Open Access Archivangelism

On Monday November 26 2012, a Hungarian MP, Márton Gyöngyösy, deputy leader of the extreme right "Jobbik" Party, called for the creation of a race-based list, on the grounds of risks to Hungarian national security.

This all-too-familiar burst of base bigotry from the Jobbik party in Hungary's parliament has deflected attention from an even more ominous event that passed unnoticed, in the very same place, on the very same day: Electoral gerrymandering designed to keep the governing Fidesz Party in power.

As Marton Dornbach points out below in his remarkably insightful commentary from the Hungarian Spectrum -- reproduced in full and slightly updated by the author -- Fidesz is just playing "good cop" to Jobbik's "bad cop".

The two right-wing parties are only distinguishable by the fact that Jobbik's hallmark is psychopathic bigotry, whereas Fidesz's hallmark is psychopathic opportunism. Both are sinking Hungary deeper and deeper, downward and backward, toward an ugly, resentful autocracy and xenophobia to which Hungary is no stranger, and from which it has not yet made the sincere effort to dissociate itself that has been made by the other nations of Europe.

Hungary has a majority of decent, fair-minded people, like every other nation in the world. It is not beyond hope that world outrage at this pair of incidents may help them to rally against these two pernicious parties, Fidesz and Jobbik, that have already done Hungary so much harm, and oust them decisively, once and for all, in the next election, despite Fidesz's shameless and disgraceful efforts to make this so much more difficult to do.

---

Marton Dornbach: "The thing that is really important here, in my opinion, is not that Márton Gyöngyösi is a Nazi. Most of us realized a while ago that Jobbik is a virulently racist Neo-Nazi party. This is no news. It is also no news, unfortunately, that the ruling party is willing to go to great lengths to avoid unequivocal and firm condemnation of Nazi talk (incidentally, the most disgracefully equivocal part of Zsolt Németh’s response was the formulation he chose: he said the number of Jews in government “is not particularly closely related” to the severity of the conflict in the Middle East /”nem nagyon kapcsolódik ahhoz”/)

"No, the most newsworthy aspect of this incident is the timing. Gyöngyösi’s statements came five days after the ceasefire in Gaza was announced. So there was nothing particularly topical about his sick proposal. In any case, thugs like him never needed a pretext for Jew-baiting. Why now then?

"Well, it so happens that, on the very same day that MGy made this demented proposal, the Fidesz supermajority put a stake through the barely-beating heart of Hungarian democracy by abolishing universal voting rights and introducing an exceptionally restrictive form of mandatory voter registration. You wouldn’t know this from the foreign media coverage of the Monday parliamentary session; but that’s precisely the point. Especially in the international media, but in Hungary too, the abolition of universal voting rights was completely eclipsed by this Nazi provocation. After all, viewed from London or Washington or Brussels it is so much easier to relate to Nazism than to election technicalities in a small country. So much easier for journalists to cover the former than the latter.

"But let’s put things in perspective. Unfortunately, there always were and perhaps there always will be sick racists who harbor genocidal fantasies. The fact that Hungarian society as a whole fails to ostracize such people and/or treat them as psychiatric cases is a sign of a civilizational breakdown. However, there is no real danger of Gyöngyösi’s proposal being implemented (although in this respect we all know that nothing is impossible). Without denying that anti-Semitism is alarmingly widespread in Hungary and has a potential to produce violent outbursts, I think it is safe to say that the only group of people in Hungary that faces systematic discrimination and harassment on account of ethnic origins is the Roma. So we should see MGy’s statement as a purely symbolic act of transgression whose sole purpose was to shock and draw attention.

"Unlike MGy’s proposal, the election law passed on the very same day is certain to have very real future consequences. It drastically reduces the chances of Orban’s opposition. Let’s be clear about this: the introduction of severely restrictive voter registration rules in a country with a perfectly well-functioning central registry is an unprecedented disgrace. It is the most overt violation of basic democratic principles even in the sordid record of the Orban regime’s power grab. This is the outrage that is being overlooked amid the (absolutely justified) uproar about the latest Nazi provocation by Jobbik. Look at the foreign coverage of what happened on Monday in the Hungarian parliament: there is no reference to the election law, no reference to Zsolt Nemeth’s appalling non-response, while most outlets state that the Hungarian government has condemned the provocation “in the strongest terms” (if only!) The whole story is a PR coup for Fidesz. In keeping with the line of defense adopted by numerous diplomatic and journalistic apologetes of the regime, this incident has given Fidesz yet another opportunity to play good cop to Jobbik's s bad cop.

To conclude, I find it almost impossible not to raise the obvious, admittedly speculative, question: Cui bono? Who is benefitting from all of this? To my mind at least the timing of this crass provocation invites the conjecture that there may be (tacit or not-so-tacit) co-operation between the Neo-Nazi Jobbik party and the ruling Fidesz supermajority. And let’s not forget here two points: it is not inconceivable that Fidesz may need to form a coalition with Jobbik to stay in power after 2014; and Jobbik is the other party, beside Fidesz, which stands to gain from the new voter registration rules.
      -- original comment, edited by the author, Marton Dornbach

---

Here is some background reading on last year's symptoms of Hungary's downward trajectory already noted in this blog:

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Hungary's Philosophy Affair: Bringing It All Out Into The Open

Open Letter to President of Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Response of President of Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The Hungarian Philosopher Affair: On Nyiri on Martyrdom

The Hungarian Philosopher Affair: On Hornok on 1919

The Hungarian Philosopher Affair: On Vancsó on Smoke Screens

The Hungarian Philosopher Affair: On "Magyar" On White Collar Crime

Quod Erat ad Demonstrandum (QED)

Claudio Aspesi, BernsteinResearch: “We estimate that a full transition to OA could lead to savings in the region of 10-12% of the cost base of a subscription publisher.”

Richard Poynder, on the Global Open Access List (GOAL): "The key question: if that estimate is accurate, will those savings be passed on to the research community?"

I think that what Richard is worrying about here is whether the cost-cutting that a transition from subscription publishing to Gold OA publishing would make possible (e.g., curtailing the print edition) would be reflected in lower Gold OA charges to the author/institution or they would simply be absorbed by the publisher (Aspesi's (2012) test case being Elsevier), leaving Gold OA charges higher than they need to be.

I join this speculation and counter-speculation only reluctantly, for two reasons:

(1) I think there are significant transition factors that none of the economic analyses has yet fully taken into account, and hence that the potential savings are still being considerably underestimated.

(2) I also think this focus on predicting the costs of Gold OA just reinforces the excessive preoccupation with estimating the costs and benefits of pre-emptive Gold OA rather than the costs and benefits of OA itself, and what is needed, practically, for facilitating a transition to OA itself, rather than just a direct transition to Gold OA in particular.

Post-Green Gold will cost far less than the pre-emptive pre-Green Gold that the economic analyses keep estimating.

We keep counting the "savings" from generic Gold OA publishing without reckoning how to get there, and whether the transition itself might not be a major determinant in the potential for savings (from OA as well as from Gold OA).

I am not an economist, so I will not try to do anything more than to point out the main factor that I believe the economic analyses are failing to take into account:

If Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories is mandated globally by institutions and funders, this will have two major consequences:

I. First, not only will globally mandated Green OA provide universal OA (and all of its benefits, scientific and economic) alongside subscription publishing, at minimal additional cost (because (a) repositories are relatively cheap to create and maintain, (b) most research-active institutions have created repositories already, and (c) have done so for multiple purposes, OA being only one of them).

II. Second, mandating Green OA globally (unlike pre-emptive Gold OA) also puts competitive pressure on subscription publishers to cut obsolete costs, because the universal availability of the Green OA version makes it much easier for cash-strapped institutions to cancel their journal subscriptions.

Not only can the print edition and its costs be phased out under cancelation pressure from global Green OA, but so can the publisher's online edition and version of record: The worldwide network of Green OA repositories and their many central harvesters are perfectly capable of generating, hosting, archiving and providing access to the version-of-record. No more PDF or XML needed from the publisher; nor archiving; nor access provision; nor marketing; nor fulfillment. Nor any of their associated expenses.

All that's needed from the publisher is the service of managing the peer review (peers review for free) and the certification of its outcome with the journal's title and track-record.

That's post-Green Gold OA publishing. Compared to that, all the economical estimates of savings are under-estimates.

Nor will there be any need -- with post-Green Gold OA -- for mega-publishers (like Elsevier), publishing vast fleets of unrelated journals; nor for mega-journals (like PLoS ONE, now the biggest journal in the world, twice as big as the next-biggest one), publishing vast flocks of unrelated articles. There are many narrow research specialities, a few wider ones, and a few even wider, multidisciplinary ones. They each have their own peers and readerships, and they each need their own peer-reviewed journals; depending on the size of the field, some fields will need several journals, forming a pyramid of quality standards, the most selective (hence smallest) at the top.

There may indeed have been economies of scale for multiple journal production in the Gutenberg days. But in the PostGutenberg era, with post-Green Gold OA journals, providing solely the service of peer review, there will be no need for generic refereeing being mass-marketed by generic editorial assistants for mega-publishers or mega-journals, where no one other than the referee (if competently selected!) knows anything about the subject matter.

So besides scaling down to the post-Green OA essentials, post-Green Gold OA journals will also revert to being the independent, peer-based titles that they were before being jointly bought up for by the post-Maxwellian publisher megalopolies. The online-era economies will come from restoring journals to their own natural speciality scale rather than from agglomerating them into generic multiple money-makers for superfluous middlemen who simply commodify what scholars give away and seek.

Aspesi, C (2012) Reed Elsevier: Transitioning to Open Access - Are the Cost Savings Sufficient to Protect Margins? BernsteinResearch November 26

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

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

Harnad, S. (2010a) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

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

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest. Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold”

Unilateral Gold OA instead of Green
is the losing choice
in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma
(think about it!)

	UniGreen (World):	UniGold (World):
UniGreen (UK):	win/win	win/lose
UniGold (UK):	lose/win	win/win

Houghton & Swan 2012:

"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA.

However, we are not in an OA world...

"At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university.

"Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold”

Preamble: If you wish to sample some of the most absurd, incoherent, pseudo-legal gibberish on the subject of "rights" retention, "systematicity" and free will, please have a look at what follows under "Elsevier Article Posting Policies" below. (And bear in mind that an institution only provides a tiny fraction of any journal's content.)

Any author foolish enough to be intimidated by this kind of garbled double-talk deserves everything that's coming to him.

My Advice to Authors: Ignore this embarrassing, self-contradictory nonsense completely and exercise your retained "right" to post your final refereed draft ("AAM") in your institutional repository immediately upon acceptance, whether or not it is mandatory, secure in the knowledge that from a logical contradiction anything and everything (and its opposite) follows! (And be prepared to declare, with hand on heart, that as an adult, every right you exercise with your striate musculature is exercised "voluntarily.")

[By the way, as long as Elsevier states that its authors retain the right to post "voluntarily", Elsevier, too, remains on the Side of the Angels insofar as immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving is concerned. It's just that the Angels are a bit glossolalic...]

---

Elsevier Article Posting Policies

Accepted author manuscripts (AAMs)

Definition: An accepted author manuscript (AAM) is the author's version of the manuscript of an article that has been accepted for publication and which may include any author-incorporated changes suggested through the processes of submission processing, peer review, and editor-author communications. AAMs do not include other publisher value-added contributions such as copy-editing, formatting, technical enhancements and (if relevant) pagination.

Policy: Authors retain the right to use the accepted author manuscript for personal use, internal institutional use and for permitted scholarly posting provided that these are not for purposes of commercial use or systematic distribution...

Permitted scholarly posting: Voluntary [emphasis added] posting by an author on open websites operated by the author or the author's institution for scholarly purposes, as determined by the author, or (in connection with preprints) on preprint servers...

...Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary [emphasis added] needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution's repository, e-mailing to colleagues. However, our policies differ regarding the systematic aggregation or distribution of AAMs to ensure the sustainability of the journals to which AAMs are submitted [emphasis added]. Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates [emphasis added] is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the publisher's policies concerning such repositories. Voluntary [emphasis added] posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted.

Systematic distribution means: policies or other mechanisms designed to aggregate and openly disseminate, or to substitute for journal-provided services, including:

--- The systematic distribution to others via e-mail lists or list servers (to parties other than known colleagues), whether for a fee or for free...

--- Institutional, funding body or government manuscript posting policies or mandates that aim to aggregate and openly distribute the work by its researchers or funded researchers...

John Houghton and Alma Swan have published several important and influential economic analyses of the costs and benefits of Open Access (OA), Gold OA publishing and Green OA self-archiving worldwide and for the UK.

The specific implications of their findings for the UK Finch Committee recommendations and RCUK OA Policy as well as for worldwide OA policy are very clearly and explicitly stated in their latest paper (Houghton & Swan 2012):

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012)
Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest
Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold”

SUMMARY
      "The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the Finch report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned that there may be some misinterpretation of this work.

      "This short paper sets out the main conclusions of our work, which was designed to explore the overall costs and benefits of Open Access (OA), as well as identify the most cost-effective policy basis for transitioning to OA at national and institutional levels.

      "The main findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world, nor are we likely to be in such a world in the foreseeable future.

      "At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university.

      "Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]

---

Further References:

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

Harnad, S. (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer Issue

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012

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

Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2010) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus 28 (1) 41-54

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009) Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, Report to The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) by Victoria University & Loughborough University.
See also the related addendum

RCUK (2012) Policy on Access to Research Outputs RCUK Research Councils UK

Swan, A. and Houghton, J.W. (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 (July 2012).

---

Update (many thanks to Eloy Rodrigues).
Speech from German ambassador at Berlin 10
announced new German law for Open Access:

“The German government is currently introducing legislation guiding the implementation process of Open Access. It will take into account our constitutionally guaranteed rights, especially freedom of expression, freedom of scientific research and intellectual property rights. Against that background, the envisaged reform of our copyright and intellectual property law will, as a first step, most likely follow along the lines of the 'Green Road'...”

---

We have heard it repeatedly claimed, without evidence or argument, that in Germany it would be illegal to mandate that authors self-archive their final drafts of peer-reviewed articles because it would be a "violation of academic freedom."

I have never believed this claim, and do not even think it is coherent.

A Green OA self-archiving mandate leaves authors free to publish whatever they wish and to publish it in whatever journal they wish. It merely requires them to deposit the final, accepted draft in an institutional repository.

(Most Green OA mandates don't even require the deposit to be made OA immediately: they allow it to be left in Closed Access during a publisher embargo period: About 60% of journals do not have OA embargoes; 40% have embargoes of from 6-12 months to several years or more.)

Hence the requirement to deposit is merely an administrative mandate -- like requiring that publications be submitted electronically rather than on paper, for performance evaluation. (Was that a violation of academic freedom in Germany too?)

The "illegal in Germany" claim has been made over and over, in and about Germany. It invariably turns out to be based on the incorrect assumption that it entails putting a constraint on authors' academic freedom. Instead of just repeating the claim, like hearsay, endlessly, I urge advocates and opponents of OA alike to first get it clear in their minds exactly what a Green OA self-archiving mandate mandates, and then to state explicitly how or why it violates authors' academic freedom.

But be careful not to conflate Green OA self-archiving mandates with Gold OA publishing mandates: The latter would require authors to publish in Gold OA journals rather than their journals of choice; or they would forbid authors to publish in journals that embargo Green OA. Such mandates would indeed be constraining authors' academic freedom.

But Gold OA publishing is not what most OA mandates require. They just require Green OA self-archiving. (See ROARMAP -- and you will see that there are already some Green OA mandates in Germany.)

---

Hans Pfeiffenberger:

Law people… in Germany… claim that something like the NIH/Wellcome requirements would violate researchers' rights granted by article 5 of our constitution....

...Stevan, you should take note that I and others do not embrace that view about the illegallity. We report what people from German funding agencies, eager to put a mandate in their grant agreements, tell us about the views of their lawyers.

You may call this hearsay, but it is a matter of fact that any attempt to introduce stonger mandates have been turned down by these lawyers, citing the constitution. 

And yes, there have been university professors who have claimed  their freedom to publish being restricted when asked to publish electronically (!). The Heidelberger Appell (don't confuse with Heidelberg Appeal) is actually an ugly mashup of opposition to Google Books, Open Access and general resentment about missing respect for authors' rights "in the Internet". But if you read some of their blogs (!) you will find that it is actually about the perceived loss of their paper-based academic culture.

Unfortunatelly, the Heidelberger Appell was signed by lots of influential people.

Stevan Harnad:

On Constitutions, Hearsay and Mashups. Thanks for your reply, Hans. You wrote:

HP: "You may call this hearsay, but it is a matter of fact that any attempt [by]… German funding agencies… to introduce stonger mandates…in their grant agreements…  have been turned down by these lawyers, citing the constitution."

It's not hearsay that such attempts have indeed been made, and been turned down. What's hearsay is the basis on which the attempts have been turned down.

If it is not unconstitutional for a funder to require that the papers resulting from a grant be provided in electronic format rather than print format, it is not unconstitutional to require that they be provided by depositing them in a repository.

I would be very interested to hear whether any lawyer arguing against a Green OA mandate has provided the constitutional clause according to which requiring deposit would be unconstitutional. (If you ask, you will hear all kinds of responses about copyright, publisher contracts, author choice, embargoes, etc., all irrelevant, but none facing up to the very specific question I am asking. And if requiring deposit is not unconstitutional, then that is precisely what should be mandated [not copyright or contract renegotiation, or constraints on journal choice].)

HP: "And yes, there have been university professors who have claimed  their freedom to publish being restricted when asked to publish electronically (!). The Heidelberger Appell  (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberger_Appell; don't confuse with Heidelberg Appeal) is actually an ugly mashup of opposition to Google Books, Open Access and general resentment about missing respect for authors' rights 'in the Internet'."

Yes, I know the Heidelberger Appell (Reuss's Ruse) well! It is indeed a mashup of journal articles and books -- again based on hearsay. Green OA self-archiving mandates pertain only to journal articles, all of which are written for research usage and impact, not author royalties.

See "Heidelberg Appeal Peeled" (2009).

Hans Pfeiffenberger:

Stevan, if I do understand your question "...whether any lawyer arguing against a Green OA mandate has provided the constitutional clause according to which requiring deposit would be unconstitutional.", then the answer is easy: It is paragraph 3 of article 5.

Roughly translated, it says: Art and science, research and teaching are free.

So, that is not hearsay. The question if this broad assertion can be regarded a foundation for the claims we discuss here could be answered only in court. But I think nobody is eager to put this to a test now. One thing is clear: Freedom of research is very high on the list of rights (right after religious freedom). It is number 5 of the 19 articles on "Grundrechte" (basic rights).

Stevan Harnad:

Is Peer Review Constitutional in Germany? But Hans, does "Art and science, research and teaching are free" in Germany mean: "Your research proposal has been accepted and funded on condition that you actually conduct the research, as proposed, and submit an annual report -- but you are free to take the money and not conduct the research, nor submit an annual report"?

Or do you think every failure to comply with grant fulfillment conditions would need to be tested in constitutional court in Germany as a potential violation of research freedom?

Or, to take it further, does a German researcher's constitutional "freedom of art, science, research and teaching" mean that he can refrain from doing any art, science, research and teaching at all, and continue to come in and collect his salary till his scheduled date of retirement, on the grounds that he is exercising his constitutional rights?

Is it unconstitutional in Germany, till tested, to withhold further research funding from a researcher who has not published any results of prior research?

Is "publish or perish" unconstitutional in Germany, hence peer reviewers may not use that -- or, for that matter, any -- criterion in deciding what German research proposal to fund, or what German research paper to accept for publication?

Is there no competition in research in Germany, because all researchers are free to do or not do whatever they wish?

I am mapping out the absurdity of these questions (which I am sure are never even asked in Germany -- just as it was never asked whether it would have been a violation of researchers' constitutional freedom to submit applications electronically instead of as hard copy) in order to show show how utterly arbitrary it is to claim that there is anything whatsoever about the requirement to deposit published research in the institutional repository that would be a potential violation of German researchers' constitutional freedom, and hence could not be adopted unless it were first tested in constitutional court. This is just nonsense unless German researchers simply have no rules of any kind at all.

In contrast to this, it's a good idea to give oneself examples of simple rules that would obviously be a violation of German researchers' constitutional freedom. And one such rule would be: "You are not free to publish what and where you wish" (apart, of course, from the need to meet the peer-reviewers' acceptance standards, if you wish to publish in a peer-reviewed journal).

The RCUK mandate that would say to a British researcher "You may not publish in a journal unless it either has a Gold OA publishing policy or it has a Green OA embargo of no more than 12 months" would indeed seem to be prima facie unconstitutional in Germany.

A repository-deposit mandate, however, certainly would not -- any more than would an electronic-submission mandate in place of a paper submission mandate (sic).

But Hans, I'm not disputing with you; I know you too find it absurd. I am simply disputing the credulousness of those who are ready to be dissuaded from adopting a Green OA mandate in Germany on the grounds that it would be unconstitutional, or that its constitutionality would first need to be tested in court.

Hans Pfeiffenberger:

Stevan, I am relieved that you understand that I too find it absurd. But there actually has been a case of a guy (Professor!) who almost claimed that he could "refrain from doing any art, science, research and teaching at all, and continue to come in and collect his salary till his scheduled date of retirement, on the grounds that he is exercising his constitutional rights?" If I remember correctly, he won.

So I am actually astounded that nobody has as yet brought a case to court against evaluation criteria which force him/her to publish in journals on a list maintained by a commercial company (TR) at their discretion.

Response of Fred Friend on GOAL to Martin Hall on Finch in UKSG Insights:

Fred Friend:

"I read Martin Hall’s defence of the Finch Group Recommendations very carefully, because one curious feature of this episode in the development of open access in the UK is the way in which previously staunch defenders of open access through repositories who were members of the Finch Group have signed up to a Report which only allocates roles in preservation and data storage to repositories, removing the role of access to published research reports…

"Neither Martin Hall nor the Finch Group as a whole have suggested the very feasible solution of funders requiring authors to retain certain rights for public benefit while still giving a publisher the right to publish….

"If the argument for not supporting repository development is weak, the argument for supporting a preference for gold open access is even weaker. (N.B. what follows should not be read as opposing all open access journal publication, merely the perverse policy to make journals the primary route to open access.)

"The argument put forward in the Finch Report is not only that repositories cannot provide a high-quality sustainable service but also that even if they could, a publisher-led approach is desirable. No evidence is put forward to support this key point in the Finch Report. The case for a transition to gold open access is not evidence-based but based upon a perceived threat to the publishing industry from any policy which gives a substantial role to repositories as an alternative source of supply of research articles. The case for “sustainability” presented in the Finch Report is a case for sustainability of the publishing industry…

"In relation to the cost of gold open access the Finch Report rightly mentions the importance of the extent to which other countries adopt the same policy as the UK, but the optimism on this point in the Report is clearly misplaced and represents a huge gamble not only with taxpayer funds but also with the UK researchers’ relationship with their peers in other countries…

"As a result of reading Martin’s article and re-reading the Finch Report I am no further forward in understanding how the open access advocates on the Finch Group could have signed up to the Report, even though they may have been out-voted by the publisher and society members…"

Comment on: UK research funders announce grants for open-access publishing (Richard Van Noorden, Nature)

First, a correction: Gold vs. Green does not mean immediate Gold OA from the publisher vs. delayed Green OA from the author’s institutional repository. Most Green OA (60%) is immediate OA too. And for the 40% that is embargoed by publishers, repositories have the “Almost OA” Button.

Second, that 60% vs 40% refers to Green OA, whose worldwide UNmandated annual average is about 25% today. So that’s 60%/40% of 25% or about 16% immediate Green OA and 8% Almost-OA globally today.

Now to RCUK: As Richard notes, even the old, weak RCUK mandate, with no compliance assurance mechanism, did better than the worldwide average.

Evidence has since shown that strong mandates provide much higher Green OA rates (over 70% within two years).

Hence the RCUK, in wasting scarce research money on Gold instead of strengthening its compliance assurance mechanism for cost-free Green OA, would be designing a self-fulfilling prophecy. This would fail, because most UK researchers would rightly refuse to comply with Gold and the rest of the world (funders as well as universities) is meanwhile mandating Green.

A European Green OA Mandate may help restore RCUK to its senses and put it back on a realistic path to 100% OA, focused on research interests instead of publishing interests.

Stevan Harnad

Comment on:
Martin Hall (2012) "Green or Gold? Open Access After Finch" UKSG Insights 25(3)

This turns out to be a stunningly superficial defence of the Finch Report by one of its authors (and the one from whom one might have hoped for a much fuller grasp of the Green/Gold contingencies, priorities and pragmatics).

The substance of Martin Hall's defence of the Finch recommendation that the UK should (double-)pay for Gold instead of strengthening its mandate for Green is that (1) Gold provides the publisher's version of record, rather than just the author's peer-reviewed final draft, that (2) Gold provides text-mining rights and that (3) Gold is the way to solve the journal price problem.

What Hall does not even consider is whether the publisher's version of record and text-mining rights are worth the asking price of Gold, compared to cost-free Green. His account (like everyone else's) is also astonishingly vague and fuzzy about how the transition to Gold is to take place in the UK. And Hall (like Finch) completely fails to take the rest of the world into account. All the reckoning about the future of publishing is based on the UK's policy for its 6% share.

Hall quotes Peter Suber's objection but does not answer it; and he does not even bother to mention (nor give any sign of being aware of) the substance of my own many, very specific points of criticism about both the Finch recommendations and the RCUK policy. (This is rather consistent, however, since if Hall had given any of these points some serious thought, it is hard to see how he could have endorsed the Finch recommendations in the first place; most had already been made before Finch.)

The Swan/Houghton economic analyses, too, are cited by Hall, as if in support, but in fact not heeded at all.

It will be instructive to see whether the remarkable superficiality of Hall's defence of Finch is noticed by the UK academic community, or it is just catalogued as further "authoritative support" for Finch/RCUK.

Stevan Harnad

Reply to Ross Mounce:

1.The affordability problem loses all of its importance and urgency once globally mandated Green OA has its dual effect of (i) making peer-reviewed journal articles free for all (not just subscribers), thereby (ii) making it possible for institutions to cancel subscriptions if they can no longer afford -- or no longer wish -- to pay for them:

2. "If and when global Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model. Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs."

3. In other words, it is global Green OA itself that will "decouple the scholarly journal, and separate the peer-review process from the integrated set of services that traditional journals provide." (And then the natural way to charge for the service of peer review will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome [acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection], minimizing cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.)

4. Because of the Gaussian distribution of virtually all human qualities and quantities, research quality and quality-assessment is not just a 0/1, pass/fail matter. Research and researchers need the much more nuanced and informative hierarchy of quality levels that journals afford.

5. Please don't conflate the simplistic reliance on the journal impact factor (the journal's articles' average citation counts) -- which is not, by the way, an OA issue -- with the much more substantive and important fact that the existing journal hierarchy does represent a vertical array of research quality levels, corresponding to different standards of peer-review rigour and hence selectivity.

6. This hierarchy is already provided by the known track-records of journals, and can and will be enhanced by a growing set of new, rich and diverse metrics of journal and article quality, importance, usage and impact. What authors and users need is not just a "Gold OA plot" but a clear sense of the quality standards of journals.

7. I think it is exceedingly unrealistic and counterproductive to advise researchers to simply give up the journal with the known and established quality standards and track-record for their work in favour of another journal just for the sake of making their paper Gold OA (let alone for the sake of freeing it from the tyranny of the impact factor) -- and especially at today's still vastly-inflated Gold OA "publishing fee," and whilst the money to pay for it is still locked into institutional subscriptions that cannot be cancelled until/unless those journal articles are accessible in some other way.

8. That other way is cost-free Green OA. And it is global Green OA self-archiving of all journal articles, published in the journal with the highest quality standards the author's work can meet -- not a pre-emptive switch to new journals just because they offer Gold OA today -- that will make those journal articles accessible in the "other way" that (i) solves the accessibility problem immediately, (ii) mitigates the affordability problem immediately, and (iii) eventually induces a transition to Gold OA at a fair and affordable price.

9. Today (i.e., pre-Green-OA), Gold OA means double-pay -- whether for hybrid Gold OA, or for pure Gold OA, as long as subscriptions must still be paid too.

10. It is short-sighted in the extreme to wish authors to renounce journals of established quality and pay extra pre-emptively to new Gold OA journals for an OA that they can already provide cost-free today through Green OA self-archiving, with the additional prospect of easing the affordability problem now, as well as preparing the road for an eventual liberation from subscriptions and a leveraged transition to affordable, sustainable Gold (and Libre) OA.

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

Harnad, S. (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 (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012