Open Access Archivangelism

RCUK allowing hybrid Gold payment only if the publisher allows the Green option within the RCUK 6-12-24+ embargo limits is no solution for the perverse effects of the new RCUK policy.

The only solution is for RCUK to allow hybrid Gold payment only if the publisher allows an immediate un-embargoed Green option -- and RCUK must leave the choice between Green or Gold options completely up to the author (no "preference," no "decision tree").

A subscription publisher that pits paid hybrid Gold against embargoed Green is practicing extortion, with or without the help of RCUK's perverse policy.

Embargoes are a complicated story that will soon have to be told forthrightly.

Publishers embargo green under the pretext that it's the only way to protect themselves from sure ruin.

That is utter nonsense, of course.

What embargoes really do is to delay (i.e. embargo) the natural, inevitable evolution from subscription publishing to Fair-Gold OA publishing at a fair, affordable, sustainable price by "protecting" double-payment at today's grotesquely inflated Fool's-Gold price.

Embargoes embargo both OA and Fair Gold, in order to lock in current subscription revenues and Fool's Gold.

Think about it….

But the compromise of an immediate-deposit/optional-access (ID/OA) mandate (in which deposit must be immediate but access to the deposit may be embargoed), once globally adopted, will ensure that publishers will be unable to keep embargoing the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, researchers and the tax-paying public much longer.

Whatever else it does, RCUK should immediately and unambiguously adopt (and ensure compliance with) an ID/OA mandate.

Richard Poynder has written yet another excellent, timely, comprehensive overview of current developments in OA: "Open Access: A Tale of Two Tables"

Three comments:

1. RP: "Some would argue that the US has long been the natural leader of the OA movement, a leadership role it could be said to have acquired in 2005 [with] the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) [Green OA mandate]"

I for one would not say the the US has been the leader of the worldwide OA movement (though it is certainly naturally placed to do so): The historic leader to date has been the UK. The world's first Green OA repository software was created in the UK (2000); the world's first Green OA mandate was adopted in the UK (2003); the UK parliamentary Select Committee was the first in the world to recommend that all institutions and funders mandate Green OA (2004); all of the UK's research funding councils (RCUK) have mandated OA (2006-2011) and the UK today has more funder (16) and institutional (25) Green OA mandates than any other country in the world (see ROARMAP).

(The US is second with 4 funder mandates and 19 institutional mandates. Little Finland leads in institutional mandates with 28; it has no funder mandates, but with all Finnish universities mandated, it hardly needs them!)

It is only now, with its flawed BIS/Finch/RCUK Gold-Preferential policy that the UK has lost its worldwide lead: In fact, as shown by the SPARC Europe Table, all other countries are now following the path that the UK pioneered in 2003-2004: the only country not following the UK's historic lead now is the UK itself!

But the good news is that the UK's lead can easily be regained, if the UK simply drops its gratuitous preference for Gold and throws its full weight behind implementing an effectively verified Green OA mandate, leaving the option of publishing and paying for Gold as purely a matter of author choice.

2. RP: "Green does usually mean a delay before OA is provided… usually... an embargo period of anything between 6 months and three or more years — a delay intended to allow the publisher to recoup the costs it incurred in publishing the paper."

This too is one of the unanticipated negative consequences of the new RCUK OA policy. It is not true that Green OA means delayed/embargoed OA. At the moment, over 60% of subscription journals, including almost all the top journals in most fields, endorse immediate, un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving by their authors. (See the SHERPA/Romeo registry.)

Fewer than 40% of journals try to impose a Green OA embargo, and even for those, there is a compromise solution that is "Almost-OA":

All papers (100%) need to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, but access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access during the embargo period. During the embargo, the repositories have an email-eprint-request Button that allows individual users to request, and authors to provide, with one click each, a single eprint for research use.

This means that an effective Green OA immediate-deposit mandate can immediately provide at least 60% immediate-OA plus 40% Almost-OA.

But RCUK's flawed policy, by providing an irresistible incentive for subscription publishers to offer UK authors hybrid Gold OA for an extra fee encourages publishers, by the same stroke, to adopt and to lengthen Green OA embargoes beyond RCUK's allowable limit in order to make sure that UK authors must pick the paid Gold option (the UK's "preferred" one) rather than the cost-free Green one.

This too is easily fixed if the UK simply drops its gratuitous preference for Gold and throws its full weight behind implementing an effectively verified Green OA mandate, leaving the option of publishing and paying for Gold as purely a matter of author choice.

Let me also stress that the costs of publication that subscription publishers incur are being paid in full, and fulsomely, by their worldwide journal subscriptions. Hence there is no justification for publisher embargoes on Green OA a as "a delay intended to allow the publisher to recoup the costs it incurred in publishing the paper." Embargoes are in place purely in order to insure publishers' current revenue streams by forcing researchers to pay or double-pay an inflated price for Fool's-Gold OA instead of allowing Green OA to leverage a downsizing and transition from subscriptions to Fair-Gold OA at an affordable, sustainable post-Green-OA price.

3. RP: "the SPARC table could be taken to imply that the Wellcome Trust only supports Green OA"

The Wellcome policy allows either Green or Gold.

But, without announcing it explicitly, and without placing any pressure on authors, Wellcome too prefers Gold (and most of the OA that is generated by its policy is Gold OA). This is no coincidence, for the new UK policy was strongly influenced by, and to a great extent modelled upon, the Wellcome policy.

Wellcome gets the historic credit for having been the first funder in the world to mandate OA. (They did it before NIH.) But the Wellcome policy is deeply flawed and was for several years ineffective because compliance was in no way monitored and there were no consequences for noncompliance.

Now, both NIH and Wellcome monitor compliance: funding may not be provided or renewed if fundees fail to comply. But NIH still only mandates Green, whereas Wellcome, a private charity, has adopted the (simplistic) maxim that "Publication costs are part of research costs (1.5%) and a research funder should be prepared to pay them."

That is Wellcome's rationale for (implicitly) preferring Gold: "We fund the research: we're ready to pay its publication costs too."

The trouble is that most research publication is still subscription based. And institutions still have to pay those subscription costs, so their users can access the research. Wellcome is not offering to pay for that: just for the Gold OA costs of publishing the research Wellcome funds. Subscription journals are happy to take the extra Wellcome money, and duly offer a hybrid Gold choice for any author who wants to pay for it -- but they also continue to collect subscriptions, and institutions continue to have to pay for them. So Wellcome is merely subsidizing a 1.5% double-payment to publishers in exchange for Gold OA.

This absurd subsidy to publishers is fine when offered by a private funder that has nothing to spend its money on other than research (98.5%) and its publication (1.5%).

But this simplistic formula doesn't work for the UK (or any) government, or any public research funder. For unlike private charities, governments are using tax-payer money not only to pay for research (100%), but also to pay for journal subscriptions (100%). Hence if they foolishly elect to pay publishers even more -- 100% for subscriptions plus 1.5% more for Gold OA -- they are throwing taxpayer money away to double-pay publishing costs that they are already paying via subscriptions.

Hence, paradoxically, the very first funder to mandate OA, the Wellcome Trust, is definitely not the model to follow. Yet the UK has now done just that, adding to the Wellcome Trust's generosity to publishers an explicit preferential pressure on UK authors, with perverse consequences for the UK as well as the rest of the world.

(For a clear grasp of the contingencies, complementarity, and time-course of Green and Gold OA, the reader could do no better than to consult Houghton & Swan's "Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest". )

It is definitely a canard that all, most or even the majority of OA is Gold OA.

It is also definitely untrue that all, most or even the majority of Gold OA is APC-based (Article Processing Charge).

But I think it is also true that the majority of non-APC-based Gold OA journals are not among the top journals in most fields -- the ones most institutions need to subscribe to, and the ones that also tend to be the journals indexed by ISI (and that doesn't just mean preoccupation with journal impact factors: those are also the journals that have established a track-record for high quality peer review standards).

I may be wrong, but I think it is misleading to equate the canard about OA being Gold OA with the misimpression that most Gold OA is APC-based: It's not, but there's more to it than that.

And I also think that although it's true that today's limited and patchy Green OA has not caused journal cancelations, once OA becomes universally mandatory, Green OA will go on to make subscriptions unsustainable, and journals will have to cut costs, downsize, and find another source of revenue to cover the remaining costs. And that other source of revenue will be Gold OA APCs, per paper submitted for peer review, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid out of a portion of each institution's annual windfall savings from the subscription-cancellations induced by universal Green OA.

That will be affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (as compared to today's Fool's Gold OA, double-paid alongside subscriptions at an absurdly inflated price). But I do not believe that either parallel subscription income, alongside universal Green -- or subsidies, or (as some imagine) pure voluntarism and thin air -- will be sustainable ways of paying for the much-reduced but still non-zero cost, per paper submitted, of post-Green peer-reviewed journal publishing.

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"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world... At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold” D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

Unilateral Gold is the losing choice in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If an institution, funder or country unilaterally mandates Gold OA Publishing (with author publication charges) today, instead of first (effectively) mandating Green OA self-archiving (at no added cost) then that institution/funder/country has made the losing choice in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma (see below):

	Unilateral Green (rest of world):	Unilateral Gold (rest of world):
Unilateral Green:	win/win	win/lose
Unilateral Gold:	lose/win	win/win

Responses to Martin Hall
on Finch
on
“Neither Green nor Gold”

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Stevan Harnad (February 11th, 2013 at 9.03 pm) Says:

MARTIN HALL: “The “Green” versus “Gold” debate... is misleading. The imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case has been remade in a recent – excellent – posting by Stuart Shieber, Harvard’s Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication.”

STUART SHIEBER: “Do you have a pointer to something saying that I support the Finch approach? If so, I’m happy to answer it directly — in the negative when it comes to both their lack of support for green and poorly designed approach to gold support.” (Feb 3 2013, personal communication.

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Martin Hall (February 12th, 2013 at 11.59 am) Says:

Stevan – here are two quotations from Stuart Shieber’s paper which make the point about the significance of moving to full Open Access to copy-of-record. The Finch Report, however imperfect, was about the transition to this.

“Open-access journals don’t charge for access, but that doesn’t mean they eschew revenue entirely. Open-access journals are just selling a different good, and therefore participating in a different market. Instead of selling access to readers (or the readers’ proxy, the libraries), they sell publisher services to the authors (or to the authors’ proxy, their research funders). In fact there are now over 8,500 open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some of them have been mentioned already on this panel: Linguistic Discovery, Semantics and Pragmatics. The majority of existing open-access journals, like those journals, don’t charge authorside article-processing charges (APCs). But in the end APCs seems to me the most reasonable, reliable, scalable, and efficient revenue mechanism for open-access journals. This move from reader-side subscription fees to author-side APCs has dramatic ramifications for the structure of the market that the publisher participates in”.

And later:

“So journals compete for authors in a way they don’t for readers, and this competition leads to much greater efficiency. Open-access publishers are highly motivated to provide better services at lower price to compete for authors’ article submissions. We actually see evidence of this competition on both price and quality happening in the market.”

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Stevan Harnad (February 13th, 2013 at 2.41 am -- Your comment is awaiting moderation. ) Says:

PRIORITIES

Martin, I agree with every word you quote from Stuart above, but that’s not what the Finch Report, or the criticism of the Finch Report is about.

Yes, this concerns the transition to Open Access (OA). But the disagreement is about the means, not the end.

The Finch report recommended downgrading cost-free Green OA self-archiving in repositories to just preservation archiving and instead double-paying pre-emptively for Gold OA (publisher’s PDF of record, CC-BY) while worldwide journal subscriptions still need to be paid, and only allowing UK authors to publish in journals that don’t offer Gold if their Green embargo does not exceed 6-12 months.

This not only wastes a great deal of scarce UK research money but it gives publishers the incentive to offer hybrid Gold (continue charging subscriptions but offer Gold for individual articles for an extra Gold OA fee), it restricts free choice of journals, antagonizing authors, and it encourages journals to adopt and extend Green OA embargoes beyond the 6-12 limit, thus making Green OA harder to mandate for other countries, none of which have any intention of following the Finch model of paying pre-emptively for Gold instead of mandating extra-cost-free Green while subscriptions are still paying for publishing: See: Sparc Europe's "Analysis of funder Open Access policies around the world".

What Finch/RCUK needs to do instead is to (1) upgrade its Green OA mandate, (2) require immediate deposit whether or not OA to the deposit is embargoed, (3) adopt an effective system for monitoring and ensuring compliance, (4) allow free choice of journals, and (5) make Gold OA completely optional.

Stuart Shieber is the architect of Harvard’s Green OA policy. That policy does not constrain researchers' journal choice and it does not offer to fund hybrid Gold. There’s no problem with offering to spend any spare cash you may have on Gold — after you have effectively mandated Green. But not instead.

(By the way, neither the publisher’s PDF nor CC-BY is worth paying extra for today, pre-emptively, while journal subscriptions still need to be paid: Once universally mandated Green OA makes journals cancellable, publishers will cut costs, phase out the obsolete print and online editions, offload all access provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories, and convert to Fair Gold, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid for out of the institutional subscription-cancelation savings — instead of the UK double-paying pre-emptively and needlessly for the bloated price of both subscriptions and Fool’s Gold out of overstretched UK research funds today, pre-Green, as Finch/RCUK are proposing to do.)

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ADDENDUM:

"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world... At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold” D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

Unilateral UK Gold is the losing choice in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If the UK unilaterally mandates Gold OA Publishing (with author publication charges) today, instead of first (effectively) mandating Green OA self-archiving (at no added cost) then the UK has made the losing choice in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma (see below):

	Unilateral Green (rest of world):	Unilateral Gold (rest of world):
Unilateral Green (UK):	win/win	win/lose
Unilateral Gold (UK):	lose/win	win/win

What is a peer-reviewed journal?

1. A journal is a peer-review manager and copy-editor (the peers -- qualified, answerable specialists -- chosen by the editor, review for free; the editor adjudicates the reviews and the author revisions).

2. If the article is accepted, the accepted draft is certified with the journal's name.

3. The journal generates and distributes (3a) a print and/or (3b) online edition.

A journal that does not generate a print edition (3a) is still a journal.

A journal that does not generate an online edition (3b) is still a journal.

The journal certifies (and answers for) its content and quality standards with its name and track-record.

If the journal's costs are paid by subscriptions, it's a subscription journal.

If costs are paid by subsidies, it's a subsidized journal. 

If costs are paid by the author, it's an author-pays journal.

OA is free online access to journal articles, immediately upon publication.

If OA is provided by the journal, it's Gold OA publishing.

If OA is provided by the author, it's Green OA self-archiving.

If the journal is OA, it's a Gold OA journal. If not, not.

There is hence no need for (nor any new information provided by) new terms like "diamond," "overlay" or "epi" journal.

An OA journal that charges neither subscriptions nor author-fees is a subsidized journal ("diamond" adds no further information or properties).

An OA journal that generates neither a print nor an online version is an OA journal that generates neither a print nor an online version: the self-archived version is the only version.

The vast majority of free online journals (Gold OA) do not charge APCs.

It is arbitrary and unilluminating to invent a spectrum of colours or precious metals to classify their various possible cost-recovery models as if they were forms of OA.

OA is not about cost-recovery models (nor about peer-review models); it is about research access. (Don't conflate OA with publication cost-recovery models.)

The reason (some) physicists and mathematicians speak of "overlay" journals is that many physicists and mathematicians, before submitting their papers to a journal for peer review, self-archive their unrefereed "preprints" in Arxiv. Most then also go on to self-archive their final, peer-reviewed "postprints" in Arxiv. They think of the peer-review, copy-editing, and certification as an "overlay" on their unrefereed preprint.

But, by the same token, the peer-review, copy-editing and certification is an "overlay" on every author's unrefereed preprint, whether the journal is print, online, both, or neither.

And most authors don't self-archive their unrefereed drafts at all.

Some fields of mathematics and physics already have close to 100% (Green) OA, by self-archiving in Arxiv.

So it looks as if Episciences.org is just a new online journal platform -- there are others) -- one that has neither a print edition nor an online edition. That means the self-archived version will be the version of record. (Green will become Gold.)

Submission is done by depositing the unrefereed draft in Arxiv (instead of just emailing it to the journal, or sending a URL from the author's website or institutional repository, as with most other journals, OA and non-OA, subscription-based, subsidy-based, and/or author-fee-based).

In addition, it looks as if Episciences.org is hoping to cover the costs of 1 and 2 above (peer review and certification) for its start-up mathematics journal(s) out of subsidies (from CCSD and Institut Fournier/Grenoble) rather than subscriptions or author fees. 3a and 3b (print and online edition) and their costs are being dropped and access-provision and archiving are to be offloaded onto Arxiv.

This is a very sensible idea, but it may be premature for sustainability: All other disciplines may first have to (be mandated to) provide 100% Green OA, as some subfields of maths and physics have long been doing, unmandated, and then all institutional subscription journal subscription funds will be freed to pay the remaining costs of 1 and 2 (whether via Gold OA fees or subsidies). Nor will Arxiv be the main locus of self-archiving in most other disciplines: Authors' own institutional repositories will be.

In principle it does not matter in the least whether the self-archiving is in a central repository like Arxiv or in each author's own institutional repository, from which one or many subject repositories (and search engines) harvest, just as long as the preprints and postprints are reliably deposited and archived online. But in practice, there are many reasons why institutional and funder mandates should stipulate institutional deposit rather than institution-external deposit.

There are no new entities needing the name "epijournals" -- just journals. What is being proposed is by Episciences.org is journals with no print or online edition, in a subdomain (of mathematics and physics) where all authors already self-archive (100% Green). (Postpublication commentary on peer-reviewed journal articles is postpublication commentary -- not peer review.)

Let's see if subsidies work to keep episciences.org journals sustainably afloat. If not, they will of course have to convert to author fees. Either way, it's just another (proposed) new Gold OA journal.

My own view is that it is too early to bury either the print or the online edition of subscription journals: Not while they still publish most of the top journals, and hence institutions cannot cancel them, nor can authors stop publishing in them.

The time for institutions to cancel, and for journals to downsize to just peer review alone and to convert to Gold, with institutions paying the (much lower) author fees out of their cancelation savings, is after Green OA is at or near 100% (as it already is in some areas of physics and mathematics).

What I think Tim Gowers and Jean-Pierre Demailly (and CERN) should hence be preaching to the world is not "epijournals" but Green OA self-archiving: Mathematicians and physicists (and, before them, computer scientists) did it without mandates, but after 20 years we see that the other disciplines won't do it until their institutions and funders mandate it.

No-print, no-online, no-subscription, no-author-fee Gold OA journals are not "complements" to subscription journals: they are simply another competing journal.

There does exist a complement to subscription journals today: It is not Arxiv, but Green OA self-archiving by authors, in all disciplines, now at last growing because of OA mandates from their institutions and funders.

When Green OA self-archiving approaches 100% across all disciplines, however, it will indeed become a "competitor," forcing journals to jettison their print and online editions and convert to Gold OA fees to cover their much lower remaining costs" peer review.

In viewing their testimony before the House of Lords Select Committee on UK Open Access Policy, one is rather astonished to see just how misinformed are the three witnesses -- Professor Rick Rylance, Chair of RCUK; Professor Douglas Kell, RCUK Information Champion; David Sweeney, Director (Research, Innovation and Skills), Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) -- on a number of key points.

Professor Kell's impression seems to be along the lines that "all the worldwide OA policies are like ours [the UK's] regarding Gold, and the rest of the world is taking its lead from us."

Unfortunately this is no longer the case at all.

And although the three witnesses extol the economist John Houghton's work as authoritative, they rather startlingly misunderstand his findings:

The witnesses cite Houghton's work as (1) evidence that Green OA is more expensive than Gold and as (2) support for the UK's new policy of paying for Gold OA in preference to providing Green OA.

Houghton's findings support neither of these conclusions, as stated rather explicitly and unambiguously in Houghton & Swan's most recent publication:

"The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the Finch Report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned that there may be some misinterpretation of this work... [our] main findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not yet anywhere near having reached an OA world. At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of unilaterally adopting Gold OA — with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost."

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

What Houghton and coworkers said and meant about Green as the transitional policy concerned an eventual transition from (1) today's paid subscription access to (2) paid subscription access + Green OA to (3) post-Green Gold (with subscriptions no longer being paid).

Houghton was not at all referring to or supporting a transition from (I) the current RCUK policy in which Green is "allowed" (though grudgingly and non-preferentially) to (II) an RCUK policy where only Gold is allowed (but subscriptions still need to be paid)!

Quite the contrary. It is the added cost of subscriptions that makes pre-Green Gold so gratuitously expensive.

In the background, it's clear exactly what subscription publishers are attempting to persuade the UK to do: Publishers know, better than anyone, now, that OA is absolutely inevitable. Hence they are quite aware that their only option is to try to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, on the pretext that it would destroy their business and hurt the UK economy to rush into OA without subsidizing subscription publishers by paying extra for Gold. And this self-interested alarmism is succeeding -- in the UK.

Meanwhile, the policy-makers in the UK remain under the misapprehension that they are still the leaders, setting the direction and pace for worldwide OA -- whereas in reality they are being rather successfully taken in by the publishing lobby (both subscription and Gold), while the rest of the world has stopped following the UK on OA since its gratuitous and unaffordable U-turn from mandating already-paid Green OA self-archiving to double-paying for Gold OA.

But it's not just the publishing lobby that's behind the U-turn from Green OA: There are two other notable sources of misdirection:

(1) The Wellcome Trust, a private biomedical research-funding charity that believes it has understood it all with its slogan "Publishing is just another research cost, and a small one, 1.5%, so we simply have to be prepared to pay it, and in exchange we will have OA":

What Wellcome does not reckon is that, unlike Wellcome, the UK government is not a private charity, with only two decisions to make: "What research shall I fund, and to whom shall I pay the 1.5% of it which is publication fees?"

The UK, unlike Wellcome, also has to pay for university journal subscriptions, university infrastructure, and a lot else. And the UK is already paying for 100% of all that today -- which means 100% of UK publication costs. Any money to pay for Gold OA is over and above that.

Nor does Wellcome -- a private funder who can dictate whatever it likes as a condition for receiving its research grants -- seem to appreciate that the UK and RCUK are not in the same position as Wellcome: They cannot dictate UK researchers' journal choice, nor can they tell UK researchers to spend money on Gold other than whatever money they give them.

Nor does Wellcome give a second thought to the fact that its ineffective OA mandate owes what little success it has had in nearly 10 years to publishers being paid to provide OA, not to fundees being mandated to do it.

Yet in almost every respect, the new RCUK policy is now simply a clone of the old Wellcome policy.

(2) The minority of fields and individuals that strongly advocate CC-BY licenses for all refereed research today have managed to give the impression that it is not free online access to refereed research that matters most, but the kinds of re-mix, text-mining, re-use, and re-publication that they need in their own small minority of fields.

To repeat, it is incontrovertibly true and highly relevant: CC-BY is only needed in a minority of fields -- and in no field is CC-BY needed more, or more urgently, than free online access is needed in all fields.

Yet here too, it is this CC-BY minority that has managed to persuade Finch/RCUK (and themselves) that CC-BY is to the advantage of -- indeed urgently needed by -- all research and researchers, in all fields, as well as UK industry. Hence that it is preferable to use 1.5% of UK's dwindling research funds to pay publishers still more for Gold CC-BY to UK research output (and pressure authors to choose journals that offer it) rather than just to mandate cost-free Green (and let authors choose journals on the basis of their quality standards and track-records, as before, rather on the basis of their licenses and cost-recovery models).

The obvious Achilles Heel in all this is unilaterality, as Houghton & Swan point out, clearly.

None of the benefits on which the UK OA policy is predicated will materialize if the UK does what it proposes to do unilaterally:

The Finch/RCUK policy will just purchase Gold CC-BY to the UK's own 6% of worldwide research output by double-paying publishers (subscriptions + Gold OA fees).

In addition, the UK must continue paying the subscriptions to access the rest of the world's 94%, while at the same time UK OA policy -- by incentivizing publishers to offer hybrid Gold and increase their Green embargo lengths beyond RCUK's allowable 6-12 in order to collect the UK Gold CC-BY bonus revenue -- makes it needlessly harder for the rest of the world to mandate Green OA .

As long as the UK keeps imagining that it's still leading on OA, and that the rest of the world will follow suit -- funding and preferring Gold OA -- the UK will remain confident in the illusion that what it is doing makes sense and things must get better.

But the reality will begin to catch up when the UK realizes that it is doing what it is doing unilaterally: It has chosen the losing strategy in a global Prisoner's Dilemma.

Let us hope that UK policy-makers can still be made to see the light by inquiries like the Lords' and BIS's, and will then promptly do the simple policy tweaks that it would take to put the UK back in the lead, and in the right.

(Some of the Lords in the above video seem to have been a good deal more sensible and better informed than the three witnesses were!)

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012

Written evidence to House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on Open Access

Stevan Harnad

I. Overview of OA

1.   Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed research journal articles. (There are about 28,000 such journals, in all fields and languages.)

2.   Most research journals recover their publication costs through institutional subscriptions.

3.   No institution can afford to subscribe to all or most or even many of the 28,000 journals, only to a small fraction of them, a fraction shrinking because of rising journal costs.

4.   As a result, all researchers today, at all institutions, are denied access to articles published in those journals whose subscriptions are unaffordable to their institutions.

5.   As a result, the research that is funded by public tax revenue, and conducted by researchers employed by publicly funded institutions (universities and research institutes) is not accessible to all of its primary intended users – the researchers who can use, apply and build upon it, to the benefit of the public that funded it.

6.   The Internet and the Web have made it possible to remedy this access-denial problem, which had been a legacy of the Gutenberg era of print on paper, and its associated costs.

7.   Researchers can continue to publish their research in subscription journals, but they can self-archive their final, peer-reviewed drafts in their institutional repositories, free for all online, as a supplement, for all users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access to the journal in which the article was published (and, as an added bonus, free also for the tax-paying public that funded the research).

8.   Author self-archiving is called “Green OA.”

9.   Sixty percent of journals (including most of the top journals in most fields) already endorse Green OA self-archiving by authors, immediately upon publication (no embargo).

10.   The remaining 40% of journals request an embargo or delay on providing OA for 6-12 months or more. (The publisher rationale for the embargo is that it protects journal subscription revenues that Green OA might otherwise make unsustainable.)

11.   There is as yet no evidence at all that immediate, un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving reduces subscriptions, even in fields, such as physics, where it has been practiced for over 20 years and has long reached close to 100%.

12.   The second way to provide OA is for the journal rather than the author to make all of its articles freely accessible online immediately upon publication.

13.   OA journal publishing is called “Gold OA.”

14.   About 20% of the world’s 28,000 journals are Gold OA journals, but very few of them are among the top journals in each field.

15.   Most Gold OA journals continue to cover their costs from subscriptions (to the print edition) but the top Gold OA journals have no print edition and instead of charging the user-institution for access, through subscription fees, they charge the author-institution for publishing, through publication fees.

16.   There are also hybrid subscription/Gold journals, who publish non-OA articles and continue to charge institutional subscription fees, but offer authors the option of paying to make their individual article OA if they pay a Gold OA fee.

17.   Paying Gold OA fees is a problem for authors and their institutions because as long as most journals are still subscription journals, institutions have to continue subscribing to whatever journals they can afford that their users need.

18.   Hence paying for Gold OA today increases the financial burden on institutions at a time when subscription costs are already barely affordable.

19.   Paying for Gold OA while subscriptions still need to be paid is not only an extra financial burden, but it is also unnecessary, because Green OA can be provided for free while worldwide subscriptions are still paying the cost of publication.

20.   If and when Green OA becomes universal (i.e., at or near 100%, in all fields, worldwide), and if and when that, in turn, makes subscriptions unsustainable (with institutions cancelling subscriptions because the free Green OA versions are sufficient for their needs), then all journals can convert to Gold and institutions will have the money to pay the Gold OA costs out of their annual windfall subscription cancelation savings.

21.   There is every reason to believe that Gold OA costs after universal Green OA will be much lower than they are today: the print edition and its costs as well as the online edition will be gone, the worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories will provide access and archiving, and journals will only need to manage peer review (all peers already review for free) and perhaps provide some copy-editing.

22.   It remains to explain how to achieve universal Green OA, so as (1) to provide universal OA, first and foremost, and then (2) to induce a transition to universal Gold OA at an affordable price if and when Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, and (3) to release the institutional subscription funds in which the potential money to pay for Gold OA is currently locked.

23.   The way to achieve universal Green OA is for institutions (universities and research institutes) and research funders to mandate (require) that all research that they fund, and that they employ researchers to conduct, must not only be published, as now (“publish or perish”), but the peer-reviewed final drafts must also be deposited in the researcher’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication.

24.   Optimally, access to the deposit should be made OA immediately; in any case any OA embargo should be as short as possible.

25.   However, if necessary, an embargo of 6 months or even 12 months or longer can be tolerated in the case of the 40% of articles published in journals that do not yet endorse immediate Green OA.

26.   The repositories make it possible for authors to provide “Almost-OA” to the deposits that are under OA embargo by automatically forwarding reprint requests from would-be users to the author, who can then decide, with one click, whether or not hey wish to email the deposited reprint to the requester.

27.   Researchers have been fulfilling reprint requests from fellow-researchers for over a half century, but in the online era this can be greatly facilitated and accelerated through universally mandated repository deposit.

II. UK OA Policy

28.   In 2004, the UK Parliamentary Select Committee recommended that UK universities and UK funding councils mandate Green OA self-archiving.

29.   With this, the UK became the world leader in OA and OA policy.

30.   Green OA self-archiving has since been mandated by both funding councils and universities in the EU, Canada, and Australia, including the National Institutes of Health, Harvard, and MIT in the US (over 250 Green OA mandates worldwide to date).

31.   Green OA mandates have been growing worldwide, guided by the UK model; to accelerate mandate adoption all that is needed is a few practical upgrades to the UK model (such as upgraded compliance mechanisms and fuller integration of institutional and funder mandates).

32.   But in 2012, instead of building on its 8-year success in worldwide OA leadership, the UK took an abrupt U-turn on OA, with the recommendations of the Finch Committee.

33.   The Finch Committee declared Green OA a failure, and recommended downgrading it to just preservation archiving.

34.   In place of mandating Green OA (which is almost cost-free, while publishing is still being paid for worldwide via institutional subscriptions) the Finch Committee recommended paying even more for publishing, by redirecting scarce UK research funds to paying for Gold OA, over and above what the UK is already paying for subscriptions.

35.   One can only conjecture as to the causes underlying this inexplicable about-face when Green OA mandates are growing worldwide:

36.   The cause may have been subscription-publisher lobbying of BIS against Green OA or Gold-OA-publisher lobbying for Gold OA.

37.   There was perhaps also some pressure from a vocal minority of OA advocates arguing that there is an urgent immediate need for something stronger than the free online access mandated by Green OA (the additional re-use rights conferred by a CC-BY license) for which this minority claimed that it is worth paying Gold OA fees.

38.   The outcome has been significantly to weaken instead of strengthen the RCUK OA policy:

39.   RCUK researchers may still choose between paying for Gold OA or providing cost-free Green OA, but RCUK expresses a preference for Gold and does not permit researchers to choose Green if their chosen journal’s OA embargo exceeds 6-12 months.

40.   This policy has the perverse consequence of giving subscription publishers a strong incentive (1) to add a hybrid Gold option just in order to collect the extra UK revenue, and (2) to adopt and extend Green OA embargoes beyond the UK’s allowable 6-12 months, to make sure that UK researchers must choose the paid Gold option rather than the cost-free Green one.

41.   The rest of the world cannot, need not, and will not follow suit with this profligate. perverse, and completely unnecessary UK policy change.

42.   In Europe, the Americas and Asia, low-cost Green OA mandates will continue to grow, while the UK loses its leadership role in worldwide OA, needlessly squandering increasingly scarce research funds, paying publishers even more in order to make UK research output (and UK research output alone -- 6% of worldwide research output) OA, while the rest of the world makes its (94%) research output OA at next to no extra cost.

The Australian economist, John Houghton, has analyzed OA policy in country after country. The House of Lords Select Committee is urged to look at the outcome of those analyses, which is that it is far cheaper to mandate Green OA first, rather than to pay pre-emptively for Gold unilaterally. That not only provides OA, but it paves the way to affordable, sustainable Gold OA:

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

Conclusion: Instead of following the Finch Committee’s counterproductive recommendation to require and subsidise Gold OA, RCUK should adopt two important practical upgrades to strengthen the prior RCUK Green OA mandate: (1) integrate institutional and funder Green OA mandates so they can mutually reinforce one another and (2) implement an effective Green OA compliance mechanism, making institutions responsible for monitoring and ensuring compliance with both institutional and funder deposit mandates.

Appendix:

Comments on the Committee's specific topics:

"support for Universities in the form of funds to cover article processing charges, and the response of universities and other HEIs to these efforts"

If there are UK funds to spare to subsidise Gold OA, fine, make them available -- but mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving in all cases (ID/OA) and do not require researchers to choose a Gold OA journal unless they wish to.

"embargo periods for articles published under the green model"

The shorter the better, but always require immediate deposit (ID/OA) in the author’s institutional repository, even for embargoed articles, and implement the “Almost OA” Button during the embargo.

"engagement with publishers, universities, learned societies and other stakeholders in the development of research council open access policies and guidance"

Publishers should endorse immediate Green OA, but ID/OA mandates are compatible with embargoes.

Universities should mandate Green OA too.

Funder and university mandates should be convergent, requiring deposit in the institutional repository, with the institution monitoring and ensuring compliance.

Deposits or their metadata can then be harvested to any desired central repositories.

Repository deposit should be designated the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance review or national research assessment.

Learned Society publishers, like all publishers, should endorse immediate Green OA, but ID/OA mandates are compatible with embargoes.

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, publishers can convert to Gold OA and institutions can pay for it out of the windfall subscription cancelation savings freed by the Green-OA-induced cancelations.

"challenges and concerns raised by the scientific and publishing communities, and how these have been addressed.

"The UK scientific community has rightly expressed considerable concern about (1) not being allowed to publish in their journals of choice, and about (2) having to pay for Gold OA.

The solution is to mandate Green OA and not to require Gold OA except if the author wishes it.

The UK subscription publishing community is being paid in full for publication, via worldwide subscriptions today.

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, publishers can convert to Gold OA and institutions can pay for it out of the windfall subscription cancelation savings freed by the Green-OA-induced cancelations.

"international issues"

The rest of the world need not, cannot, and will not follow the Finch Committee’s recommendation to pay pre-emptively for Gold instead of mandating Green OA.

It would be best if the UK returned to the direction it set in 2004; otherwise it is simply using UK research funds to provide (Gold) OA for the UK and the world at a much higher cost than necessary, and at the cost of inducing perverse effects in publishers (such as subscription publishers offering hybrid Gold in order to attract double payment for UK’s Gold subsidy, and adopting and increasing OA embargoes in order to ensure that UK researchers must pay extra for Gold OA).

Figure 1. The percentage of Green and Gold OA in the UK (2007-2011, Web of Science). Note that most OA is Green OA. From: Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012b) Green and Gold Open Access percentages and growth, by discipline. In: 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), Montreal, CA, 05 - 08 Sep 2012. 11pp.




Figure 2. The effect of Green OA mandates (comparing nonmandated vs mandated OA provision: 2002-2009). Data from Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012a) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. Presented: Open Access Week 2012

The dons are absolutely right that dictating where they may or may not publish, and coercing them to pay to publish is an assault on academic freedom:

"Open access plans are 'attack on academic freedoms'" (Guardian Observer, & Telegraph, January 26)

But they are absolutely wrong that the fault lies with Open Access (OA), or with mandating OA.

The fault lies entirely with the way the UK government -- RCUK, under the influence of the foolish and ill-informed recommendations of the Finch Committee -- has proposed to mandate OA.

The Finch Committee has recommended weakening instead of strengthening the RCUK's existing, 5-year-old OA mandate -- which had allowed authors to continue publishing wherever they wished, and merely required them to make their final drafts OA within 12 months of publication by self-archiving them free for all online ("Green OA").

Declaring the prior Green OA mandate a failure, the Finch Committee proposed instead to dictate to authors which journals they were permitted to publish in: only in journals that make their own published articles OA ("Gold OA"), with a CC-BY license, immediately upon publication, or in journals that formally endorse their authors providing Green OA within 6-12 months of publication. In addition, some scarce research money was to be diverted from research to pay publishers even more money, over and above what is already being spent on subscriptions, in exchange for Gold OA.

Authors naturally became incensed at the government dictating where they might or might not publish. (Nor did they appreciate money being diverted from dwindling research funds to pay publishers even more.)

Enough complaining. The error is easily corrected:

Let authors publish wherever they wish. Require them to deposit their peer-reviewed final drafts in their OA institutional repositories immediately upon publication.

Sixty percent of journals already endorse immediate Green OA. For the 40% that want OA embargoed, make the deposit Closed Access instead of OA during the embargo.

The repository has a Button for redirecting individual users' reprint requests for Closed Access articles to the author, who can authorize the emailing of the reprint to the requester with one click if he wishes. This is not OA, but it is "Almost-OA" and is sufficient to tide over researchers' access needs until embargoes die their inevitable and well-deserved natural deaths.

Meanwhile, 100% of articles are immediately deposited, 60% are immediately OA, 40% are Almost-OA, and authors retain their full right to choose their journals and not pay for Gold OA if they do not wish to.

They are strongly encouraged to make the deposit OA as soon as possible, but this is not a constraint on their freedom of choice of journals.

This is a strengthened version of RCUK's prior Green OA mandate, without the Finch folly (nor the premature and unnecessary CC-BY requirement, which is not needed in most fields, not as urgent as free online access in any field, and only makes it gratuitously harder to mandate OA).

All this upgrade needs in order to make it optimal is:

(1) Funder mandates and institutional mandates should both stipulate convergent institutional deposit (not divergent, competitive deposit: institution-external repositories like EuPMC can harvest from the institutional ones).

(2) Institutions and funders should both stipulate that repository deposit is the only means of submitting publications for institutional performance review or national research assessment.

(3) Institutions should be designated to monitor and ensure that their researchers comply with both institutional and funder deposit mandates.

This optimized Green OA mandate is no more of an assault on academic freedom than the mandate to "Publish-or-Perish" is -- in fact, it is merely a natural extension of P-or-P, for the online age.

This petition already has 60,000 signatures, well over the threshold that promises a reply, but many more signatures will ensure that the reply is affirmative. Please sign!

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Added December 31 2012:

"The cardinal law... contains a provision that gives the Parliament its own military, a Parlia-military"

"it seems increasingly likely that the Hungarian government is heading toward the creation of a police state"

(K. L. Scheppele)

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I’ve just read the timely recent observations in Hungarian Spectrum by Princeton University's international constitutional scholar, Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, as well as her earlier excellent lecture on the new Hungarian constitution (delivered at CEU nearly a year ago).

Professor Scheppele's insights were and continue to be astute. But one point on which she does not seem to be realistic is her insistence that the problem of undoing the profound damage being done in Hungary by the current governing party's electoral supermajority and its increasingly autocratic leader's use of that supermajority power can and hence must be solved by Hungarians alone.

On the contrary, Hungary’s long history of red/white polarization and scape-goating has clearly culminated, in the latest pendulum swing, in the entrenchment of the white side’s ideology — a primitive, parochial, petty, punitive and increasingly paranoid world-view — in a quackish new constitution drafted, adopted and since amended at will nearly 2000 times by the governing party's supermajority.

Undoing this systematic, cumulative and self-perpetuating damage would require far more substantial and unified internal opposition now than Hungary seems capable of mustering (including the election of a supermajority in the opposite direction, under increasingly self-serving election restrictions voted into law at will by the ruling supermajority).

If global scrutiny and support on behalf of democracy and justice are not ratcheted up dramatically, Hungary will become ever more inextricably engulfed by the opportunistic tar-baby that a plurality made the fateful mistake of embracing in 2010.

(International sanctions would certainly be infinitely preferable to an unopposed descent into dictatorship -- or to civil war.)