Open Access Archivangelism

Responses to Martin Hall
on Finch
on
“Neither Green nor Gold”

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Stevan Harnad (February 11th, 2013 at 9.03 pm) Says:

MARTIN HALL: “The “Green” versus “Gold” debate... is misleading. The imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case has been remade in a recent – excellent – posting by Stuart Shieber, Harvard’s Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication.”

STUART SHIEBER: “Do you have a pointer to something saying that I support the Finch approach? If so, I’m happy to answer it directly — in the negative when it comes to both their lack of support for green and poorly designed approach to gold support.” (Feb 3 2013, personal communication.

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Martin Hall (February 12th, 2013 at 11.59 am) Says:

Stevan – here are two quotations from Stuart Shieber’s paper which make the point about the significance of moving to full Open Access to copy-of-record. The Finch Report, however imperfect, was about the transition to this.

“Open-access journals don’t charge for access, but that doesn’t mean they eschew revenue entirely. Open-access journals are just selling a different good, and therefore participating in a different market. Instead of selling access to readers (or the readers’ proxy, the libraries), they sell publisher services to the authors (or to the authors’ proxy, their research funders). In fact there are now over 8,500 open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some of them have been mentioned already on this panel: Linguistic Discovery, Semantics and Pragmatics. The majority of existing open-access journals, like those journals, don’t charge authorside article-processing charges (APCs). But in the end APCs seems to me the most reasonable, reliable, scalable, and efficient revenue mechanism for open-access journals. This move from reader-side subscription fees to author-side APCs has dramatic ramifications for the structure of the market that the publisher participates in”.

And later:

“So journals compete for authors in a way they don’t for readers, and this competition leads to much greater efficiency. Open-access publishers are highly motivated to provide better services at lower price to compete for authors’ article submissions. We actually see evidence of this competition on both price and quality happening in the market.”

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Stevan Harnad (February 13th, 2013 at 2.41 am -- Your comment is awaiting moderation. ) Says:

PRIORITIES

Martin, I agree with every word you quote from Stuart above, but that’s not what the Finch Report, or the criticism of the Finch Report is about.

Yes, this concerns the transition to Open Access (OA). But the disagreement is about the means, not the end.

The Finch report recommended downgrading cost-free Green OA self-archiving in repositories to just preservation archiving and instead double-paying pre-emptively for Gold OA (publisher’s PDF of record, CC-BY) while worldwide journal subscriptions still need to be paid, and only allowing UK authors to publish in journals that don’t offer Gold if their Green embargo does not exceed 6-12 months.

This not only wastes a great deal of scarce UK research money but it gives publishers the incentive to offer hybrid Gold (continue charging subscriptions but offer Gold for individual articles for an extra Gold OA fee), it restricts free choice of journals, antagonizing authors, and it encourages journals to adopt and extend Green OA embargoes beyond the 6-12 limit, thus making Green OA harder to mandate for other countries, none of which have any intention of following the Finch model of paying pre-emptively for Gold instead of mandating extra-cost-free Green while subscriptions are still paying for publishing: See: Sparc Europe's "Analysis of funder Open Access policies around the world".

What Finch/RCUK needs to do instead is to (1) upgrade its Green OA mandate, (2) require immediate deposit whether or not OA to the deposit is embargoed, (3) adopt an effective system for monitoring and ensuring compliance, (4) allow free choice of journals, and (5) make Gold OA completely optional.

Stuart Shieber is the architect of Harvard’s Green OA policy. That policy does not constrain researchers' journal choice and it does not offer to fund hybrid Gold. There’s no problem with offering to spend any spare cash you may have on Gold — after you have effectively mandated Green. But not instead.

(By the way, neither the publisher’s PDF nor CC-BY is worth paying extra for today, pre-emptively, while journal subscriptions still need to be paid: Once universally mandated Green OA makes journals cancellable, publishers will cut costs, phase out the obsolete print and online editions, offload all access provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories, and convert to Fair Gold, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid for out of the institutional subscription-cancelation savings — instead of the UK double-paying pre-emptively and needlessly for the bloated price of both subscriptions and Fool’s Gold out of overstretched UK research funds today, pre-Green, as Finch/RCUK are proposing to do.)

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ADDENDUM:

"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 (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold” D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

Unilateral UK Gold is the losing choice in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If the UK unilaterally mandates Gold OA Publishing (with author publication charges) today, instead of first (effectively) mandating Green OA self-archiving (at no added cost) then the UK has made the losing choice in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma (see below):

	Unilateral Green (rest of world):	Unilateral Gold (rest of world):
Unilateral Green (UK):	win/win	win/lose
Unilateral Gold (UK):	lose/win	win/win

What is a peer-reviewed journal?

1. A journal is a peer-review manager and copy-editor (the peers -- qualified, answerable specialists -- chosen by the editor, review for free; the editor adjudicates the reviews and the author revisions).

2. If the article is accepted, the accepted draft is certified with the journal's name.

3. The journal generates and distributes (3a) a print and/or (3b) online edition.

A journal that does not generate a print edition (3a) is still a journal.

A journal that does not generate an online edition (3b) is still a journal.

The journal certifies (and answers for) its content and quality standards with its name and track-record.

If the journal's costs are paid by subscriptions, it's a subscription journal.

If costs are paid by subsidies, it's a subsidized journal. 

If costs are paid by the author, it's an author-pays journal.

OA is free online access to journal articles, immediately upon publication.

If OA is provided by the journal, it's Gold OA publishing.

If OA is provided by the author, it's Green OA self-archiving.

If the journal is OA, it's a Gold OA journal. If not, not.

There is hence no need for (nor any new information provided by) new terms like "diamond," "overlay" or "epi" journal.

An OA journal that charges neither subscriptions nor author-fees is a subsidized journal ("diamond" adds no further information or properties).

An OA journal that generates neither a print nor an online version is an OA journal that generates neither a print nor an online version: the self-archived version is the only version.

The vast majority of free online journals (Gold OA) do not charge APCs.

It is arbitrary and unilluminating to invent a spectrum of colours or precious metals to classify their various possible cost-recovery models as if they were forms of OA.

OA is not about cost-recovery models (nor about peer-review models); it is about research access. (Don't conflate OA with publication cost-recovery models.)

The reason (some) physicists and mathematicians speak of "overlay" journals is that many physicists and mathematicians, before submitting their papers to a journal for peer review, self-archive their unrefereed "preprints" in Arxiv. Most then also go on to self-archive their final, peer-reviewed "postprints" in Arxiv. They think of the peer-review, copy-editing, and certification as an "overlay" on their unrefereed preprint.

But, by the same token, the peer-review, copy-editing and certification is an "overlay" on every author's unrefereed preprint, whether the journal is print, online, both, or neither.

And most authors don't self-archive their unrefereed drafts at all.

Some fields of mathematics and physics already have close to 100% (Green) OA, by self-archiving in Arxiv.

So it looks as if Episciences.org is just a new online journal platform -- there are others) -- one that has neither a print edition nor an online edition. That means the self-archived version will be the version of record. (Green will become Gold.)

Submission is done by depositing the unrefereed draft in Arxiv (instead of just emailing it to the journal, or sending a URL from the author's website or institutional repository, as with most other journals, OA and non-OA, subscription-based, subsidy-based, and/or author-fee-based).

In addition, it looks as if Episciences.org is hoping to cover the costs of 1 and 2 above (peer review and certification) for its start-up mathematics journal(s) out of subsidies (from CCSD and Institut Fournier/Grenoble) rather than subscriptions or author fees. 3a and 3b (print and online edition) and their costs are being dropped and access-provision and archiving are to be offloaded onto Arxiv.

This is a very sensible idea, but it may be premature for sustainability: All other disciplines may first have to (be mandated to) provide 100% Green OA, as some subfields of maths and physics have long been doing, unmandated, and then all institutional subscription journal subscription funds will be freed to pay the remaining costs of 1 and 2 (whether via Gold OA fees or subsidies). Nor will Arxiv be the main locus of self-archiving in most other disciplines: Authors' own institutional repositories will be.

In principle it does not matter in the least whether the self-archiving is in a central repository like Arxiv or in each author's own institutional repository, from which one or many subject repositories (and search engines) harvest, just as long as the preprints and postprints are reliably deposited and archived online. But in practice, there are many reasons why institutional and funder mandates should stipulate institutional deposit rather than institution-external deposit.

There are no new entities needing the name "epijournals" -- just journals. What is being proposed is by Episciences.org is journals with no print or online edition, in a subdomain (of mathematics and physics) where all authors already self-archive (100% Green). (Postpublication commentary on peer-reviewed journal articles is postpublication commentary -- not peer review.)

Let's see if subsidies work to keep episciences.org journals sustainably afloat. If not, they will of course have to convert to author fees. Either way, it's just another (proposed) new Gold OA journal.

My own view is that it is too early to bury either the print or the online edition of subscription journals: Not while they still publish most of the top journals, and hence institutions cannot cancel them, nor can authors stop publishing in them.

The time for institutions to cancel, and for journals to downsize to just peer review alone and to convert to Gold, with institutions paying the (much lower) author fees out of their cancelation savings, is after Green OA is at or near 100% (as it already is in some areas of physics and mathematics).

What I think Tim Gowers and Jean-Pierre Demailly (and CERN) should hence be preaching to the world is not "epijournals" but Green OA self-archiving: Mathematicians and physicists (and, before them, computer scientists) did it without mandates, but after 20 years we see that the other disciplines won't do it until their institutions and funders mandate it.

No-print, no-online, no-subscription, no-author-fee Gold OA journals are not "complements" to subscription journals: they are simply another competing journal.

There does exist a complement to subscription journals today: It is not Arxiv, but Green OA self-archiving by authors, in all disciplines, now at last growing because of OA mandates from their institutions and funders.

When Green OA self-archiving approaches 100% across all disciplines, however, it will indeed become a "competitor," forcing journals to jettison their print and online editions and convert to Gold OA fees to cover their much lower remaining costs" peer review.