inadvertent click. Then thought this was good because I should write something shorter...then wrote something longer

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Thomas Pfeiffer:

I definitely agree with Cameron that it's better to talk with people instead of for people. Funders, OA publishers and researchers ultimately have the same goal, they just prefer different routes to it. That should not keep them from working together to reach the goal, though.

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Stevan Harnad:

REPAIRING THE RCUK MANDATE
Reply to +Thomas Pfeiffer

+Thomas Pfeiffer: "Don't Green OA mandates restrict the choice of journal/publisher as well?"

60% of journals formally recognize the author's right to provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA. Many of the remaining 40% ask for a Green OA embargo of 6-12 months. Some journals have embargoes of longer than 12 months.

Before the UK government gave all publishers the strong incentive -- by promising, as per the recommendations of the Finch Committee, to take the money to pay for it out of research funds -- to provide a Hybrid Gold OA option and make their Green OA embargoes much longer, to ensure that authors pay for Gold rather than provide cost-free Green, an ID/OA mandate with a maximal embargo of 6-12 months on Green OA would have been feasible, with minimal restriction on journal choice and maximal incentive on journals to minimize or eliminate their embargoes.

But now that the word is out that not only are the extra Gold OA funds to be there for the asking, but that RCUK even obliges authors to pick paid Gold over cost-free Green if Gold is offered, it is no longer possible for RCUK to require a maximum 6-12 month embargo length on Green OA.

The only way to fix the broken RCUK mandate with its perverse incentives and disincentive now is to urge rather than to require a maximum OA embargo of 6-12 months.

What a repaired RCUK mandate can require is:

PATCH 1: Repository deposit (with no exceptions) of the final refereed draft ,immediately upon acceptance for publication, by all fundees, irrespective of journal, urging that access to the deposit should be set as OA immediately if possible, or, at latest, 6 months after deposit (12 for AHRC and ESRC if necessary). (Meanwhile the repository's "email-eprint-request" Button can tide over research user needs during the embargo period by providing "Almost OA" with one click from the requester and one click from the author.)

That applies pressure on authors and journals for short or no embargoes, but it does not prevent authors from publishing in their journal of choice.

In addition:

PATCH 2: The condition that if the journal offers both Gold and Green the author must choose Gold should be dropped completely.

PATCH 3: Funds are available to pay to publish in a Gold OA journal, but only pure-Gold journals, not hybrid subscription/Gold.

+Thomas Pfeiffer: "Have you presented your patches to their policy directly to RCUK yet?"

RCUK did not consult me in designing their policy (though I did have some indirect information from some of the people RCUK did consult).

I have posted PATCH 1 and 2 prominently now. They are simple enough so that if there is a will to fix the policy, I trust that they can and will be done.

PATCH 3 is highly advisable, if there is the will for it, though, unlike 1 & 2 it is not absolutely essential.

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Stevan Harnad:

PRIORITIES, AGAIN
Reply to @Cameron Neylon
"TRANSITIONAL COSTS": It is not at all clear to me what Cameron's speculations about transitional costs of "between nothing and maybe £15M pa for a few years" are based on.

(I'm also not sure how "the worst case scenario is we do 1.5% less research for a few years - and frankly that is in the noise" would wash with researchers, even if were right on the money.)

Does anyone seriously imagine that if the UK, with its 6% of world research output, mandates Gold OA then all journals will convert to pure-Gold OA to accommodate the RCUK mandate?

Assuming the answer is no (and that Cameron does not imagine that all UK authors will therefore drop their existing journals and flock to the existing Gold OA journals), the only remaining option is hybrid Gold.

It is certainly conceivable (indeed virtually certain) that under the irresistible incentive of the current RCUK mandate virtually all journals will quickly come up with a Hybrid Gold option: What is also conceivable is that some journals will offer a discounted hybrid Gold option ("membership") to authors at universities that subscribe to that journal: Maybe even free hybrid Gold for those authors, as long as their university subscribes again the next year.

But that isn't a transition scenario, it's a subscription deal. It locks in current subscription rates and revenues and provides Gold OA for authors from subscribing institutions. How many papers? And what about authors from non-subscribing institutions? And how does this scale, globally and across time?

Subscriptions are sold and sustained on the demand by an institution for the whole of a journal's contents. But an institution's published papers per journal vary from year to year and from institution to institution, What is an institution's incentive to keep subscribing at a fixed rate? Especially if -- mirabile dictu -- the global proportion of Gold OA articles were to go up? (Reminder: You don't need a subscription to access those Gold articles!)

Publishers can do this simple reckoning too. So it is much more likely that the "quick" Hybrid Gold offered by most journals under RCUK pressure will not be based on free Gold OA for subscribers, but on charging extra for Gold OA. How much? It's up to the journal, since the mandate is just that if Gold is offered, it must be picked and paid for, if the journal is picked.

So the likelihood is that journals will charge a lot. (They already charge a lot for Gold OA.) The price per article is likely to be closer to 1/Nth of their gross revenues per article for a journal that publishes N articles per year. If they get that much per RCUK article, then that will bring in 6% more than their prior gross revenue annually, thanks to the UK's largesse..

We can speculate on how much publishers might reduce this 1/N, in order to hedge their bets, on the off-chance that it could also catch on in some other countries whose pockets full of spare research funds are not quite as deep as the UK's -- but why are we speculating like this? No one knows what will happen if UK authors are forced to pay for Gold and journals happily offer them hybrid Gold at an asking-price of the journal's choosing.

What's sure is that this kind of "transition" doesn't scale -- because other countries don't have the spare change to pay for OA this way -- and especially because it is still evident for those who are still thinking straight that OA can be provided, completely free of any extra cost whilst subscriptions are paying for publication, by mandating Green OA rather than paying pre-emptively for a "transition" to Gold OA.

And certainly not paying in order to enjoy the legendary benefits of Libre OA -- for authors who can't even be bothered to provide Gratis OA unless it is mandated! (At least every researcher today, both as author and user, has a concrete sense of the frustration of gratis-access denial as a non-subscriber: How many researchers have the faintest idea of what they are missing for lack of getting or giving libre OA re-use rights?)

I would also appreciate an explanation from Cameron of the reason behind his suggestion that "even if it did cost £50M to deliver OA to all RCUK funded outputs from April next year, wouldn't that be a bargain? We can start to save several hundred million on subscriptions":

Does Cameron imagine that UK institutions only subscribe to journals in order to gain access to their own UK research output? (Or has Cameron forgotten about hybrid Gold OA again?)

+Cameron Neylon: "It's working for Wellcome so I think it can be made to work here as well."

Is it? And if Wellcome pays to make all its funded research Gold OA, does that take care of Wellcome authors' access to research other than Wellcome-funded research?

+Cameron Neylon: "The only real risk is that publishers form a cartel to agree to charge high prices. And that cartel is already broken by a range of OA publishers who charge much less than the average."

Is that so? Are you not forgetting Hybrid Gold again? And authors' disinclination to give up their journal of choice in order to have to pay scarce research money for a Gold OA that they had to be mandated to act as if they wanted?

Being mandated to do a few extra keystrokes (to provide Green OA) as a condition of receiving research funding is one thing (and a familiar one), but having to give up your journal of choice and to shell out scarce research money (or possibly even some of your own dosh) is quite another.

+Cameron Neylon: "a more effective [RCUK] policy would be to offer the option to go green if Gold is too expensive… I'm… arguing for it with the relevant people"

Putting an arbitrary price-limit on the Gold fee is no solution for the profound flaw in the current RCUK policy. How much more than cost-free is "too expensive"? And why?

+Cameron Neylon: "the firebombing of comment threads… is making my job harder"

Thinking things through first might make it easier -- maybe even consulting those who might have thought them through already. ;>)

+Cameron Neylon: "Claiming that green is free is not helpful"

But while subscriptions are paying the cost of publishing in full, and fulsomely, it is, helpful or not, a fact.

+Cameron Neylon: "Showing how [Green] is cost effective as a strategy, engaging with those people and giving them the detailed modelling of how costs would pan out, is [helpful]."

I believe that's precisely what Alma Swan and John Houghton did, and their modelling and recommendations were ignored in the Finch and RCUK recommendations. Their recommendation was to mandate Green, not to pay pre-emptively for Gold. And they showed that the benefit/cost ratio was far higher for Green than Gold in the transition phase. (Post-Green Gold is another story, but we have to get there first; and the calculations confirm that mandating Green -- not paying pre-emptively for Gold while still paying for subscriptions -- is the way to get there from here.)

+Cameron Neylon: "Offering to help game out the different ways policy might have an impact, is [helpful]."

I offer to help.

Till now I have not been consulted in advance, so I have had no choice but to give my assessment after the policy (both Finch and RCUK) was announced as a fait accompli. My assessment was extremely negative, because both policies are just dreadful, and their defects are obvious.

But RCUK, at least, is easily reparable. I've described how. I'm happy to explain it to any policy-maker willing to listen to me.

(And if RCUK is fixed, that will indirectly fix Finch.)

+Cameron Neylon: "Stevan says above he speaks for the interests of researchers but he doesn't represent mine. Access to the literature isn't a problem for me, I can get any paper I want if I put my mind to it, albeit (possibly) illegally."

Cameron, that response does not scale, nor is it representative.

+Cameron Neylon: "Discovery of the right literature is a problem"

The only reason discovery of the right literature is a problem is that most of it is not yet OA! You can't "discover" what is not there, or not accessible. That's why we need Green (Gratis) OA mandates.

+Cameron Neylon: "you dismiss the potential for enhancing innovation in your reply to me, but that is the government perspective"

Cameron, you know as well as I do that "the government" could not explain what the slogan "potential for enhancing innovation" means to save its life. "The government" gets fed these slogans and buzzwords and "perspectives" by its advisors and lobbyists and spin-doctors.

Yes, it's near-miraculous that "the government" express any interest in OA at all. But it's up to those who actually know what they are talking about to go on to explain to them what it means, and what to do about it.

And anyone who still has his feet on the ground (rather than levitating on gold dust or rights rapture) knows that what is needed first and foremost, and as a necessary precondition for anything further, is Gratis OA (free online access), globally. We're nowhere near having it yet; and if RCUK persists in its present fatally flawed form, we'll have (at the very best) UK Gold OA (raising worldwide OA by 6% from about 22% to about 28%) plus a local, unscalable policy. (More likely, we will simply have a failed mandate, non-compliant authors, a lot of money and time wasted, and the UK no longer leading the worldwide OA movement, as it had been doing for the past 8 years.)

+Cameron Neylon: "There are many different interests served by OA, some served perfectly well by Green or Gratis and some that are not. For those of us with needs not served, Green could be a dangerous distraction, just as Gold looks this way for those who believe Green is the fastest route to universal access."

You seem to be conflating Libre and Gold here Cameron, but never mind. Gratis is for those who need free online access. Libre is for those who need free online access plus certain re-use rights. Green is for those who don't want to wait for all journals to go Gold and don't have the money to pay for Gold pre-emptively at today's asking prices while subscriptions are still being paid for. Gold is for those who are galled by subscription prices (and have other sources of money).

Gratis and Libre come as either Green or Gold, but Green has no extra cost (while subscriptions are being paid); and Libre is much harder to get subscription publishers to agree to. Moreover, all four include Gratis as a necessary condition.

So without tying oneself up into speculative and ideological knots (or a transport of gold fever or rights rapture), it looks as if Gratis OA via cost-free Green OA mandates are the way to go for now (with ID/OA and the Button mooting embargoes).

The rest (Libre, Gold) will come after we've mandated and provided Gratis Green globally. To insist on Libre Gold locally in the UK now, by paying extra for it pre-emptively, is just a way of ensuring that the UK no longer has a scalable global solution for OA at all. And without global Gratis OA at least, the UK's dearly purchased Gold amounts to Fool's Gold, insofar as UK access is concerned. (And remember way back, Cameron: Open Access was about access!)

+Cameron Neylon: "There's no need for this to be competitive. Paying for Libre in no way diminishes the value of Gratis and nor does having Gratis diminish the value in continuing to push for Libre. And both Green and Gold approaches can be complementary in keeping transitional costs under control. We can have both, arguably we need both"

I'm all for going for both -- as long as cost-free Green Gratis OA is mandated and Libre Gold is a bonus option one can choose if one wishes and has the money to pay for it. Not, as RCUK currently has it, where the author may not choose Green if a journal offers Gold. That is just fatal foolishness, aka, Fool's Gold.

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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.

       David A. Arnold wrote: "Stevan - you are wrong about RCUK madating green OA. It does not. The new RCUK policy only requires green OA if the journal does not offer gold OA. Since the vast majority of journals now offer a gold route, the green option is essentially redundant. Here is the wording:"

       The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access. The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if:

       1. The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on re-use. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher. The CC-BY license should be used in this case.

Or

       2. Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above, the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher’s formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period.

---

Here is my response to David. But as you will see, although I am doing my level best to disagree with him, in the end, it turns out he was basically right:

David, I think you are wrong that "the vast majority of journals offer a gold route".

I also think that you are misconstruing the RCUK "mixed" approach (and the semantics of "inclusive disjunction," i.e., "either A or B or both").

I think RCUK fundees can comply with the RCUK mandate by depositing a peer-reviewed draft in their OA institutional repository -- either the publishers version, by paying for Gold OA, or the author's final draft (possibly after an allowable embargo interval), i.e., Green OA.

My understanding is that the constraint on journal policy is intended to be on the journal (i.e., that the journal must either offer Gold OA or endorse Green OA within the allowable embargo interval) not on the author.

The idea is that journals should know in advance that an RCUK-funded author is under a prior contractual obligation, as a condition of funding, to publish only in a journal that either offers Gold OA or (allowably embargoed) Green OA.

I don't think the mandate is that if a journal offers both Gold and Green, then the author is obliged to pay for Gold instead of providing Green cost-free. (If it were, that would be extremely foolish and wasteful.)

However, I do think that there is a bug in the RCUK mandate that should on no account be imitated by other funders (and that should be corrected by RCUK):

(1) It is a big mistake to insist that an RCUK author must pay for Gold if his journal of choice is a hybrid Gold journal that offers Gold but does not endorse Green within the allowable embargo interval:

PATCH: Better to allow embargoed deposit and reliance on the repository's automated "email-eprint-request" Button to provide "Almost OA" during the embargo via one click from the user to request an individual copy for research purposes, and one click from the author to comply.

(2) Much more important than (1) is the distinct possibility that RCUK's mixed either/or policy provides an incentive to publishers -- even the publishers of the 60% of journals that already endorse immediate, un-embargoed Green OA today -- to change their policy so as to offer a high-priced hybrid Gold OA option, coupled with an infinitely long Green OA embargo, in order to ensure that the RCUK author must pay for hybrid Gold OA. This would be a terrible, unintended consequence of the RCUK policy, and a huge blow to OA and Green OA worldwide.

I cannot say whether the RCUK policy will have this terrible unintended consequence. All I can do is urge RCUK to patch it up -- and the rest of the world to ignore it.

The best solution would be the PATCH. If the RCUK is not patched, then I predict a tremendous (and justified) researcher revolt against the policy, with the result that the policy will not be complied with, and will have to be revised after a few lost fallow years of failure.

Other funders and institutions should learn a lesson from this: There is a trade-off between embargo-tolerance and OA-cost: If you don't want to induce journals to charge -- and oblige authors to pay -- needless and bloated hybrid Gold OA fees, don't try to constrain journal choice too radically: mandate immediate deposit (whether Gold or Green), specify an allowable Green OA embargo length (preferably no more than 6 months), but don't forbid authors to publish in journals whose embargo exceeds the specified length. Rely on the Button (and human nature) rather than forcing authors into gratuitous expenses, constrained journal choices, or non-compliance with the mandate.

Embargoes will die their well-deserved death as a natural matter of course, under the growing pressure of Green OA mandates, but not if a nonviable, unscalable mandate model is adopted.

Stevan Harnad

Anthony Watkinson wrote on LIBLICENSE:

"...There were three publishers on the Finch committee (out of seventeen members)... [1]

"...I do not know of any evidence that they had a special line to Finch herself or any special privileges.
I do not know of any special influence that representative bodies for publishing might have had.
Does Professor Harnad?... [2]

"...Some years ago Professor Harnad had a lot of influence on the conclusions of a Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee in the UK.
Perhaps he expects the same special channel he had then... [3] [boldface added]"

[1] Publishers on the Finch Committee
There were more than three publishers on the Finch committee -- Learned Societies are publishers too -- but three publishers would already be three publishers too many in a committee on providing open access to publicly funded research. (Besides, the lobbying began well before the Finch Committee, and already had a hand in how the Committee was constituted and where it was headed.)

Research is funded, conducted, refereed and reported as a service to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, and the public that pays for it all. Research is not a service to publishers: Publishers sell a service to research institutions, for which they are paid very handsomely. (I don't think any of this ruckus is about journal publishers being underpaid, is it?)

[2] Influence of Publishers on Finch Committee Outcome
The recommendations of the Finch committee were identical to the ones for which publishers have been lobbying aggressively for years (ever since it has become evident that trying to lobby against OA itself in the face of the mounting pressure for it from the research community is futile and very ill-received by the research community).

The publisher lobbying has accordingly been for the following:

"Please phase out Green OA as inadequate, parasitic and likely to destroy publishing and peer review -- and please provide extra money instead to pay us for Gold OA, if you want OA so much."

The Finch outcome was already pre-determined as a result of publisher lobbying before the committee was even constituted:

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…"

But that's all moot now, as both RCUK and EC have ignored it, instead re-affirming and strengthening their Green OA mandates the day after Mr. Willets announced the adoption of the recommendations of the Finch committee:

RCUK: "[P]eer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils... must be published in journals… [either] offering a “pay to publish” option [Gold OA] or allowing deposit in a subject or institutional repository [Green OA] after a mandated maximum embargo period… of no more than six months… except… AHRC and… ESRC where the maximum... is 12 months…"

[3] "Special Channel" on 2004 Select Committee?
The 2004 recommendations of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology were based on 23 oral testimonials and 127 written testimonials. Mine (part 1 and part 2) was one of the 127 written testimonials. If anything had influence on the outcome, it was evidence and reasons.

The 2004 Select Committee recommendation 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]he Report [also] recommends that the Research Councils each establish a fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish...”

At that time, despite the fact that the UK government (again under pressure from the publishing lobby) decided to ignore the Select Committee’s recommendation to mandate Green OA, RCUK and many UK universities adopted Green OA mandates anyway.

As a result, the UK became the global leader in the transition to Open Access.

If heeded, the Finch Committee recommendation to downgrade repository use to the storage and preservation of data, theses and unpublished work would have set back global OA by at least a decade.

Fortunately, the RCUK has again shown its sense and independence, reaffirming and strengthening its Green OA mandate. Let us hope UK’s universities — not pleased that scarce research funds, instead of being increased, are to be decreased to pay extra needlessly for Gold OA — will likewise continue to opt instead for cost-free Green OA by mandating it.

If so, the UK will again have earned and re-affirmed its leadership role in the global transition to universal OA.

---

Anthony Watkinson replied on LIBLICENSE:

"[In] 2003/2004 I was asked to be the expert adviser to the [UK Select] committee… and had a pleasant conversation with Ian Gibson, the member of parliament who was the committee chair. It seemed to me in our conversation that Dr. Gibson had already been lobbied by Professor Harnad or his disciplines [sic] and that his mind was already made up. I cannot remember now whether or not Dr. Gibson said that he had met Professor Harnad but it was definitely the impression I had."

"I am impressed by the suggestion that Professor Harnad actually thinks that learned societies, organisations that represent the academic communities, should not be involved in decisions which will have such an impact on the said academic communities!"

I am flattered that Dr. Watkinson feels I had special influence on Ian Gibson and his Select Committee. I wish I had had!

But alas the truth is as I have already written (above): I was not one of the 23 witnesses invited to give oral evidence (several publishers were).

Ian's parliamentary assistant Sarah Revell pencilled me in for a personal appointment on Wednesday October 13 2004 (depending on whether Ian's jury duty ended in time: it did), but my recall of that breathlessly brief audience was that it was too compressed for me to be able to stutter out much that made sense, and I left it pretty pessimistic.

And my subsequent over-zealous attempts to compensate for it via email were very politely but firmly discouraged by the committee's very able 2nd clerk, Emily Commander.

So my input to the Committee amounted to being one of the 127 who submitted written evidence, plus that tachylalic personal audience on the 13th.

The rest of the influence on the committee was from written reasons, not personal charisma.

I'm not aware of having had any "disciples," to lobby the Committee at that time (though extra disciplines, as well as discipline, are always handy in lobbying for the interests of research and researchers).

My understanding, however, is that Ian Gibson was indeed pre-lobbied in favour of OA, and indeed that's why the Committee was created. But that pre-lobbying in 2003 had been done by a Gold OA publisher, Vitek Tracz of BMC (and perhaps others), not by me; and the lobbying was not at all in favour of Green OA but in favour of Gold OA. This initial goldward bent is quite evident in the Committee's original call for evidence in late 2003, which was the first I ever heard of the Committee's existence:

"The Committee will be looking at access to journals within the scientific community, with particular reference to price and availability. It will be asking what measures are being taken in government, the publishing industry and academic institutions to ensure that researchers, teachers and students have access to the publications they need in order to carry out their work effectively.... What are the consequences of increasing numbers of open-access journals, for example for the operation of the Research Assessment Exercise and other selection processes? Should the Government support such a trend and, if so, how?"

As a result, the Committee's final decision to recommend that institutions and funders mandate Green and merely experiment with funding Gold was an unexpected surprise and delight to me. It also turned out to be a historic turning point and blueprint for OA worldwide.

As to publishers, and learned-society publishers: they are pretty much of a muchness in their fealty to their bottom lines. The only learned societies that could testify (for either the 2004 Gibson Committee or the 2012 Finch Committee) with a disinterested voice (let alone one that represented the interests of learned research rather than earned revenues) would be the learned societies that that were not also publishers.

Stevan Harnad

The seemingly selfless offer from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) to pay £1 million in hybrid Gold OA fees for its authors at institutions that subscribe to all the RSC's 72 journals is in reality a totally self-interested strategy for locking in RSC's current publishing revenue streams should the research community prove foolish enough to seek OA via the slow and costly route of paying pre-emptively for Gold OA instead of providing cost-free Green OA by self-archiving their refereed final drafts free for all online.

The hybrid Gold "membership/transition" strategy is not new: The same Trojan Horse offer has been made by Springer (but with little uptake) for a few years now, with a promise to lower subscription fees "proportionately" as hybrid Gold uptake rises.

The irony is doubled (and along with it the foolishness of researchers who fall for this option) by the fact that both RSC and Springer have already formally recognized their authors' right to provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA. See: SHERPA/ROMEO

Stevan Harnad

Paul Ayris's points in
"Why panning for gold may be detrimental to open access research"
are all spot on:

The UK Government -- under the palpable influence of ponderous (and successful) lobbying by the publishing industry lobby -- recommends that the UK should phase out extra-cost-free Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories and instead pay publishers extra for Gold OA out of scarce UK research funds, as recommended by the Finch Report. Fortunately, RCUK (and the EC) think otherwise and continue to mandate Green OA, in keeping with the UK Select Committee's historic recommendation in 2004.

There is also the question of the rest of the world, as only 6% of research journal content comes from the UK.

Paul writes:

"If the whole world turned open access tomorrow, the evidence suggests that the greatest savings would come from gold, rather than green, open access."

This is incorrect, because it omits the question of how the rest of the world is imagined to turn OA tomorrow:

1. If tomorrow the entire world, like the UK, immediately agreed pre-emptively to pay publishers' asking price for Gold OA, the world would have OA, but everyone would be paying more for publishing than they are paying now for subscriptions, because they would be paying for subscriptions plus pre-emptive Gold OA. Publishers would, of course, obligingly agree to cap total expenditure at what is today being paid for subscriptions, thereby ensuring their current revenue streams.

2. If tomorrow the entire world instead immediately mandated extra-cost-free Green OA, the world would have OA, and subscriptions would continue paying for subscriptions, at no extra cost or saving.

But the reality is that the entire world cannot and will not agree to pay publishers extra pre-emptively for Gold OA tomorrow, as the UK seems to have agreed to do. There will be an anarchic transition period, in which mandating extra-cost-free Green OA will be the much less expensive option.

And if Green OA nears or reaches 100% globally, institutions will finally able to cancel their subscriptions, forcing publishers to phase out the print and online edition, archiving and access-provision and their costs, downsizing to the management of the peer-review service and converting to Gold OA, whose far lower costs institutions will pay, per paper published, out of a fraction of their annual windfall savings from having cancelled subscriptions.

This is the contingency the publishing lobby managed to gull the gullible Finch Committee and UK government into overlooking completely in favour of a gratuitous rush to pan out pre-emptively for pre-Green Gold. (And this is the reason that pre-emptive Gold is such a foolish, unrealistic and costly option, whereas post-Green Gold will not only provide 100% OA but it will also lower overall publishing cost and expenditure substantially.

Swan, Alma & Houghton, John (2012) Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: further economic modelling. Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group, June 2012.

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. (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

From Swan & Houghton's 2012 executive summary (as quoted by Peter Suber in "Transition to green OA significantly less expensive than transition to gold OA" )

"Based on this analysis, the main findings are: [1] so long as research funders commit to paying publication costs for the research they fund, and [2] publication charges fall to the reprint author’s home institution, [3] all universities would see savings from (worldwide) Gold OA when article-processing charges are at the current averages, [4] research-intensive universities would see the greatest savings, and [5] in a transition period, providing Open Access through the Green route offers the greatest economic benefits to individual universities, unless additional funds are made available to cover Gold OA costs....[F]or all the sample universities during a transition period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing institutions around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university sampled. In a transition period, providing OA through the Green route would have substantial economic benefits for universities, unless additional funds were released for Gold OA, beyond those already available through the Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust...."

Stevan Harnad

asks:

"Is “gold” open access necessary to provide the financial resources to make open access a reality?"

No. Institutional subscriptions are already paying the cost of publication, in full, handsomely, today. No need to pay still more for Gold OA while subscriptions are still paying the bill: Just mandate Green OA self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed final draft.

That's exactly what RCUK and EC research funders are mandating. All insitutions and funders worldwide need to do the same, and global OA will be a reality.

"Are taxpayers who have paid for the research entitled to the free access that “green” open access promises?"

Of course. And all their funders and institutions need to do is mandate Green OA, as RCUK, EC, NIH and other funders, as well as UCL, Harvard, MIT and other institutions have begun to do (see ROARMAP).

"Is there a hybrid model that preserves the positive elements of both “gold” and “green” models?"

The RCUK & EC mandates are already hybrid Green+Gold: They mandate Green and provide funds for Gold.

But research money is already overstretched today. Gold need not be paid for in advance (pre-emptively) until and unless universal Green has caused global subscription cancelation, making subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering the cost of publication. Then journals will downsize to providing just the peer review service alone and convert to Gold OA, paid for, per paper published, by the authors' institutions, out of a small portion of the windfall savings freed up by the subscription cancelations made possible by the universal availability of the Green OA version.

That's a scalable, affordable and sustainable post-Green Gold "hybrid".

In contrast, pre-emptive payment for hybrid subscription+Gold, pre-Green, as Finch/Willets have recommended, is not: It's just the needless and senseless waste of a lot of public money for little OA in return.

The only interest served by paying for pre-emptive hybrid subscription+Gold today is publshers' self-interest, in preserving their current bloated revenue streams, come what may, whilst holding Green OA at bay, at the cost of both lost research access and lost research funding.

"Where does peer review and quality assurance fit in to all of this?"

Peer review is quality assurance, and it never left! Green OA is the self-archiving of peer-reviewed papers, the peer review being paid for by institutional subscriptions. Post-Green OA-Gold OA is the peer review service itself, paid for out of the subscription cancelations.

It is pre-emptive, pre-Green payment for hybrid subscription+Gold that is a needless and senseless waste of a lot of public money for little OA in return.

The only interest served by paying pre-emptively for hybrid subscription+Gold today is publshers' self-interest in preserving their current bloated revenue streams, come what may, whilst keeping Green OA at bay, at the cost of both lost research access and lost research funding.

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

---

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.

---

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