Saturday, March 24. 2007
Below is a posting, with permission, of an offline exchange with Jan Velterop, of Springer Open Choice. I have labelled the dramatis personae and indented for chronology. (The title "Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice" is mine, not Jan's.)
Jan argues that paying for Open Choice Gold OA at this time, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing, would not be double-paying for OA.
I argue that it would be.
Jan argues that mandating Green OA -- as ERC, ARC, NHMRC, 5 RCUK research councils, and a growing number of universities have done, and as FRPAA, NIH, EC, CIHR and EURAB propose to do -- will destroy journals and peer review.
I argue that it will provide OA -- and that if it ever does cause subscription cancellation, then that will be the time to convert to Gold OA, paying the institutional Gold OA publishing costs out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings themselves, rather than pre-emptively double-paying, as we would be doing if we did it now, while subscriptions are still paying all the costs of publishing.
(I will let Jan have the last word in this posting and will reply separately to a few of his points in my next posting. My surmise is that the careful reader of this exchange will not need my subsequent reply -- though this surmise could be wrong.)
Stevan Harnad
From: Jan Velterop (VELTEROP)
To: Stevan Harnad (HARNAD)
HARNAD: Jan, may I post this? I've removed the nonsubstantive parts that do not need not be aired in public. Chrs, S
VELTEROP: Stevan, If you include my further comments, you may post. Best, Jan
On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Velterop, Jan, Springer UK wrote:HARNAD: The main substantive points are: (1) Paying for optional OA Gold today is double-paying...
VELTEROP: Answer: Nonsense. Paying for access to content is not the same as paying for having your article published with OA. At no point is the same article paid for twice.
HARNAD: Can we count this up, slowly:
(a) A journal sells subscriptions.
(b) Subscriptions cover publication costs plus profits. Let's say $3000 per article published.
(c) That same journal now begins to offer Open Choice: $1500 to make your article free online, instead of having it accessible only to those with a paid subscription.
In what sense is the publication of that article not being double-paid for? VELTEROP: That's clear to anyone who understands how journals work: The open access articles are simply not part of the subscription. As if they were published in a 'parallel' journal with the same editor and editorial board. This doesn't only happen to open acces articles, but publishing history is strewn with sponsored supplementary material that, whilst carrying a journal's mark, was made available for free and not part of a subscription. HARNAD: (Please don't reply that the author is not paying twice. I of course meant the publisher is being paid twice.) VELTEROP: Of course authors are not paying twice. Authors, and readers for that matter, are rarely paying at all. That's all done vicariously by the institution, mostly the library. And the publisher is not paid twice for the same thing, however much you twist it. HARNAD: And recall that this is all being rehearsed in the context of the claim that Green self-archiving would destroy journals because it would destroy their subscription base and no longer make it possible to pay the costs of publishing.
To which my reply has always been that subscriptions pay the cost of publishing, and if and when subscriptions are cancelled, hence no longer paying the cost of publishing, then the cancellation savings can be redirected to pay for the cost of publishing. Before that, publishing is being double-paid for. VELTEROP: I know that your reply has always been thus. That doesn't make it correct. I'm not denying that there may be a cost of transition from subscriptions to gold OA. That's been highlighted many times before, notably by PLoS before they even were publishers themselves. Your method has a cost as well. A much greater one. You favour, by implication, although you refuse to see it that way, the demise of journals, and with that the destruction of a system and infrastructure of peer-reviewed publishing. Of course that can be built up again after the existing journals have gone out of business. But it will take a very long time. The benefits of OA are substantial, but that price, making the transition of one phase to the next via a phase of destruction, is too high in my view. That's why I favour a transition without such drastic drawbacks. HARNAD: Hence authors should self-archive (Green), not pay for Gold, now (for a hybrid Open Choice journal: if they wish to publish in a pure Gold journal, like BMC or PLoS, they are not double-paying). VELTEROP: In what way is Open Choice different from 'pure' gold? Have you forgotten that 'open access' was explicitly declared a property of an article, not of a journal or a publisher? (look here if you need to refresh your memory). Why not pay for gold? Why are you making such an issue of that? Are you the guardian angel of university administrators and research funders now, too? How would paying for gold threaten your cherished self-archiving? Did it escape your attention that gold is green plus a lot more? When your campaign for self-archiving was just that, it at least had the benefit of an intellectually honest quest. Now that you are showing a keen interest in making any transition impossible unless via destruction, using financial arguments, you've lost your focus, and, in my view, your credibility. For the avoidance of doubt: I'm not against green. What I think is not a good idea is mandates for self-archiving. If they are successful (and why else would they be proposed), they carry too high a price, as I explained above. VELTEROP: Consider this analogy: you take a subscription to a newspaper and subsequently you wish to place an ad in it. You'll be asked to pay for the placement of the ad. In your reasoning this would mean that you'd be double-paying. You may be paying more than you did before, but you'd be paying for different things. To call it double-paying is misleading.
HARNAD: I'm afraid I don't see the analogy at all. The crucial difference is that my own article is my ad, and I am saying that that ad's author (me) should be mandated (by his employer/funder) to put a supplementary copy of his own ads online for free, not pay their publishers to do it, while their publishers are still being fully paid by their subscribers. They don't need more money from me, to do what they are doing already, plus what I can do for myself, for free (without "destroying the newspaper"). VELTEROP: As I indicated, analogies are not perfect. In the case of an article (your 'ad'), it gains quite a lot by being published in the journal. What you are doing, is taking that 'gain', without bothering to care how that gain is acquired and paid for (other than throwing the ball into the librarian's court and say: "you paid for it in the past and you shall keep paying for it in the future, and if not, there will be some 'deus ex machina' salvaging any ailing journal"), and attach it to your self-archived copy. You can, at any time, publish your article online. When you need the journal 'label' to give it professional credibility is when you go to a publisher. Not giving him your article, mind you, but asking for a service. Performing that service costs money and subscriptions are a poor way of providing that money. Article processing charges are much better because they remove any need to restrict access in any way. VELTEROP: Analogies, as always, are not perfect. Unlike the newspaper analogy, and for Academia as a whole, any 'extra' payment is temporary.
HARNAD: It sounds here as if you are conceding, after all, that there is double-payment being received... VELTEROP: Of course there is a cost of transition, as I said above. But that's a cost of transition, not paying twice for the same thing. The cost of transition your method incurs, destruction of the journal infrastructure, is much greater. VELTEROP: This is unfortunate, but a consequence of a drawn-out transition in which not all libraries in one go switch from subscriptions to article charges as a way of sustaining peer-reviewed journals.
HARNAD: We are not talking about changing the ways subscribing libraries sustain peer-reviewed journals. We are talking about supplementing subscription access with author-provided free online access, today. If there is indeed one day to be a transition to Gold OA, let that transition be driven by cancellations, and funded by the cancellation savings, not pre-empted now, by double-payment (and at a price that may well be a good deal higher than it will be if the transition is preceded and driven by Green OA). VELTEROP: Who is 'we' here? I am indeed talking about changing ways of sustaining peer-reviewed journals. Your idea of having any transition funded by cancellation savings is predicated (without realising it, I suspect) on the completely unrealistic premise that all journals are being published by this one 'Ueber-publisher'. Any librarian who thinks he's double paying, can just cancel whatever he feels he can afford to cancel and re-use the funds for OA publishing. Any funder who thinks there is a risk of double payment can stipulate that out of the 58% of overheads typically taken off research grants, OA publishing is paid in the form of article processing charges, instead of non-OA publishing in the form of subscriptions. VELTEROP: At our initiative, we are in active discussion with a number of library consortia and some major research and funding institutions to find proper ways of avoiding any double payment, if and where it might occur. I'll announce them as soon as the ink is dry.
HARNAD: If institutional libraries are foolish enough to prepay the asking price for Gold now, by redirecting all their subscription budgets, there will not be a single murmur of protest from me if both the publishers support and the libraries' institutions adopt a Green OA mandate.
But if this absurd bargain is made in place of a Green OA mandate, I shall certainly do my level best to make all parties see the folly of their ways. VELTEROP: What's 'absurd' about working on a sustainable way to make the transition from subscriptions without OA, to OA publishing? HARNAD: (2) For a Gold (or hybrid Gold) OA publisher to oppose Green OA mandates is, at best, to oppose OA...
VELTEROP: Answer: This is weird reasoning, Stevan, and repeating it doesn't make it any better. We're gold, we're green (and by the way, gold includes green - not the other way around), and we feel that mandates should not be employed in the innately liberal world of science.
HARNAD: If Springer were (as it is) Green (i.e., endorses immediate Green self-archiving) and did not at the same time try to oppose Green OA mandates (as Springer does), then we would be in the scenario I described above, and Springer would not be blame-worthy (for trying to make an extra buck): only the institutions who took Springer up on it without mandating Green OA would be balmy. VELTEROP: Feel free to keep on calling institutions and funders 'balmy', authors 'stupid' or 'ignorant', publishers 'blame-worthy', et cetera, but don't expect to be taken seriously. VELTEROP: If a cultural norm emerges, like is the case with having to publish with peer-review, then fine. And if, and only if, a mandate is deemed justifiable, then it should be a mandate for open access, not a mandate for open access by such or such a means.
HARNAD: Researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals. That's a given. Journals recover their peer-review costs from subscriptions. That's a current fact. Alongside that, and (until/unless there are unsustainable cancellations as a result), mandating Green OA self-archiving is a completely independent matter, a matter that is entirely between an author and his institution or funder. Publishers should have no say in it whatsoever. (And, a fortiori, no say in the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate [ID/OA], which doesn't even notionally need the publisher's blessing or endorsement for the deposit.) VELTEROP: Much of the added value of a journal is concentrated in its 'trademark' attached to the article. This trademark, and therefore its added value, is easily pilfered. This is a problem for publishers, of course. And a lot of thinking goes into how to deal with that. If you were to argue for a self-archiving mandate for articles without indicating where and when they were published, in other words without appropriating the 'gain' while not taking responsibility for supporting the way this gain is generated, then that would be fine.
PS. Where not explicitly stated that I do speak for Springer, I speak for myself.
Jan Velterop
VELTEROP: I didn't argue for mandating direct deposit in a CR
HARNAD: (Sorry: When you singled out IRs as one of my "orthodoxies" I thought you were defending direct deposit in CRs (as BMC does). I withdraw those points.)
VELTEROP: You should feel free to post this
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