Universal Open Access Mandates By Universities Moot The Problem of Uncontrolled Journal Price Inflation Caused By Inelastic Demand

Stuart Shieber, architect of Harvard's OA Mandate, asks:

"Do we continue the status quo, which involves only supporting a business model known to be subject to uncontrolled inflationary spirals, or do we experiment with new mechanisms that have the potential to be economically sound and far more open to boot?"

The answer is simple: The only reason the uncontrolled inflation of journal subscription costs is a problem at all (and also the reason the upward spiral continues uncontrolled) is the world's universities' inelastic demand and need for access to one another's peer-reviewed journal articles.

Hence the solution is for universities -- who also happen to be the universal providers of all those journal articles -- to provide Open Access (free online access) to their own institution's subset of that total journal article output by mandating that the peer-reviewed final drafts be deposited by their own institutional authors in their own institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Universal OA self-archiving moots the problem of uncontrolled subscription-cost inflation by putting an end to the inelasticity of the demand: If your university cannot afford the subscription price for journal X, your users will still have access to the OA version.

There is no need for universities to try to reform journal economics directly now. What is urgently needed, universally reachable, and already long overdue is universal OA self-archiving mandates from universities. Focusing instead on reforming journal business models pre-emptively is simply distracting from and hence delaying the fulfillment of this pressing need.

Harvard should focus all its energy and prestige on universalizing OA self-archiving mandates rather than dissipating it needlessly and counterproductively on journal economics and OA funds.

Once OA self-archiving is universal, journal economics will take care of itself quite naturally of its own accord.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan.

ABSTRACT: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.