Open Access Archivangelism

Comments on "What would be the implications of a ‘gold’ Open Access REF policy?" (Ben Johnson, HEFCE)

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Ben Johnson “this post ignores … the commonly heard prediction that universal green OA will somehow deliver a sustainable gold OA future all on its own…

Let me spell out that commonly heard prediction, explaining exactly how and why today's pre-green gold OA is fool’s gold -- unaffordable and unsustainable -- and exactly how and why universal green OA, on its own, will deliver a sustainable gold OA future, in the form of post-green fair-gold:

0. Lost Impact: Journal subscriptions are costly, unaffordable and growing, research funds are scarce, hard to come by and shrinking, and research access, usage, impact, productivity and progress are being needlessly lost every day that we fail to provide OA.

1. Over-Pricing: Pre-green gold OA publication fees are arbitrarily and hugely over-priced. (We will see how much, and why, shortly.)

2. Double-Payment: Payment for pre-green gold is double payment: (i) subscription fees for incoming papers plus (ii) gold fees for outgoing papers. (Must-have subscription journals cannot be cancelled by an institution until those same articles are accessible to users in some other way.)

3. Double_Dipping: On top of that, paying the same "hybrid gold" journal (both subscription and optional gold) for pre-green hybrid gold also allows publisher double-dipping.

4. "Rebates": Even if the pre-green hybrid gold publisher promises all N of its subscribing institutions a full, 100% rebate on all hybrid gold income received, that only means that (N-1)/N of whatever hybrid gold any institution pays for its own outgoing hybrid gold papers becomes a subsidy to all the other N-1 subscribing institutions: The institution only gets back 1/Nth of its hybrid gold outlay. (The UK, for example, would get back a 6% subscription rebate for its hybrid gold outlay; the rest of the UK hybrid gold outlay would become a rebate to the other 94% of subscribing institutions in the countries that were not foolish enough to pay pre-emptively for pre-green gold.) Unless the full gold OA rebate goes to the same institution that paid for the gold (by deducting it from the subscription fee), it is still double-payment.

5. Repositories: Research funds are scarce, subscriptions are barely affordable, and pre-green gold payment is completely unnecessary, because green OA can be provided at no extra cost. (Institutional repositories already exist anyway, for multiple purposes, so their cost per paper is negligible, particularly compared to the grotesque cost per paper for pre-green gold.)

6. CC-BY: CC-BY is most definitely not so urgent today, compared to access itself, as to be worth the extra cost of pre-green gold today: CC-BY will come quite naturally of its own accord soon after universal green prevails, and at no extra cost. (We will see how and why shortly.)

7. Embargoes: Publisher embargoes on green are ineffectual because of the repositories’ copy-request Button -- if, but only if the paper was mandatorily deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication, exactly as HEFCE requires). The sole purpose of publishers' OA embargoes today is to try to ensure that -- come what may -- their current level of revenue per paper published, whether via subscriptions or via fool's gold, is sustained. (Please pause for a moment to think this through. It says it all.)

8. Cancelation: So post-green — i.e., once immediate-deposit green has been mandated and provided universally, by all institutions and funders, as HEFCE has done -- institutions can at last cancel their journal subscriptions, because then their users can access the content another way.

9. Obsolete Costs: The post-green unsustainability of subscriptions will force publishers to cut all publishing costs that have been made obsolete by the post-green OA era: Publishers will be forced to phase out the print edition, the online edition, access-provision and archiving: these functions will now be offloaded onto the distributed global network of green OA institutional repositories. And publishers current level of revenue per article will not be sustained.

10. Fair Gold: To cover the remaining post-green cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing — which is just the cost of managing peer review itself — post-green journals will convert to affordable, sustainable fair gold. Institutions will easily pay this service fee, per outgoing paper, out of a fraction of their windfall subscription cancelation savings on incoming papers.

In other words, post-green, subscriptions will be gone, embargoes will be gone, and all OA will be CC-BY (where desired).

Ben Johnson: “Would repositories disappear in a gold OA world? No, they’re still useful for theses etc. Monitoring would continue to be necessary for any OA policy.”

In the Post-green fair-gold OA world there will no longer be any need to monitor OA policy. Everything published will be fair-gold OA! But there will certainly be a need for the worldwide network of green OA repositories — to provide access and archving in place of the pre-green subscription journals: For it will have been the cancelation pressure generated by universally mandated-and-provided green OA that drove the entire downsizing and transition to fair gold.

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.

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

______ (2013) The Postgutenberg Open Access Journal (revised). In, Cope, B and Phillips, A (eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal (2nd edition). 2nd edition of book Chandos.

______ (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold". D-Lib Magazine 19 (1/2).

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

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Ben Johnson:
December 8, 2014 at 10:16 pm

Stevan, you make an excellent set of points. Particularly interesting to me is the notion that ‘offsetting’ schemes, even those that look quite generous on the face of it (like RSC, who offer APC vouchers equal to the full subscription rate of a given institution), are still set up to replace subscriptions with APCs at the 100% level.

While it isn’t a professional mission of mine to drive down the cost of scholarly communication at the expense of all else, clearly one of the most compelling advantages of your 100% green-leveraged transition idea is that it offers an opportunity to make the whole of scholarly publishing much cheaper than it is now. We should always be mindful that the price of OA publishing in ‘top’ journals can reach into the £000’s but the cost of posting in a repository is £33, and posting on the arXiv costs just $7 (as I read somewhere the other day). A case for the marginal benefit of spending those extra thousands of pounds on gold fees has, as far as I’m aware, not been made – even if that marginal benefit includes CC BY.

As I’ve argued before in this blog, I’m not convinced that journal publishing need do much more than referee articles and stamp them with their brand sticker. So, while the system probably won’t ever get down to being just $7 per article, there are strong public policy reasons why funders of research would not be averse to an outcome that managed to do away with a lot of the superfluities that surround that most highly affected of artefacts, the “version of record”. (I do think there is a good strategic argument for wanting CC BY, though, if perhaps there is no economic or financial case.)

Most interestingly for the neutral, the success criterion of such a green-leveraged transition is identical to the success criterion of a gold future: both require ~100% uptake, globally. So this makes for an interesting fight, doesn’t it?