Saturday, July 21. 2012Q&A On Post-Green-OA Gold OA vs. Pre-Emptive Gold OAasks: "Is “gold” open access necessary to provide the financial resources to make open access a reality?" No. Institutional subscriptions are already paying the cost of publication, in full, handsomely, today. No need to pay still more for Gold OA while subscriptions are still paying the bill: Just mandate Green OA self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed final draft."Are taxpayers who have paid for the research entitled to the free access that “green” open access promises?" Of course. And all their funders and institutions need to do is mandate Green OA, as"Is there a hybrid model that preserves the positive elements of both “gold” and “green” models?" The"Where does peer review and quality assurance fit in to all of this?" Peer review is quality assurance, and it never left! Green OA is the self-archiving of peer-reviewed papers, the peer review being paid for by institutional subscriptions. Post-Green OA-Gold OA is the peer review service itself, paid for out of the subscription cancelations. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed). The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. Friday, July 20. 2012On Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust) on Finch Report and RCUK Mandate
Robert Kiley [Wellcome Trust] wrote in GOAL: My reading of the RCUK policy is somewhat different to Stevan’s. In short, I see clear parallels between what Finch recommended (disclosure – I sat on the Finch Working Group) and the RCUK policy...In response to Robert, let's keep it simple and go straight to the heart of the matter: 1. Ever since the historic 2004 Report of the UK Parliamentary Select Committee which made the revolutionary recommendation to mandate (what has since come to be called) Green OA self-archiving as well as to fund (what has since come to be called) Gold OA journal fees, RCUK (and later the EC and other funding councils worldwide) have been mandating Green and funding Gold. 2. The Finch report recommended phasing out Green and only funding Gold. 3. That's the substance of the "squabbling over the minutiae of differences between green and gold". The Wellcome Trust's pioneering historic lead in OA has since 2004 alas hardened into rigid dogma, at the cost of much lost growth potential for OA (as well as of much potential research funding). The 2004 UK's Parliamentary Select Committee's prescient recommendation eight years ago had been this: “This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way... [T]o encourage… experimentation… the Report [also] recommends that the Research Councils each establish [an experimental] fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish...”CC-BY is not nearly as urgent and important as "Gratis" OA (free online access): not all authors want it, most users don't need it, and it would immediately make endorsing un-embargoed Green ruinous to subscription publishers: so demanding it today, pre-emptively leads to less OA and longer embargoes (just as demand for pre-emptive Gold does). See: "Overselling the Importance and Urgency of CC-BY/CC-BY-NC for Peer-Reviewed Scholarly and Scientific Research." (Lest it sound as if I am lauding the pre-emptive funding of Gold today: I am not. It was historically important to demonstrate that fee-based Gold OA is conceivable and viable, in order to fend off the publishing lobby's doomsday contention that OA would destroy publishing. So the early Gold OA proof-of-principle, especially by PLOS-Biology and PLOS-Medicine, was very timely and useful. But the subsequent mindless Gold Rush, at the expense of neglecting the enormous power of cost-free Green OA mandates to accelerate the growth of OA, not to mention the needless waste of money diverted from research to fund Gold pre-emptively, have been exceedingly detrimental to overall OA growth. The simplest way to summarize the underlying logic and pragmatics is that pre-Green-OA pre-emptive Gold OA, at today's inflated asking prices and while subscriptions still prevail, is extremely bad for OA progress: wasteful, unscalable, and unsustainable, it generates very little global OA, very slowly. In contrast, post-Green-OA, downsized Gold OA, once Green OA has prevailed globally, making subscriptions unsustainable and forcing journals to downsize and convert to Gold OA for peer review service alone, at a far lower cost, paid out of subscription cancelation savings instead of scarce research funds, will be affordable, scalable and sustainable) Stevan Harnad What Is Open Access? And What Is All the Tumult About?
1. "Open Access" does not mean "Open Access Publishing."
2. "Open Access" (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed, published journal articles. 3. OA comes in two "degrees": "Gratis" OA is free online access and "Libre" OA is free online access plus various re-use rights. (Most of the discussion right now is about Gratis OA, which is the most important, urgent and reachable degree of OA.) 4. Authors can provide OA in two ways: (4a) by publishing in a subscription journal and making their final, peer-reviewed drafts free for all online by self-archiving them in their OA institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication ("Green OA") or (4b) by paying to publish them in an OA journal that makes them free for all online ("Gold OA"). 5. Both Green OA and Gold OA is peer-reviewed: no difference there. 6. But Gold OA costs extra money (which the Finch Report proposes to take out of already-scarce research funds). 7. Green OA is free of extra cost (because subscriptions are still paying in full -- and handsomely -- for publication). 8. About 60% of journals officially recognize their authors' right to provide immediate Green OA, but about 40% impose an embargo of 6-12 months or longer before their authors may provide Green OA. 9. All the UK Research Councils (RCUK) mandate that their authors provide Green OA with a maximum allowable embargo of 6 months (12 for AHRC and ESRC). They also make some funds available to pay Gold OA fees. 10. The Finch report, under very strong lobbying pressure from publishers, recommended that cost-free Green OA be phased out and that only funded Gold OA should be provided. 11. 12. The tumult from researchers and OA advocates is about the diversion of scarce research funds to pricey Gold OA what Green OA can be provided cost-free. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed). The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93 Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) Times Higher Ed: Professor Adam Tickell's Four Tricky FringillismsProfessor Adam Tickell (pro-VC, U. Birminhgam): "Critically, the minister for universities and science wanted to ensure that all relevant stakeholders - universities, funders, learned societies and publishers - were represented" The only "relevant stakeholders" are those by and for whom research is funded, conducted, refereed and reported. That does not include publishers, whether commercial or learned-society.Professor Tickell: "Open access is not a significant issue for most academic researchers: we already have access to most research papers." In searching the latest literature in his field, is Adam Tickell one of the rare academics who has not reached (frequently) an access-denied link offering pay-to-view with a hefty price-tag?Professor Tickell: "Many UK-based learned societies rely on income from publishing - most of which is export income - to remain viable" Are Green Open Access Mandates rendering anyone's publishing income nonviable?Professor Tickell: "As green was unacceptable to funders unless learned societies and publishers were willing to allow it with minimal embargo periods (which would undermine their business models), the group recommended gold as part of a mix that includes elements of all forms of open access." Are the interests of publishers, whether commercial or learned-society, the arbiters of what is in the interest of those by and for whom research is funded, conducted, refereed and reported? And what was the green part of the Finch "mix"? This?: "The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories… [so] the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should [instead] be developed [to] play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation [no mention of Green OA]…"FINCH ON GREEN: Stevan Harnad Tuesday, July 17. 2012EC Didn't Follow Finch/Willets, It Rejected it, Promptly and Prominently
Irony of ironies, that it should now appear (to some who are not paying attention) as if the
Finch/Willets, under the influence of the publisher lobby, have recommended abandoning cost-free Green OA and instead spending scarce research money on paying publishers extra for Gold OA. What Finch/Willets have mandated is that £50,000,000 of the UK's scarce research budget be taken away annually from UK research and redirected instead to paying publishers for Gold OA. The UK government is free to squander its public funds as it sees fit. But as long as cost-free Green OA mandates remain in effect, that's just a waste of money, not of progress in the global growth in OA. (A lot of hard, unsung work had to be done, by many, many people, to fend off the concerted efforts of the publishing industry lobby -- so brilliantly successful in duping Finch/Willets -- in the effort to dupe the Stevan Harnad RCUK: Posting Retracted"A Serious Potential Bug in the RCUK Open Access Mandate" and "Hybrid Gold OA and the Cheshire Cat's Grin" “The new policy, which will apply to all qualifying publications being submitted for publication from 1 April 2013, states that peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils… must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access.This is eight years almost to the day in 2004 when the UK Parliamentary Select Committee made its revolutionary recommendation to mandate Green OA: “This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way.”At that time, despite the fact that the UK government (under pressure from the publishing lobby) decided to ignore the Select Committee’s recommendation to mandate Green OA, RCUK and many UK universities adopted Green OA mandates anyway. As a result, the UK became the global leader in the tranistion to Open Access. If heeded, the Finch Committee recommendation to downgrade repository use to the storage and preservation of data, theses and unpublished work would have set back global OA by at least a decade. Fortunately, the RCUK is again showing its sense and independence. Let us hope UK’s universities — not pleased that scarce research funds, instead of being increased, are to be decreased to pay extra needlessly for Gold OA — will likewise continue to opt instead for cost-free Green OA by mandating it. If so, the UK will again have earned and re-affirmed its leadership role in the global transition to universal OA. Stevan Harnad Friday, July 13. 2012For the Perplexed GOAL Reader: Reaching for the Reachable
For the perplexed reader who is wondering about what on earth all the current to and fro on GOAL is about:
1. Gratis Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles. 2. Libre OA means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles + certain re-use rights (often CC-BY). 3. Green OA means OA provided by authors self-archiving their peer-reviewed final drafts free for all online (either in the author's institutional repository or website or in an institution-external central repository) 4. Gold OA means OA provided by authors publishing in OA journals that provide free online access to their articles (Gratis or Libre), often at the cost of an author publication fee. 5. Global OA today stands at about 20% of yearly journal article output, though this varies by discipline, with some higher (particle physics near 100%) and some lower (chemistry among the lowest). 6. About two thirds of the global 20% OA is Green and one third is Gold. Almost all of it is Gratis rather than Libre. 7. Institutions and funders that mandate Green OA have much higher Green OA rates (70%+), but only if they have effective Green OA mandates -- and only a tiny proportion of the world's institutions and funders mandate OA as yet have Green OA mandates at all. 8. Ineffective Green OA mandates are the ones that require self-archiving only if and when the publisher endorses self-archiving: 60% of journals endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving; 40% ask for embargoes of varying in length from 6-12 months to 5 years or indefinitely. 9. Effective Green OA mandates (ID/OA: Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access) are the ones that require immediate deposit of all articles, but if the publisher has an OA embargo, access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access" during the allowable embargo period (preferably no more than 6 months). 10. During any embargo, the institutional repository has an automated email-eprint-request button that allows users to request a copy for research purposes with one click, and allows the author to comply with one click. (This is not OA but "Almost-OA".) 11. The rationale for ID/OA + the Almost-OA button is to ensure that 100% of papers are immediately deposited and accessible for research purposes, not just the 60% that have publisher endorsement. 12. The expectation is that once ID/OA is mandated globally by 100% of institutions and funders, not only will it provide 60% immediate-OA plus 40% Almost-OA, but it will hasten the end of OA embargoes, as the power and utility of OA become evident, familiar and indispensable to all researchers, as authors and users. There are additional details about optimal mandates. (Deposit should be designated the sole procedure for submitting publications for institutional performance review, and funders should mandate convergent institutional deposit rather than divergent institution-external deposit.) And the further expectation is that once Gratis Green OA is mandated by institutions and funders globally, it will hasten the advent of Libre OA (CC-BY) and Gold OA. All the frustration and complaints being vented in the recent GOAL postings are with the lack of OA. But frustration will not bring OA. Only mandates will. And the optimal mandate is ID/OA, even if it does not confer instant global OA. First things first. Don't let the unreachable best get in the way of the reachable better. Grasp what is already within reach. Stevan Harnad Thursday, July 12. 2012Overselling the Importance and Urgency of CC-BY/CC-BY-NC for Peer-Reviewed Scholarly and Scientific Research
I think there has been a vast overstatement and overselling of the alleged need for -- and urgency of -- re-use rights (CC-BY) (or NC) for peer reviewed research journal articles today, especially in view of the fact that CC-BY (or NC) is much harder to get journal publishers to agree to, today, and not all (perhaps not even most) authors and disciplines need or want it, today.
Consider that if a subscription publisher were to allow CC-BY, that would authorize any 3rd-party rival publisher to free-ride with impunity on the publisher's investment, selling the publisher's contents at a cut-rate from the very day of publication. So asking subscription publishers for unembargoed Green Libre OA (CC-BY, or CC-BY NC, etc.) rather than just unembargoed Green Gratis OA is tantamount to asking them to commit immediate suicide, hence likely to provoke them instead to adopt as long a protective embargo as possible against Green Libre OA. Re-use rights (Libre OA) -- just like Gold OA -- will come, after Green Gratis OA, where needed and wanted. But neither is even remotely as important or urgent as (Gratis) OA itself today: free online access to the journal articles of which 80% are accessible only to subscribers today. Gratis OA means free online access, reading, linking, downloading, printing, storing, and data-mining locally, as well as harvesting, inverting and indexing of navigation and research by Google Scholar and countless other search engines). Green Gratis OA is the solution to providing the missing 80% of OA. All that's needed is to mandate it. But insisting now on Libre OA (further re-use rights), just like insisting now on Gold OA, is simply demanding still more, and thereby raising higher the obstacles to getting the 80% Green OA (Gratis) that is already within reach and has been for years through Green (Gratis) OA self-archiving mandates by researchers' institutions and funders (as so brilliantly described and spear-headed by Professor Bernard Rentier in his recent GOAL posting). And all in the name of further benefits that are not even remotely as important and urgent as Green Gratis OA. Consider that there is a practical contradiction between trying to expand Green OA mandates from funders and institutions to 100% and insisting on Libre OA (e.g., CC-BY, etc.) today. For not one of the world's Green OA mandates, whether funder of institutional, is a Libre OA mandate -- and with good reason: Green OA mandates are a research-community adaptation to the publisher status quo: Publication is still largely subscription-based today, and copyright is mostly transferred to publishers (rather than being non-exclusively licensed, as we of course want it to be, eventually). That's the status quo. And self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft is the research community's own self-help response, within this publisher status quo. The result is Green Gratis OA; that is the thing that the research community needs the most today. That is what maximizes research access, uptake, usage, applications and impact by making it accessible to all users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access. But Green Gratis OA is only at about 20% worldwide today, because so few institutions and funders have as yet mandated it. Opening up the Libre OA front, alongside the Gold OA front, instead of pushing full-speed on the all-important Green Gratis OA-mandating front toward 100% Green Gratis OA is simply adding further obstacles, handicaps and distractions to the Green Gratis OA front -- as well as providing an unscalable model that most other countries will not want (or be able) to follow today. And the most important thing to keep in mind is that these further obstacles, handicaps and distractions are nowhere near as important and urgent as (Green, Gratis) OA itself. (Not to mention that the fastest and surest way to get eventual Libre OA as well as Gold OA is to first mandate Green Gratis OA universally.) I think it would be practical, realistic and helpful to make it clear to all OA advocates that the primary, immediate, and already fully reachable target is 100% Green Gratis OA, and that the re-use rights and the Gold OA can and will come later, after this urgent primary goal is reached, but will only make it gratuitously harder to reach if they are needlessly insisted upon in advance. A word to the wise. I close by re-quoting the spot-on and timely words of Professor Rentier in his recent GOAL posting [emphasis added]: "...I have mandated deposit in my University's repository (ORBi) and since there is no way I can force my colleagues to "obey", I have just made official a procedure whereby the only publication list being considered in a Liege University member's C.V. is the one produced by ORBi. Simple. This explains ORBi's success... Of course, this does not solve the question of immediate open access. Only those papers published by publishers who agree upon immediate access on line are immediately accessible on line. The others must be immediately deposited but cannot be seen fully upon publication. They must await the end of the publishing house's embargo period, 6 months for most of them. Meanwhile, the title and metadata appear on any search engine by keywords, authors' names, University, etc. and a single click sends [an immediate eprint] request to the author. There are a few minutes to a few hours before the final author version is sent: it depends on the author's availability and response time. Usually less that 24 hours unless the author is on a weeklong trek in Nepal.... Compliance... has been very high, at first because of the soft but firm coercive top down pressure, but nowadays because our authors have fully realised the very much larger readership with which OA provides them and the citation advantage from which they benefit. My most reluctant colleagues have now become ORBi's best advocates. I consider this a success. OA's worst enemy out there is OA [fundamentalism]…"Integrating Institutional and Funder Open Access Mandates: Belgian Model The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment procedures EOS: New worldwide organization for universities promoting open access Repositories: Institutional, Thematic, or Central? Liege Mandate Definitely Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Stevan Harnad Wednesday, July 11. 2012Gold Fever, Finch Follies, and Junk Journals
The biggest risk from Gold OA (publishing) (and it's already a reality) is that it will get in the way of the growth of Green OA (self-archiving), and hence the growth of OA itself. That's Gold Fever: Most people assume that OA means Gold OA, and don't realize that the fastest, surest and (extra-)cost-free way to 100% OA is to provide (and mandate) Green OA.
The second biggest risk (likewise already a reality, if the Finch Follies are Followed) is that Gold Fever makes sluggish, gullible researchers, their funders, their governments and even their poor impecunious universities get lured into paying for pre-emptive Gold OA (while still paying for subscriptions) instead of providing and mandating Green OA at no extra cost. The risk of creating a market for junk Gold OA journals is only the third of the Gold OA risk factors (but it's already a reality too). Gold OA's time will come. But it is not now. A proof of principle was fine, to refute the canard that peer review is only possible on the subscription model. But paying for pre-emptive Gold OA now, instead of mandating and providing Green OA globally first will turn out to be one of the more foolish things our sapient species has done to date (though by far not the worst). Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. Friday, June 29. 2012Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch ReportThe UK’s universities and research funders have been leading the rest of the world in the movement toward Open Access (OA) to research with “Green” OA mandates requiring researchers to self-archive their journal articles on the web, free for all. A report has emerged from the Finch committee that looks superficially as if it were supporting OA, but is strongly biased in favor of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research. Instead of recommending building on the UK’s lead in cost-free Green OA, the committee has recommended spending a great deal of extra money to pay publishers for “Gold” OA publishing. If the Finch committee were heeded, the UK would lose both its lead in OA and a great deal of public money -- and worldwide OA would be set back at least a decade. Open Access (OA). Open Access means online access to peer-reviewed research, free for all. (Some OA advocates want more than this, but all want at least this.) Subscriptions restrict research access to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which the research was published. OA makes it accessible to all would-be users. This maximizes research uptake, usage, applications and progress, to the benefit of the tax-paying public that funds it. Green and Gold OA. There are two ways for authors to make their research OA. One way is to publish it in an OA journal, which makes it free online. This is called “Gold OA.” There are currently about 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all disciplines, worldwide. Most of them (about 90%) are not Gold. Some Gold OA journals (mostly overseas national journals) cover their publication costs from subscriptions or subsidies, but the international Gold OA journals charge the author an often sizeable fee (£1000 or more). The other way for authors to make their research OA is to publish it in the suitable journal of their choice, but to self-archive their peer-reviewed final draft in their institutional OA repository to make it free online for those who lack subscription access to the publisher’s version of record. This is called “Green OA.” UK Leadership in Mandating Green OA. The UK is the country that first began mandating (i.e., requiring) that its researchers provide Green OA. Only Green OA can be mandated, because Gold OA costs extra money and restricts authors’ journal choice. But Gold OA can be recommended, where suitable, and funds can be offered to pay for it, if available. The first Green OA mandate in the world was designed and adopted in the UK (University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, 2003) and the UK was the first nation in which all RCUK research funding councils have mandated Green OA. The UK already has 26 institutional mandates and 14 funder mandates, more than any other country except the US, which has 39 institutional mandates and 4 funder mandates -- but the UK is far ahead of the US relative to its size (although the US and EU are catching up, following the UK’s lead). Optimizing Green OA Mandates and Accelerating Adoption.To date, the world has a total of 185 institutional mandates and 52 funder mandates. This is still only a tiny fraction of the world’s total number of universities, research institutes and research funders. Universities and research institutions are the universal providers of all peer-reviewed research, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, but even in the UK, far fewer than half of the universities have as yet mandated OA, and only a few of the UK’s OA mandates are designed to be optimally effective. Nevertheless, the current annual Green OA rate for the UK (40%) is twice the worldwide baseline rate (20%). What is clearly needed now in the UK (and worldwide) is to increase the number of Green OA mandates by institutions and funders to 100% and to upgrade the sub-optimal mandates to ensure 100% compliance. This increase and upgrade is purely a matter of policy; it does not cost any extra money. Gold OA. What is the situation for Gold OA? The latest estimate for worldwide Gold OA is 12%, but this includes the overseas national journals for which there is less international demand. Among the 10,000 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters, about 8% are Gold. The percentage of Gold OA in the UK is half as high (4%) as in the rest of the world, almost certainly because of the cost and choice constraint of Gold OA and the fact that the UK’s 40% cost-free Green OA rate is double the global 20% baseline, because of the UK’s mandates. Publisher Lobbying and the Finch Report. Now we come to the heart of the matter. Publishers lobby against Green OA and Green OA mandates on the basis of two premises: (#1) that Green OA is inadequate for users’ needs and (#2) that Green OA is parasitic, and will destroy both journal publishing and peer review if allowed to grow: If researchers, their funders and their institutions want OA, let them pay instead for Gold OA. Both these arguments have been accepted, uncritically, by the Finch Committee, which, instead of recommending the cost-free increasing and upgrading of the UK’s Green OA mandates has instead recommended increasing public spending by £50-60 million yearly to pay for more Gold OA. Green OA: Useless? Let me close by looking at the logic and economics underlying this recommendation that publishers have welcomed so warmly: What seems to be overlooked is the fact that worldwide institutional subscriptions are currently paying the cost of journal publishing, including peer review, in full (and handsomely) for the 90% of journals that are non-OA today. Hence the publication costs of the Green OA that authors are providing today are fully paid for by the institutions worldwide that can afford to subscribe. If publisher premise #1 -- that Green OA is inadequate for users’ needs -- is correct, then when Green OA is scaled up to 100% it will continue to be inadequate, and the institutions that can afford to subscribe will continue to cover the cost of publication, and premise #2 is refuted: Green OA will not destroy publication or peer review. Or Destructive Parasite? Now suppose that premise #1 is wrong: Green OA (the author’s peer-reviewed final draft) proves adequate for all users’ needs, so once the availability of Green OA approaches 100% for their users, institutions cancel their journals, making subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of covering the costs of peer-reviewed journal publication. What will journals do, as their subscription revenues shrink? They will do what all businesses do under those conditions: They will cut unnecessary costs. If the Green OA version is adequate for users, that means both the print edition and the online edition of the journal (and their costs) can be phased out, as there is no longer a market for them. Nor do journals have to do the access-provision or archiving of peer-reviewed drafts: that’s offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA institutional repositories. What’s left for peer-reviewed journals to do? Peer review itself is done for publishers for free by researchers, just as their papers are provided to publishers for free by researchers. The journals manage the peer review, with qualified editors who select the peer reviewers and adjudicate the reviews. That costs money, but not nearly as much money as is bundled into journal publication costs, and hence subscription prices, today. But if and when global Green OA “destroys” the subscription base for journals as they are published today, forcing journals to cut obsolete costs and downsize to just peer-review service provision alone, Green OA will by the same token also have released the institutional subscription funds to pay the downsized journals’ sole remaining publication cost – peer review – as a Gold OA publication fee, out of a fraction of the institutional windfall subscription savings. (And the editorial boards and authorships of those journal titles whose publishers are not interested in staying in the scaled down post-Green-OA publishing business will simply migrate to Gold OA publishers who are.) So, far from leading to the destruction of journal publishing and peer review, scaling up Green OA mandates globally will generate, first, the 100% OA that research so much needs -- and eventually also a transition to sustainable post-Green-OA Gold OA publishing. But not if the Finch Report is heeded and the UK heads in the direction of squandering more scarce public money on funding pre-emptive Gold OA instead of extending and upgrading cost-free Green OA mandates.
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