Open Access Archivangelism

The Director General of the UK's Russell Group of universities, Wendy Piatt, responded as follows to the BIS Committee Recommendations on UK OA policy:

“We welcome the committee’s report, which highlights the vital role that ‘green’ open access can play as the UK moves towards full open access... [T]he committee rightly highlights that ‘green’ open access is a simple and cost-effective way of sharing research. We urge the Government to take note of the calls to reconsider its preference for ‘gold’ open access during the five year transition period."
      “However, we have real reservations about the committee’s recommendation to restrict embargo periods to six months for STEM subjects and 12 months for humanities, arts and social sciences. This will directly limit where researchers can publish, will constrain academic freedom and could potentially damage the international standing of UK universities.”

The substantive recommendations of the 2013 BIS Report (I, II) were:

1. that the Green OA deposit in the institutional repository should be immediate rather than delayed, whether or not Open Access to the deposit is embargoed by the publisher (during any OA embargo the repository's eprint-request Button can then enable the author to fulfill individual user eprint requests automatically with one click each if deposit was immediate),

2. that an effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring timely mandate compliance should be implemented, and

3. that Gold OA publishing should either no longer be preferred or hybrid Gold should no longer be funded.

The only bearing these three recommendations have on author freedom-of-choice of journal is that they restore it: Whereas Finch/RCUK's current preference for publishing in Gold OA journals would have restricted author freedom of choice, BIS removes that restriction. Authors can publish in whatever journal they wish.

As to the BIS suggestion to reduce the maximum allowable Green OA embargo limit to 6-12 months from 12-24 months: the immediate-deposit mandate (plus the repository Button) largely moots this. As long as deposit is immediate, there would be nothing wrong with allowing an opt-out or waiver (as in the American opt-out mandate models, such as Harvard's) from the maximal embargo limit on an individual article basis, if the author demonstrates that it would restrict journal choice to have to comply with the embargo. The critical thing is that there should be no opt-out from immediate-deposit (which, if not immediately OA, has no bearing whatsoever on author freedom of choice of journals). Authors can publish in whatever journal they wish.

In response to the BIS Select Committee Report Dame Janet Finch writes:

Dame Janet Finch: "There are some unfortunate gaps in the Select Committee’s consideration. In particular their comments on the publishing industry take no account of a [sic] Learned Societies, whose publishing and other roles have been a major concern of our working group."

The substantive recommendations of the 2013 BIS Report (I, II) were:

1. that the Green OA deposit in the institutional repository should be immediate rather than delayed, whether or not Open Access to the deposit is embargoed by the publisher (during any OA embargo the repository's eprint-request Button can then enable the author to fulfill individual user eprint requests automatically with one click each if deposit was immediate),

2. that an effective mechanism for monitoring and ensuring timely mandate compliance should be implemented, and

3. that Gold OA publishing should either no longer be preferred or hybrid Gold should no longer be funded.

It is not at all clear how this amounts to "tak[ing] no account of a [sic] Learned Societies, whose publishing and other roles have been a major concern of our working group."

The Report does recommend shorter limits on the maximum allowable publisher embargo on OA, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the substantive recommendations above, which refer to the mandatory date of deposit, not to the date on which the deposit is made OA.

Anonymous: "By the time we reach 100% Green OA, there will be few journals left to cancel and it will be far too late to start charging authors a "fair gold" price for something they feel they have been getting for free up till then."

Until Green OA is at or near 100%, a journal cannot be cancelled because its contents cannot be accessed any other way. And Green OA grows anarchically, not journal by journal but article by article.

So subscriptions will support publication for as long as they are sustainable; when global Green OA is at or near 100%, and at or near the point of making subscriptions unsustainable, journals will be forced to cut costs by phasing out all inessential products and services. That means print edition, online edition, access-provision and archiving. Nothing will be left for them to do except manage the peer review and certify the outcome with their journal name. All access provision and archiving will be offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA repositories.

And authors will not have to pay the (Fair Gold) cost of the journal's peer review service out of pocket: Their institutions will pay for it out of a fraction of their annual windfall savings -- from their subscription cancellations.

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