Publishing Reform

Historians will look back on our planet's glacially slow transition to the optimal and inevitable outcome for refereed research dissemination in the online era -- free online access webwide -- and will point out the irony of the fact that we were so much quicker to commit scarce money to trying to reform publishing ("Gold OA") through projects like SCOAP3 and COPE than we were to commit to providing free online access ("Green OA") to our own research output (by depositing it in our institutional repositories, and mandating that it be deposited) at no extra cost at all.

Here is just the latest instance:

"SCOAP3 support in the United States almost complete!… So far, over 150 U.S. libraries and library consortia have pledged a total of over 3.2 Million dollars to the SCOAP3 initiative. This is almost the entire contribution expected from partners in the United States. Worldwide, SCOAP3 partners in 24 countries collectively pledged around 7 Million Euros. These pledges represent about 70% of the SCOAP3 funding envelope, and the initiative is getting close to its next steps to convert to Open Access the entire literature of the field of High-Energy Physics."

Yet (mark my words) it will be Green OA self-archiving -- and Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders -- that actually bring us universal OA at long last, and not the limited and ineffectual "gold fever" that is "freeing" (already-free) high energy physics (SCOAP3) -- climbing toward 100% OA since 1991 and effectively there since about a decade now! -- nor the COPE commitment on the part of universities to pay to make a small portion of their own research output Gold OA -- without first committing to make all of it Green OA, cost-free.

[University presidents and provosts especially seem to be quite quick to sign open letters in support of their government's adopting an open access mandate, yet much slower to adopt an open access mandate for their own institutions!]

"Never Pay Pre-Emptively For Gold OA Before First Mandating Green OA"

"On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse"

"SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive "flip" model for Gold OA conversion"

"Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity [COPE]: Mistaking intent for action?"

"Putting Principled Support Into Practice: What Provosts Need to Mandate"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Colin G. Scanes Editor-in-Chief Poultry Science (Poultry Science Association) wrote:

[T]here is self-interest from journals... whether... profit... or non-profit... in not supporting free open access. Equally there is strong self-interest in university libraries... supporting open access because they are likely to reduce their costs of purchasing journals.

-- There are also the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit it is conducted and published. That interest is in making the research accessible, immediately upon acceptance for publication, to all would-be users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscription access.

Hitchcock, S. (2010) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies

1. Who is to pay the very real costs of producing journals with this move to open access? Should it be the researcher, and, if so, where is the additional funding to come from? Is it realistic to consider that journals should absorb the costs

-- Open Access means free online access to published journal articles, not necessarily Open Access publishing. Authors can provide Open Access to their conventionally published articles by self-archiving their final refereed drafts free for all online.

2. At what point do libraries cease to purchase subscriptions for journals if their contents are available by open access?

-- No one knows whether and when libraries will cancel journals. Till they do, institutional subscriptions pay the cost of peer review and authors make their final drafts free for all online. If and when journal cancellations make subscriptions unsustainable because users prefer to use the free online drafts, journals will cut costs and downsize to providing peer review alone, paid for, per article, by authors' institutions, out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings.

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.

3. If library subscriptions to journals are an essential part of the business plan of a journal or a professional society, how many journals will disappear if we go to a completely open access approach?

-- No journals will disappear as a result of Open Access. Open Access is provided by author self-archiving (now being increasingly mandated by their institutions and funders) and if and when subscriptions fail, journals will downsize to peer-review service provision alone, paid for on the open access publishing service-fee model.

4. As a journal editor with, at present, a positive cash flow, we can and do waive page charges from papers from institutions in developing countries that cannot afford to pay these. We will not be able to continue this if there is a major reduction in revenue. Forcing journals to adopt an author-pays model would have a stifling effect on the publication of work from authors in developing countries.

-- No need to change anything (except to make sure the journal endorses rather than obstructs author self-archiving). Universal self-archiving and self-archiving mandates will provide universal Open Access, and the rest depends on how long subscriptions remain sustainable, and on whether and when the downsizing and transition to the Open Access cost-recovery model occurs.

5. What is a reasonable embargo period between publication and the paper being available by free open access?

-- What is optimal for research -- and for researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit it is conducted and published -- is no embargo at all. What is helpful from publishers is if they endorse Open Access self-archiving by authors. The rest will all come as a natural matter of course either way (i.e., with or without publisher endorsement), as a result of Open Access mandates by institutions and funders. The Green publishers will simply have the historic satisfaction of having been on the side of the angels all along.

Poultry Science's self-archiving policy is not in Romeo and does not appear to be among the 63% of journals that endorse immediate Open Access self-archiving by its authors. It would be helpful if this were remedied:

Poultry Science Copyright Release: Copyright laws make it necessary for the Association to obtain a release from authors for all materials published. To this end we ask you to grant us all rights, including subsidiary rights, for your article. You will hereby be relinquishing to the Poultry Science Association all control over this material such as rights to make or authorize reprints, to reproduce the material in other Association publications, and to grant the material to others without charge in any book of which you are the author or editor after it has appeared in the journal.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Leo Waaijers suggests in Ariadne that funder OA mandates impose "unfair conditions" on authors because there are not enough Gold OA journals to publish in. So instead, funders should fund research on alternative "non-proprietary peer review" services. This is based on a misunderstanding of OA mandates (which are for author self-archiving of the final peer-reviewed drafts of articles published in peer-reviewed non-OA journals, i.e., Green OA, not Gold OA) as well as a misunderstanding of peer review, which needs to be neither reformed, replaced nor redirected: existing peer-reviewed articles need merely to be self-archived.

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Leo Waaijers wrote in Ariadne, "Publish and Cherish with Non-proprietary Peer Review Systems":

LW: "More and more research funders require open access to the publications that result from research they have financed... Although there is a steadily growing number of peer-reviewed Open Access journals... the supply fails to keep pace with the demand... [A]s authors cannot all publish in Open Access journals... Open Access-mandating funders impose unfair conditions on authors."

There is a profound misunderstanding here. Funders who mandate Open Access (OA) impose no "unfair conditions." What they mandate is the self-archiving of all published articles ("Green OA"), not the publishing of all articles in Open Access (OA) journals ("Gold OA").

It cannot be pointed out often enough that Gold OA is not the sole or primary way to provide OA: The incomparably faster, easier, cheaper and surer way to provide OA is for authors to self-archive articles published in non-OA journals by depositing them in the author's Institutional Repository (IR) (Green OA). And that is exactly what funders and institutions are mandating. No need to wait for all publishers to convert to Gold OA. Hence no "unfairness."

Most of the top institutions already have IRs. All the rest can create them with free (and extremely powerful) software; moreover, the DEPOT repository is available (now internationally) for self-archiving by author's whose institutions do not yet have an IR or for authors who do not have an institution.

Hence Leo's point about "unfair conditions" by funder mandates is either misinformed or misinforming.

LW: "[A] conversion... from proprietary to non-proprietary systems of peer review... can be speeded up if disciplinary communities, universities, and research funders actively enter the market of the peer review organisers by calling for tenders and inviting publishers to submit proposals for a non-proprietary design of the peer review process"

This is a non sequitur. What is needed is Open Access to peer-reviewed articles (2.5 million articles per year, published in 25,000 peer-reviewed journals). Most of those articles are available today only via toll-access (institutional subscriptions). The solution is neither to keep waiting for those journals to convert to Gold OA, nor to try to invent alternative forms of peer review. That would be like thinking that the way to solve the problem of public smoking is not to mandate no-smoke zones but to invent an alternative form of cigarette, or instead of mandating medicare to invent alternative forms of medicine, or instead of mandating recycling to invent an alternative form of garbage.

Not only is there no need to try to replace existing journals and their peer review system, but the problem with peer review is not that it is a proprietary service (for which the service-provider -- the journal -- needs to be paid) but that the byproducts of the service -- the peer-reviewed articles -- are not openly accessible to all would-be users.

And the solution is for authors to self-archive (the final, peer-reviewed drafts of) their peer-reviewed articles (Green OA) -- and for authors' institutions and funders to mandate it (submit submit tenders soliciting research proposals for alternatives to peer review!).

There is no need (and certainly no time) to wait to re-invent peer review in new hands and try to persuade (mandate?) authors to publish in these new "non-proprietary systems of peer review" instead of their existing peer-reviewed journals; nor is there the need or time to persuade publishers (already sluggish about converting to Gold OA) or others to turn to "tenders" inviting them to design a new system of peer review.

What is needed is for authors' institutions and funders to mandate Green OA self-archiving, a non-hypothetical solution that has already been tested, works, and can scale to all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals as quickly and surely as it can be mandated.

LW: "The [funder]... requires that... published research appears as openly accessible peer-reviewed articles."

The way for the funder to require that published research should appear as openly accessible peer-reviewed articles is to mandate that the author's final peer-reviewed draft (not the publisher's proprietary PDF) must be self-archived in the author's OA IR immediately upon acceptance for publication. That's all. No need for "tenders" for "non-proprietary peer review."

And this is exactly what most of the existing and proposed OA mandates (by funders as well as institutions) require -- not the "unfair condition" of having to find and publish in a suitable Gold OA journal. Hence there is no need at all to create new Gold OA journals, let alone new forms of peer review, in order to provide universal OA, today. All that is needed is Green OA mandates.

But Leo instead recommends a highly speculative alternative for reforming peer review that is not only untested and unnecessary, but contains within the proposal itself the signs that it misunderstands how peer review itself works, and why it is needed for research and researchers:

LW: "In order to have appropriate review procedures in place to process these articles... The reviewing process must be independent, rigorous and swift..."

So far, so good (except Leo does not say how peer review should be speeded up, given the number of papers submitted daily for peer review, the number of qualified peer reviewers available, and the number of their waking hours that researchers can devote to peer reviewing. Let us agree, however, that there are indeed ways to make this process faster and more efficient in the online era.)

But now, the proposed system (for which, Leo recommends, funders should solicit proposals, instead of mandating Green OA):

LW: "As a result of the reviewing process, articles will be marked 1 [low] to 5 [high]... In review procedures the [funder] will weigh articles with marks 3, 4 and 5 as if they were published in journals with impact factors 1-3, 4-8 and 9-15 respectively... For articles marked 3 to 5 adequate Open Access publication platforms must be available (e.g. new Open Access journals). Alternatively, authors may publish their articles in any existing OA journal. Upon publication all articles will be deposited in a certified (institutional) repository."

This speculative notion of peer review imagines that peer review consists of giving papers marks.

(It does not. It involves assessing their contents and making concrete recommendations as to what needs to be done by way of revision -- if they are potentially acceptable -- and reasons for rejection if not. What users expect and need from journals is an all-or-none indication of whether an article has met that journal's established quality-standards for acceptance. Any internal ratings the referees might have used in the process of coming to a recommendation on acceptance or rejection are not for the user but the editor. The real ranking for the user -- and author -- is in the quality hierarchy among journals. Their quality standards -- meaning what percentage of articles meet their acceptance criteria -- are reflected in their track-records and known to users. They are also (sometimes) reflected in the journals' impact factor. But that impact factor -- which is objectively determined by journals' average citation counts -- is certainly not the same thing as referees' internal ratings.)

Leo suggests that these "marks" should be given (by someone), with marks 3-5 standing in for having been published in peer-reviewed journals with corresponding "impact factors," for which there must be a corresponding Gold OA journal (either new or existing) for them to appear in (created to ensure that "unfair conditions" are not imposed by the deposit requirement).

Then the paper can be deposited in a "certified" IR. (One wonders why? Since all articles, in Leo's hypothetical scenario, would be published in Gold OA journals that this peer-review reform proposal had miraculously generated, why do they need to be deposited in IRs at all -- "certified" or otherwise -- since they are all already OA?)

In other words, Leo has invented an imaginary problem with deposit mandates (viz, "there aren't enough Gold OA journals") -- whereas the mandates are not to publish in Gold OA journals but to deposit in Green OA IRs. And then he has invented an imaginary solution to the problem (viz, create new "non-proprietary peer-review services" and then publish the outcome in new Gold OA journals that no longer need to bother to implement peer review). All in order to be able to "fairly" deposit them in "certified" IRs?

My guess is that this rather complicated conjectural solution ("non-proprietary peer-review services") to an imagined problem ("unfair Gold OA mandates") was inspired by Leo's incorrect six assumptions:

(1) that what needs to be deposited in an IR in order to provide OA is the publisher's proprietary PDF, i.e., the canonical version of record (whereas what needs to be deposited for OA is just the peer-reviewed final draft ("postprint" which is merely a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- the canonical version of record);

(2) that depositing in Closed Access during any publisher embargo on OA would not fulfill the deposit mandate (whereas in fact it would, and especially with the help of the IR's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button to tide over research usage needs during any embargo on OA);

(3) that peer review is largely just a rank-assignment (whereas in reality peer review is a dynamic, interactive, answerable system of detecting and correcting errors so as to meet a given journal's established quality standards);

(4) that OA means just Gold OA publishing (whereas Green OA self-archiving too is OA);

(5) that what research and researchers really need is not just Green OA, but Gold OA (whereas what they need is OA) and hence that

(6) IRs are just for digital preservation (whereas OA IRs are for OA-provision today, and digital preservation of the canonical version of record is an entirely different matter, unrelated to OA until and unless subscriptions become unsustainable, thus making the author's peer-reviewed final draft the canonical version of record!).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Commentary on "Why did OASPA admit the BMJ Group and OUP? and other questions about membership" (Caroline Sutton, Director, OASPA):

From the bylaws of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA):

"To be considered an OA scholarly publisher and eligible for full membership... the Publisher must... Publish at least one OA journal that regularly publishes original research or scholarship, all of which is OA... [which] includes... Copyright holders allow users to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship..." [i.e., "libre" OA]

Now let us look at what these criteria imply: Full OASPA membership for BMJ, for example, is perhaps arguable, because all refereed research articles in the flagship BMJ are OA and hybrid OA is available as an option for all 27 BMJ journals, but all BMJ authors are also free to provide immediate Green OA by self-archiving. In contrast, Oxford University Press (OUP) publishes 246 journals, only 6 of them full Gold OA; the rest of the OUP journals embargo Green OA self-archiving by authors for a year (90 of them offering authors the generous "option" of paying to do it immediately, if they pay OUP's hybrid Gold OA fee). (In contrast, Cambridge University Press (CUP) offers paid hybrid Gold OA for 15 journals, but endorses immediate Green OA self-archiving for every single one of its 283 journals. In other words, CUP hybrid Gold is a noncoercive OA option for authors who want to pay for hybrid Gold OA; OUP's is not. All CUP authors are free to provide immediate Green OA to their articles by self-archiving them; OUP authors are not. Yet OUP is a "full member" of OASPA and CUP is not.)

It is exceedingly difficult to see the value to OA itself of the following: 

(1) OASTP officially includes, as "full members" of its "OA Scholarly Publishers Association," publishers that oppose immediate OA Self-Archiving by their authors. (Such publishers can now even proudly advertise themselves as "full OA" journal publishers in good standing if they publish one single libre Gold OA journal while forbidding Green OA self-archiving for their other 999 journals.)

(2) OASTP officially excludes from full membership in its "OA Scholarly Publishers Association" publishers every one of whose 999 journals are "gratis" Gold OA, perhaps not even charging a penny for it, as not being "full OA" journal publishers in good standing, because they are not "libre" Gold OA.

Richard Poynder seems to have been right (again): "officially" sanctioning this perverse play on words will not only: 

(a) allow being an "OA publisher," "Gold OA publisher" and "full OA" publisher in good standing to be touted and promoted in a self-interested, word-bending way by publishers that are just about as far from being OA as a publisher can be,

(b) prevent publishers that are genuinely "full OA" publishers -- fully gratis OA, hence fully Gold, and hence fully Green, for all their journals, hence fully OA on any rational construal of "full OA publisher" -- from calling themselves "full OA publishers" in good standing, and

(c) add yet another unwelcome layer to the confusion about the meaning of "OA" as well as of being an "OA publisher" that we owe to the premature, persistent and counterproductive profusion of gold dust and publishing-economics in place of OA.

Full members should only be publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA (and all of whose journals are Green OA); otherwise just "Associate" members. (And gratis OA journal publishers should either be full OASPA members or we should stop repeating the slogan that "most OA journals do not charge for publication.")

Of course it is the publisher that represents the journal.  But reserving full OASPA membership for publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA would rule out the obvious abuse of "full OA" status by a publisher that publishes a fleet of 1000 journals, only one of them OA, yet is currently entitled to call itself an official "OA publisher" in virtue of full membership in good standing in OASPA. Such a publisher would then simply be an Associate Member of OASPA. (An independent journal, by the way, not associated with a "publishing house,"  is simply its own publisher.) That would remedy abuse of full membership status by non-OA and anti-OA publishers.

But to remedy the very meaning of OA and OA journal, it would be just as important to admit as full members the publishers of (all or mostly) gratis OA journals (including gratis OA journals that do not charge either authors or their institutions/funders for publication, but make ends meet from subscriptions or subsidy). Yes, fee-free gratis OA journals represent a different "business model," but nevertheless they are "fully" OA in every OA-relevant respect.

(It also seems fine to accept hybrid Gold OA publishers as Associate Members, given that the Association's interest seems to be primarily in OA publishing business models rather than OA itself.) 

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

It would be churlish of me to criticize Richard Poynder's friendly article, with most of which I can hardly disagree. So please consider this a complimentary complement rather than a cavil:

Annual institutional subscriptions for annual incoming journals do not morph in any coherent or sensible way into annual institutional "memberships" for individual outgoing articles.

This is true of the multi-journal "Big Deal" subscriptions with journal-fleet publishers, and it is even more obvious with single journals: Are 10,000 universities supposed to have annual "memberships" in 25,000 journals on an annual pro-rated quota based on the number of articles each institution's researchers happen to have published in each journal last year? Or is this "membership" to be based on one global (and oligopolistic) "mega-deal" between a mega-consortium of publishers and a mega-consortium of institutions? (If this makes sense, why don't we do all our shopping this way, putting a whole new twist on globalisation?) Or is it just to save our familiar intuitions about subscriptions? Wouldn't it make more sense to scrap those intuitions, when they lead to absurdities like this?

Especially when they are unnecessary, as we can see if we remind ourselves what OA is really about. Open access is about access: about making all journal articles freely accessible online to all users. It is not about morphing institutional-subscription-based funding of publishing into institutional-membership-based funding of publishing. Indeed, it isn't about funding publishing at all, since it is not publishing that is in a crisis but institutional access.

Here's another way to look at it: The "serials crisis" is the fact that institutions cannot afford access to all the journal articles they need. They have to keep canceling more and more journals, thereby making their access less and less. If all institutions had free online access to all those journal articles then that would not make the journals any more affordable at current prices, but it would certainly make canceling them less of a big deal, because their content would be free online anyway.

And that is precisely the state of affairs that universal Green OA self-archiving mandates would deliver virtually overnight.

So why are institutions instead wasting their time and money fussing over how to fit the round peg of institutional subscriptions into the square hole of institutional memberships today, via pre-emptive Gold OA funding commitments that generate a lot of extra expense for very little extra access -- instead of providing Open Access to all of their own journal-article output by mandating Green OA self-archiving today?

That "the access and affordability problems are part and parcel of the larger serials crisis" is altogether the wrong way to look at it. The OA problem is access, and affordability is part and parcel of that problem today only inasmuch as alternatives to journal subscriptions increase access today -- which is very little, and at high cost, insofar as Gold OA is concerned (today).

So instead of waiting passively for journals to convert to the Gold standard, and instead of throwing scarce money at them pre-emptively to try to make it worth their while, why don't institutions simply make their own journal article output Green OA, today? That will generate universal (Green) OA with certainty, today.

If and when that universal Green OA should in turn eventually go on to generate journal cancellations to the point of making subscriptions unsustainable for covering the costs of publication, then that will be the time for journals to cut obsolete products and services for which there is no longer a market (such as the print edition, the PDF edition, archiving, access-provision and digital preservation, leaving all that to the global network of Green OA institutional repositories), along with their associated costs, and convert to Gold OA for covering the costs of what remains (largely just implementing peer review).

Unlike today -- when paid Gold OA is at best a useful proof-of-principle that publishing can be sustained without subscriptions and at worst a waste of scarce cash based on a premature and incoherent hope of morphing directly into universal Gold OA -- after universal Green OA each institution will have more than enough money to pay those much reduced publication costs (on an individual article basis, not via an institutional membership) from just a small fraction of its annual windfall savings if and when they decide they can cancel all those subscriptions in which that money is tied up today.

Hence it is mandating Green OA that will rewire the "disconnect" between user and purchaser that Stuart Shieber deplores, putting paid to the inelastic need and demand of institutions for subscriptions (today) because of their inelastic need and demand for access (otherwise unavailable today). The reconnect will not come from ("capped") Gold OA Compacts (like COPE and SCOAP3 but from the cancelation pressure that universal Green OA will eventually generate -- once the demand for the obsolescent extras currently co-bundled with peer review fades out as the planet goes Green.

In other words, even if it is the affordability problem rather than OA that exercises you, the coherent way to morph from institutional subscriptions to universal Gold OA is via the mediation of universal Green OA mandates, not via a pre-emptive leap directly from the status quo to Gold via funding commitments, regardless of the price and modus operandi. Meanwhile, along the way, we will already have universal OA, at last solving the access problem, which is what OA itself is all about.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

What follows is a critique of the "Compact for Open-Access Equity." The Compact states:

"We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the benefits of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

"Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature."

/signed/

My critique is based on points that I have already made many times before, unheeded. All I can do is echo them yet again (and hope!):

Regardless of the size of the current asking price ("reasonable" or unreasonable), it is an enormous strategic mistake for a university or research funder to commit to pre-emptive payment of Open Access (OA) journal ("Gold OA") publishing fees today -- until and unless the university or funder has first mandated OA self-archiving ("Green OA") for all of its own published journal article output (irrespective of whether the article happens to be published in an OA or a non-OA journal).

There are so far five signatories to the "Compact for Open-Access Equity." Two of them have mandated Green OA (Harvard and MIT) and three have not (Cornell, Dartmouth, Berkeley). Many non-mandating universities have also been committing to the the pre-emptive SCOAP3 consortium.

If Harvard's and MIT's example of first mandating Green OA is followed, and hence Green OA mandates grow globally ahead of Gold OA commitments, then there's no harm done.

But if it is instead pre-emptive commitments to fund Gold OA that grow, at the expense of mandates to provide Green OA, then the worldwide research community will yet again have shot itself in the foot insofar as universal OA -- so long within its reach, so urgent, and yet still not grasped -- is concerned.

The fundamental problem is not that of needlessly overpaying for Gold OA by paying prematurely and pre-emptively and at an arbitrarily inflated asking price (although that is indeed a problem too).

The fundamental problem is that focussing on a commitment to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA today gives institutions the false sense that they are thereby doing what needs to be done in order to provide OA for their own research output, whereas this is very far from the truth:

No institution can or will pay for Gold OA publication of all (or even most) its research output because

(1) not all (or even most) journals offer Gold OA today,

(2) not all (or even most) Gold OA journals' asking price is reasonable or affordable today, and

(3) most of the money to pay for Gold OA is still tied up in institutional journal subscriptions today.

But most important of all is the fact that

(4) OA can be provided for all of an institution's research output today by mandating Green OA self-archiving, which moots (1) - (3).

(1) - (4) jointly comprise the reason pre-emptive Gold OA payment is not at all what is needed today. What is needed is OA itself, and that is what Green OA provides, regardless of journal funding model (subscription or Gold OA).

Once Green OA has been mandated universally and is being universally provided by institutions, journals will eventually adapt, under subscription cancellation pressure, downsizing to provide peer review alone and converting to Gold OA to cover costs. Meanwhile, institutions' own windfall subscription cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay journals for Gold OA publication at this much-reduced price.

But none of that can happen today, through pre-emptive payment for Gold OA. And meanwhile research progress and impact keep being lost, needlessly, because institutions are focusing on funding Gold OA when what they urgently need to do is mandate Green OA.

Once an institution has mandated Green OA, it no longer matters (for OA) what it elects to do with its spare cash. It is only if an institution elects to focus on spending its cash to pay for Gold OA instead of mandating Green OA that an institution does both its research and its pocketbook a double disservice, needlessly.

The creation of high-quality, self-sustaining Gold OA journals such as the PLoS and BMC journals was historically important and timely as a proof-of-principle that peer-reviewed journal publication is viable even if universal Green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. But what is urgently needed now is not more money to pay for Gold OA but more mandates to provide Green OA, hence OA itself.

Finding money to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA while subscriptions still prevail and OA itself does not is an extremely counterproductive strategy, if access to refereed research -- rather than publishing reform -- is the real raison d'être of the Open Access movement (as it certainly is and always has been for me).

Gold OA is not the end, but merely one of the means (and by far not the fastest or surest means) of providing universal OA. Full speed ahead with (mandating) Green OA; publishing will adapt naturally as the time comes.

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Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2 (1): 39 - 53

Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995.

Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999

Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives. Ariadne 35.

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.

Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. 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.

[Background: See "Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again"]

A Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) article (29 April) writes:

"The research councils are looking at what more they can do to support open access to research results after an independent study found that their current policies were having a 'limited impact'."

First, the SQW/LISU study is simply incorrect in opining that current Green OA deposit mandates (when adopted and monitored) are "having a 'limited impact'." As objective deposit-counts for the NIH mandate have shown, the NIH deposit rate jumped from 4% to over 60% within a year of mandate adoption. Much the same is true for university self-archiving mandates.

Rather, the ambivalence seems to be largely originating from EPSRC, the last of the adopters of the least clearcut of the seven UK research council policies. What EPSRC had finally mandated was not unequivocal deposit, like the other six councils, but rather a hybrid between Green OA deposits and Gold OA journal publishing.

"The councils have previously baulked at requiring all council-funded researchers to deposit papers in openly available repositories."

This is incorrect: Six of the seven UK research councils have required all fundees to deposit all published articles in an open access repository: Only EPSRC leaves it open whether (1) to publish in a subscription journal and deposit in a repository or (2) to publish in an open-access journal (and pay publishing fees, if any). This is the EPSRC policy:

EPSRC Council agreed at its December [2008] meeting to mandate open access publication, but that academics should be able to choose whether they use the so-called green option (ie, self-archiving in an on-line repository) or to use the gold option (ie, pay-to-publish in an open access journal).

It is interesting how the divergent view of the last and most ambivalent -- but also the biggest -- of the councils to adopt a mandate is now being presented as the new prevailing view among the seven. (Is it, really? And has EPSRC really thought it through, or are a few strongly held opinions ruling the roost?)

"Now, after a study by SQW Consulting concluded that open access is increasingly popular with UK researchers and that institutions are setting up their own repositories, the councils... will have to tread carefully because open access threatens to undermine the business model of publishers and learned societies."

This sounds like a non sequitur. OA is becoming increasingly popular with researchers and institutions (and at least 6 of the 7 funders) and yet now funders must "tread carefully" because of publishers' business interests? How did publishers' business interests get into this?

(I suspect that in the case of EPSRC, this may partly be driven by an ongoing experiment in paying pre-emptively for Gold OA publishing in (part of) the physics community: Instead of just mandating Green OA deposits and letting subscriptions continue to pay for publication until and unless Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, the SCOAP3 consortium of institutions is simply redefining their institutional subscription fees as "institutional Gold OA publishing fees" in exchange for the publishers providing Gold OA. It is virtually certain that this ill-thought-out experiment cannot and will not scale beyond parts of physics, but meanwhile it is yet another retardant on the growth of Green OA mandates. Here it is not just publishing-lobby self-interest, but institutional serials-budget myopia that are (each for its respective reasons, both of them irrelevant to the primary interests of the research community) doing the all-too-familiar conflation of the journal-affordability problem with the research-accessibility problem, to the great disadvantage of the latter.)

"The study also reports that more than three quarters of 2,100 council-funded researchers surveyed were unaware of the councils' current mandates."

It would seem that a more straightforward remedy for unawareness of funders' grant fulfillment conditions would be to increase the awareness of fundees and their institutions of the conditions on the funding they have received -- and to monitor and reinforce compliance with those conditions, just as with other grant fulfillment conditions. It would seem an unusual remedy to instead spend scarce research funds on paying publishers to do what fundees are neglecting to do, for free, as a condition of their funding.

"Paul Gemmill, chair of the research outputs group at Research Councils UK, said the next stage was to decide whether a specific model should be adopted. He said the process would involve learned societies, publishers and academics."

How did the publishing community come to thus dominate a research community issue? (Both publishers and learned-society publishers are publishers.) This is really quite puzzling. One can quite well understand why they would try to do so, but how did they succeed? Could it be that the publisher-budget defenders and the library-budget defenders are making common cause with pre-emptive Gold OA, at the expense of cost-free Green OA and the interests of the research community and research itself? Or is this just blind a-priori ideology (regarding "publishing reform") in place of the direct of interests of research that are the real concern of the research funding councils (as well as the research community itself)?

"Open-access advocate Stevan Harnad, professor of electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton, said scarce research money should not be used to pay open-access journal fees, where the costs normally borne by the publisher are picked up by funders."

The costs of publishing are borne by subscribing institutions, not by funders.

"'If good sense were to prevail, funders and universities would just mandate repositories,' he said."

What he said was:

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

For now, subscriptions are paying for publication, and what is needed is more Green OA, not a new non-research expense (Gold OA publication fees) on which to squander the little research money there is to go round. Wait till universal Green OA actually causes subscriptions to become unsustainable (if and when it ever does do so) and then the subscription cancellation savings themselves can be used to pay for the Gold OA -- that's then, when it's actually needed, rather than using research money to pay for Gold OA pre-emptively, now, when Gold OA is not even needed yet.


Drawn by
Judith Economos
(feel free to use to promote OA and to bait "pit-bulls")

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Context:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Because it is relatively easy to start up fleets of "peer-reviewed journals" online with minimal experience, answerability, quality-control, cost, or risk, because the call for Open Access (OA) is getting stronger, because traditional journals are perceived as getting weaker, and because there is still widespread ignorance and inertia regarding the fastest and surest way of providing OA (Green OA self-archiving), there seems to be a growing "dot-gold rush" of Gold OA journal start-ups, based on spamming the research community to solicit editors, referees and authors. Needless to say, these antics are giving OA a bad name. The eloquent and insightful chronicler of the OA movement, Richard Poynder, is doing some investigative journalism on this fast-feeding frenzy and looking for help from the research community.

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On Mon, 14 Jul 2008, Richard Poynder wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

Thanks to everyone who helped me when I was writing about Bentham Science Publishers. I am now researching another OA publisher [Scientific Journals International], and would be grateful for any further help list members might be able to provide...

There seems to be a growing epidemic of fast Gold-OA journal-fleet start-ups, based on next to no scholarly/scientific or publishing experience or expertise, and relying heavily on online spamming. The numbers are high enough to have inspired a fraud-alert/spam-warning series on Guenther Eysenbach's blog and now Richard Poynder's investigative studies.

The warning sign is always fleet start-ups (in both sense of "fleet"), from Elsevier/Springer wannabes: By quickly starting a bunch of journals, you can treat them all as a database, and treat peer review as just a matter of automatized software. Journals can now be irregular, "publishing" papers singly as they are are accepted, rather than bundling them by regular issue. (This is just fine, for a journal with an established track record for quality, but for a start-up fleet, it means journals can come and go, the author and archival perenity be damned: it's survival of the fittest -- fittest to generate either self-sustaining revenue for the publisher or a quick pull-out...) An honest new journal start-up is always just one journal.

Here are some observations on this unwelcome phenomenon that risks giving OA a bad name:

(1) Gold OA fever (a general yearning for OA that has sometimes taken the specific form of an urgent desire for Gold OA journals) has created a climate in which some people think there is money to be made by starting up new OA journals. They think that because most established journals are currently unwilling to convert to Gold, they can attract their authors away from them (and charge the authors for it).

(2) Some of the Gold OA startups are completely inexperienced in peer-reviewed journal publishing and peer review. They imagine it is largely a matter of cheap online solicitations, with minimal human involvement and maximal reliance on mass emailing, to solicit editors, reviewers and authors.

(3) Some of them do minimal, low-quality peer review, and some of them (like SJI) perhaps next to none.

(4) These quick-Gold start-ups will all fail, in short order (as many conventional journal start-ups also do, in an already-saturated market). Electronic start-ups (whether OA or non-OA) are so much cheaper -- or so it seems to the dot-com-minded entrepreneur -- that it is now a low-risk, minimal-investment venture to try to "create" a fleet of journals through nothing but email spamming.

(5) The reason the startups will fail is not just that their practices are shoddy and their quality standards low or nonexistent, but because what research needs is free access to the contents of the established peer-reviewed journals, with their track-records for quality-control and selectivity, not fly-by-night start-ups that try to attract their authors away from the established journals. (We already have more than enough journals, and the market is saturated. What is needed is better selection for quality, not greater quantity.)

(6) The fact that well-meaning research funders and even universities are foolishly willing to throw money at Gold OA (instead of just mandating Green OA) is also helping to encourage these quick-money Dot-Gold fast-OA start-ups.

None of this is doing the reputation of either OA or Gold OA or even peer-reviewed journal publishing any good. Gold OA fever and the economies of the online medium attract quick-money-minded know-nothings to what used to be an honorable scholarly/scientific trade: peer-reviewed journal publishing. It must be admitted that the trade had already been in decline since before OA and even before the online medium, with (some) publishers becoming big, price-inflated fleets of journals, many with low peer-review standards. But the Dot-Gold Rush has carried this to a grotesque extreme, because it did not even have to worry about building up a subscriber base by generating a credible journal: It just charged authors, already eager for publication, and if the articles ended up in a soon-dead "journal", no skin off the "publisher's" nose.

It has always been part of the strategy of starting up a journal to attract a distinguished (and sometimes unused) "Editorial Board" so as to attract, in turn, authors and reviewers. Authors have always been lured by the need and greed to publish, trading off the fact that a journal was new with the fact that it was hungrier to accept one's paper. Scholars and scientists have always accepted to join new journals' editorial boards (usually after being assured the workload would be light) for the added luster it gave their CVs. Referees refereed willingly for free, partly out of superstition, partly out of duty, partly out of interest in the subject matter.

(None of this is new: I myself have done every single one of these things: started up new journals via chain letter, joined start-up editorial boards, published articles in start-up (and later discontinued) journals, etc. The only difference is that these practices, which are legitimate up to a point, as long as the motivation is scientific/scholarly and not financial or self-promotional, are now being taken to a grotesque extreme because of the ease of entry into online publishing and a perceived instability in the traditional journal publishing trade, owing to the growing clamor for OA.)

Dot-Gold startups will come and go, but alas the long wait for OA is still on, and these unwelcome diversions and digressions are not doing OA's image or progress any good at all. (And meanwhile Green OA self-archiving, from which there is no money to be made at all, still languishes, underexploited, waiting for its day...)

Richard Poynder is doing a great service by helping to distance OA explicitly from these tempting and growing abuses.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Richard Poynder asks (in the American Scientist Open Access Forum):

[1] Is it true that a Gold OA article-processing-charge model will create a situation in which "publishers are operating in a genuinely competitive market to offer a service that is good value for money"?

[2] If it is true, then is not Stevan Harnad's concern that before moving to Gold OA we must first "downsize publishing and its costs to just the costs of peer review" by "offloading access-provision, archiving and their costs onto the network of Green OA Institutional Repositories" a misplaced concern?

Excellent question(s)!

i. The answer to Question [1] would be "Yes" if all or most (refereed) journals today were Gold OA. But the vast majority of journals are non-OA. Hence the competition is just among a minority of journals (about 10-15%, and mostly not the top 10-15%).

ii. Meanwhile, without universal Green OA, the functions of access-provision and archiving -- and their costs -- continue to be a part of journal publishing, both Gold OA and non-OA, with all journals also still providing the PDF (with its costs) too. (I leave the issue of the print edition to those who are specialized in pondering Escher impossible-figures.) I just point out that this is a long way from providing just peer review alone. Nor does there look to be a transition scenario, in the absence of Green OA and a distributed network of Green OA Institutional Repositories to take over the function of access-provision and archiving.

iii. The answer to question [1] being hence "No," conditional question [2] becomes moot.

iv. There is a known, tried, tested way of scaling to 100% OA, and it has been demonstrated to work: Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates.

v. Unlike Gold OA, which not only faces substantial scaling problems but is not in the hands of the research community, Green OA is entirely in the hands of the research community and can be (and has been) mandated (and the mandates work).

vi. So what are we waiting for?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum