Open Access Archivangelism

Jan Velterop, OA advocate, wrote in The Parachute:

"The 'sin' that RCUK, Finch and the Wellcome Trust committed is that they didn't formulate their policies according to strict Harnadian orthodoxy. It's not that they forbid Harnadian OA (a.k.a. 'green'). It is that they see the 'gold' route to OA as worthy of support as well. Harnad, as arbiter of Harnadian OA (he has acolytes), would like to see funder and institutional OA policies focus entirely and only on Harnadian OA, and would want them, to all intents and purposed, forbid the 'gold' route... It is the equivalent of opening the parachute only a split second before hitting the ground. "

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Peter Suber:

"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."

Stevan Harnad:

"If the UK first... — clearly and unambiguously mandates Green OA for all UK research output — then it is welcome to throw all the cash it has to spare on also subsidizing Gold OA if it so wishes. --- But not instead."

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]…"

Research Councils UK Policy on Access to Research Outputs:

[P]apers… funded by the Research Councils… must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy…

The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if… the journal provides [Gold] …

The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access…:

Where a publisher does not offer [Gold], the journal must allow [Green]

The crucial contingency, and the one that caused all the confusion about whether or not RCUK is truly continuing "to support a mixed approach" is that if a journal offers Gold, RCUK fundees must choose Gold. If so, the only thing that any subscription journal needs to do to ensure that RCUK authors cannot choose Green (and hence must pay for Gold) is to offer hybrid Gold.

That's the contingency that needs to be clearly and unambiguously dropped in order to fix the RCUK OA mandate and bring it into line with the EC mandate, as well as the adopted and planned OA mandates in the US.

Swan & Houghton's 2012 executive summary (as excerpted 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...."

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. JISC Information Environment Repository.