Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again

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SUMMARY: Contrary to the suggestion of this RCUK report, there is no "Gold Standard" for OA except universal OA, and the way to universalize OA is to universalize Green OA self-archiving mandates to all institutions and funders globally, not to divert scarce research money -- pre-emptively and needlessly -- toward paying Gold OA publication fees at a time when subscription fees are still paying for publication worldwide and only 77 out of 10,000 institutions and funders have yet mandated Green OA. The problem is not that Green OA mandates are failing to achieve compliance, as this RCUK report suggests. The problem is that they have not yet been adopted by 99.23% of the world's institutions and funders!
    Unlike "peer-to-peer" consumer "sharing" of creators' non-give-away commercial output, creators giving away their own peer-reviewed and publicly funded research output to maximize its uptake, usage and impact is not piracy but the sharing of a public good for public benefit. In contrast, publisher embargoes on research access are the hostage-taking of a public good -- and the way to counter that is immediate-deposit (IDOA) mandates coupled with the "Email EPrint Request" Button, not the payment of a gold ransom (nor, while we're at it, the equally gratuitous burden of formal hostage-rights-retention negotiations).

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Comments on:
Open Access to Research Outputs: Final Report to Research Councils UK

Once they have mandated Green OA self-archiving (as all 7 of the RCUK funding councils have now done), what funders do with their spare cash is entirely their own business.

But it does seem as profligate as it is unnecessary to propose squandering scarce research money today on paying Gold OA publishing fees pre-emptively while Green OA mandates are still so few and subscription fees are still paying for publication.

This RCUK report shows signs of having been drafted under two palpable influences: (1) the publishers' lobby, striving to ensure that, whatever the outcome, revenues for publishers are maximized and immunized against risk -- and (2) the publishing reform movement, striving to ensure that publishers convert to Gold OA at all costs.

If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate Green OA for now, and then let supply and demand decide, given universal Green OA, whether and when to convert from subscriptions to Gold OA, and for what product, and at what price.

Context:

With non-OA journals, subscriptions pay the costs of publication.

With fee-based OA journals, author publication fees pay the costs of publication.

Green OA mandates require authors to deposit their published articles on the web, free for all.

Gold OA means the journal makes the articles free for all on the web.

The goal of the open access movement is open access to research, in order to maximize research uptake, impact and progress. Universal Green OA mandates from funders (like RCUK) and universities are all that is needed to ensure universal OA.

Universal Green OA may or may not eventually lead to subscription cancellations and a transition to the Gold OA cost-recovery model. If and when it does, the windfall subscription cancellation savings themselves will be more than enough to pay for the much-reduced costs of providing peer-review alone (which will be the only product that peer-reviewed journals will still need to provide), with never the need to redirect a single penny from the dwindling pot that funds research itself.

(That publication costs would only amount to 2% of research costs is a specious calculation, when one fails to take into account that publication costs are still being fully covered by subscription payments today, while many research proposals recommended for funding by reviewers are going unfunded because there is not enough money in the research pot to cover them. Nor is there any need whatsoever for researchers to publish in fee-based Gold OA journals if their objective is to provide OA for their work: Green OA self-archiving already provides that.)

The effects of pre-emptive Gold fever today are (i) to distract from the urgent need for universal Green OA mandates, (ii) to encourage a needless waste of scarce research funds, and (iii) to facilitate the locking-in of today's asking-prices for goods and services (print edition, publisher's PDF, storage, dissemination) that will almost certainly be obsolete by the time Gold OA's day really comes, once universal Green OA has become the access-provider (and archiver).

The publishers are just doing what any business will do to try to sustain and maximize its habitual revenues; it is the pre-emptive publishing reformers who are being foolish and short-sighted, needlessly conflating the urgent and important research accessibility problem with the journal affordability problem, not realizing that if they solve the former, the latter loses all its apparent urgency and importance.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum