Publishing Reform

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SUMMARY: Journal articles are purchased by institutions, or consortia of institutions, in bulk (jointly aggregated in journals, multi-journal fleets, or even multi-publisher fleets of fleets), whereas individual articles are published by authors individually, in their journal of choice (and only if and when they successfully pass that journal's peer review).
    Mark Rowse, former CEO of INGENTA, a journal subscription aggregator, has suggested that institutions and institutional consortia could "flip" collectively, from paying annually for subscription licenses that buy-in journals in bulk, to paying annually instead for the publishing (Gold OA) of their own institution's outgoing articles, likewise in bulk, in the same fleet of journals.
    SCOAP3 is an experimental implementation of a pre-emptive Rowsean flip, but it is local, and in a unique field (particle physics) that already provides 100% Green OA by self-archiving. SCOAP3's is hence simply a consortial subsidy ("sponsorship") to replace former subscriptions.
    This is unlikely to be globally scalable across disciplines, institutions, authors, articles and (competing) journals, not only because the asking price today is too high, but because successfully passing peer review is an individual author - article - journal - referee matter rather than something to be annually "bulk-subscribed" to, consortially, in advance.
    By way of an alternative, institutional Green OA self-archiving and mandates, unlike a Rowsean flip, can not only scale universally to provide 100% (Green) OA, but they can also prepare the ground for an eventual non-pre-emptive, non-Rowsean "flip" to Gold OA, by first offloading access-provision, archiving and their costs onto the network of Green OA Institutional Repositories, thereby helping to downsize publishing and its costs to just the costs of peer review.
    Those remaining costs can then be covered on an individual paper basis (non-bulk, non-consortial, non-aggregated, non-subscription, non-annual, non-pre-emptive) out of individual institutional subscription cancellation savings -- if and when Green OA should ever make subscriptions globally unsustainable. (Till then, no need for any pre-emptive conversion at all.)

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What follows is a note of caution about the generalizability of Mark Rowse's consortial "flip" model for pre-emptive conversion to Gold Open Access publishing and its current implementation by SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), as promoted by CERN and the other participating institutions.

First, the important and unproblematic points of agreement:

1. CERN mandates Green OA self-archiving for all of its research output (and most particle physicists self-archive spontaneously in any case). 

If all other research institutions and universities, in all disciplines, worldwide, already did the same as CERN, then we would already have universal Green OA and there would be no problem with the SCOAP3 experiment, which would be risk-free, regardless of whether it proved scalable or sustainable. But as it is, only 44 other institutions and funders have so far done as CERN has done and only about 10-15% of annual research article output is being self-archived spontaneously.

2. CERN is very probably right that the eventual future of peer-reviewed journals will be that publishing costs are no longer recovered from user-institution subscription fees but from author-institution publishing fees. 

(Note that this is not "author pays" but "author-institution pays," as it should be, and does not entail diverting scarce research funds toward paying publishing fees.) 

However, if all other research institutions and universities, in all disciplines, worldwide, were, like CERN, already mandating the self-archiving of 100% of their research output today, hence if the archiving and access-provision service were already being offloaded onto the distributed network of OA Institutional Repositories instead of having to be provided by journals, then the essential cost of journal publishing would shrink to just the cost of providing peer review alone, and the asking price for that service alone would be far less than what is being charged currently for Gold OA and all the other products and services that are being co-bundled into Gold OA today (print edition, PDF, archiving, access-provision). Moreover, each author-institution's annual savings from its user-institution subscription cancellations would then be available to pay that much reduced asking price for peer review alone, per institutional paper published. (That would then be a natural, non-Rowsean "flip" that worked, thanks to universal Green OA.)

But there are several problems with the SCOAP3 approach at this time, and they arise from an incoherence at the heart of the "flip" model (in the pre-emptive form proposed by Mark Rowse, former CEO of the journal aggregator, INGENTA, in a proposal not unlike an even earlier one made by Arnoud De Kemp, then at Springer, for a "click-through oligopoly"):

3.1. The current asking price for Gold OA is vastly inflated. Because there is nowhere near universal Green OA self-archiving yet, paying for Gold OA at all today is not only premature and unnecessary (if, that is, our goal is OA itself, rather than something else [like lowering journal prices, maybe?]), but the current Gold OA asking price is unrealistically high. 

Green OA needs to come first, before conversion to Gold OA publishing. Then, if and when universal Green OA induces subscription cancellations, which in turn drive cost-cutting, and downsizing to the true essentials of OA publishing (with the print edition terminated and OA repositories taking over the burden of access-provision and archiving), peer review can be paid for by author-institutions, per outgoing paper published, instead of being paid for, as now, by user user-institutions, per incoming journal purchased. At the present time, however, there exist (a) neither the institutional need to pay to publish in order to provide OA nor (b) the institutional funds to pay to publish (because those funds are currently tied up in paying journal subscriptions, which are in turn covering the costs of publishing indirectly); in addition, (c) the price of publishing as it is currently done today, with everything that is still being co-bundled into it, is still far too high.

3.2. The Rowsean "flip" model is globally incoherent and unscalable. SCOAP3 consortial sponsorship/membership is not only based on an arbitrarily inflated asking price today, with inessentials (like the paper edition or the publisher's PDF) gratuitously co-bundled into it, but the consortial payment model itself is incoherent and unscalable, for two reasons:

(i) Why should institutions that can access all journal articles for free (Green) pay for Gold until/unless they have to (in order to get their own research output published)?

And (ii) on what basis are institutions to negotiate in advance with each individual journal (there are 25,000 in all!) how many of their researchers' papers will be accepted and published, per year, as if that too were some sort of annual subscription quota! Publishing is individual paper- and journal-based, not consortial bundled subscription-based.

4. Consortial institutional payment for co-bundled incoming journals does not translate into consortial payment for the peer review of institutions' individual outgoing articles. Consortial payment for publication gives the illusion of making sense only if one considers it locally, as CERN is doing, for one field (particle physics, a field that already has Green OA), with a set of collaborating institutions, ready and willing to "flip" to paying the same journals jointly for publishing, much as they had been paying jointly for subscribing. But this Rowsean "flip" model stops making sense as one scales up globally across fields, institutions, publishers and journals -- and particularly to that overwhelming majority of fields that do not yet have Green OA.

We are meant to imagine all institutions, pre-emptively paying all journals -- co-bundled, subscription/license-style -- in advance, for an annual "quota" (again subscription-style) of accepted publications. This is rather like paying for all meals, for all consumers, by all vendors, through advance annual "institutional" meal-plans, each consumer specifying to his institution, each year, what meals he intends to consume, from which vendor. And that still leaves out the crucial factor, which is that each vendor needs to "peer review" each individual meal-request to determine whether it is worthy of fulfilling at all (by that vendor)! It also leaves out the question of the price per meal, which today includes extras such as styrofoam containers, mustard, relish, salad bar, home delivery and a child's toy prize co-bundled into it, none of which the consumers may need or want any longer, once their institutional repositories can supply it all on their own...

5. Conclusions. In sum, the problem is not only that a Rowsean "flip" is profligate and premature at today's asking prices in fields where universal Green OA self-archiving has not yet downsized publishing and its costs to their post-OA essentials. Even apart from that, the Rowsean consortial "sponsorship/flip" model, simply does not scale up to all journals, across all fields, researchers and institutions, because it is based on the institutional co-bundled license/subscription model. That in turn involves an institutional library budget (1) pre-paying (i.e., subscribing to) a specific yearly quota of incoming journals (consisting of articles published by other institutions), per annual incoming journal (bundle), rather than (2) paying for the peer-review for each institution's own individual outgoing articles, per individual outgoing article.

Collective, bundled annual institutional subscriptions (for that is exactly what they would be!) are simply the wrong model for paying for individual, per-article peer review services. Twenty-five thousand peer-reviewed journals (publishing 2.5 million articles annually) cannot each agree in advance to accept an annual quota of N(i) articles from each of N (c. 10,000) institutions worldwide (and vice versa), even if many, most or all of the journals are "bundled" into a collective, bundled omni-publisher "Big Deal." Authors choose journals, journals compete for articles, and referees (not consortial subscribers) decide what gets accepted, where. (This could conceivably all be done in bulk for bulk publishers, on an annual pro-rated basis, based on last year's institutional publications, but then that would hardly be different from -- and certainly not simpler or more accurate than -- just paying each journal by the article.)

The Rowsean instant flip model has not been thought through beyond the confines of the special case of CERN, SCOAP3 and a long-self-archiving (hence Green) field (particle physics). As a consequence, instead of advancing universal Green self-archiving across all fields -- and thereby helping to set the stage for universal OA, and possibly eventual global cancellations, publication cost-cutting, downsizing, and conversion to per-article peer review services, paid for out of the institutional cancellation savings, via Gold OA (a gradual, global, leveraged, non-Rowsean "flip," driven by Green OA) -- the SCOAP3 consortium institutions are pushing through a (literally) pre-emptive solution for their library budget problems, in one special subfield (particle physics):

This would be fine (vive la liberté!), except that it also keeps being portrayed and perceived (by some, not everyone) as a scalable solution for achieving OA, which it most definitely is not. The prospect of an instant Rowsean "flip" is a local illusion, and hence a source of distraction and confusion for other fields and institutions worldwide, of which only 44 have as yet even made the successful transition to Green OA that particle physicists in general, and CERN in particular, have already made.

6. Recommendation. What is needed is prominent caveats and disclaimers clearly explaining the current unsuitability of the SCOAP3 "flip" model for the rest of the research world, along with the prominent injunction that the rest of the world's institutions and disciplines should first go Green, as CERN did, before contemplating any "flip-flops"...

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: pp 99-106.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed journal articles. There are two ways to provide OA: (1) by publishing an article in an OA journal that makes all articles free online ("Gold OA") or by (2) publishing in a non-OA journal and self-archiving it to make it OA ("Green OA").
    R. Gadagkar (Letter to Nature, 22 May 2008) suggests that although denying access to users because of unaffordable subscription fees to the user-institution is bad, denying publishing to authors because of unaffordable OA publishing fees to the author-institution is worse, especially in the Developing World.  
    The usual reply is that (1) many Gold OA journals do not charge a publishing fee and (2) exceptions are made for authors who cannot pay. More important, there is also Green OA self-archiving, and the self-archiving mandates increasingly being adopted by universities (e.g. Harvard) and research funders (e.g. NIH).
    Self-archiving costs nothing, and if it ever makes subscriptions unsustainable it will at the same time generate the windfall institutional savings out of which to pay for OA publishing instead.
    Nor are the costs of publishing likely to remain the same under self-archiving: If journal subscriptions are ever no longer in demand (because users all use authors’ self-archived drafts rather than publishers’ subscription-based version) journals will not convert to OA publishing under its current terms (where journals still provide most of the products and services of conventional journal publishing), but under substantially scaled-down terms.
    Current costs of providing the print and PDF edition, of access-provision and of archiving will all vanish (for the publisher). Those functions will have been off-loaded onto the distributed network of OA institutional repositories, each hosting its own peer-reviewed, published output. The only service that peer-reviewed journal publishers will still need to provide then will be peer review itself – and the windfall institutional cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay for that.
    But until then, Green OA is OA enough -- and free.

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In a letter to Nature 453, 450 (22 May 2008) Raghavendra Gadagkar, Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, writes:

"The traditional 'publish for free and pay to read' business model adopted by publishers of academic journals can lead to disparity in access to scholarly literature, exacerbated by rising journal costs and shrinking library budgets. However, although the 'pay to publish and read for free' business model of open-access publishing has helped to create a level playing field for readers, it does more harm than good in the developing world..."

It is easy to guess what else this (closed access) letter says: That at the prices currently charged by those Gold OA publishers that charge for Gold OA publishing today, it is unaffordable to most researchers as well as to their institutions and funders in India and elsewhere in the Developing World.

This is a valid concern, even in view of the usual reply (which is that (1) many Gold OA journals do not charge a fee, and that (2) exceptions are made by those journals that do charge a fee, for those authors who cannot afford to pay it). The concern is that current Gold OA fees would not scale up equitably if they became universal, making publishing impossible for some.

However, the overall concern is misplaced. The reasoning is that whereas access-denial to users today because of unaffordable subscription fees to the user-institution is bad, publication-denial to authors because of unaffordable Gold OA publishing fees to the author-institution would be worse.

But this leaves out Green OA self-archiving of published research, and the Green OA mandates to self-archive that are now being adopted by universities (such as Harvard) and research funders (such as NIH) in growing numbers (now 44 worldwide, and many more under way).

Not only does Green OA cost next to nothing to provide, but once it becomes universal, if it ever does go on to generate universal subscription cancellations too, making the subscription model of publishing cost recovery unsustainable, then universal Green OA will also by the very same token generate the release of the annual windfall user-institution subscription cancellation savings out of which to pay the costs of publishing on the Gold OA (author-institution pays) cost-recovery model.

The natural question to ask next is: Will user-institution costs and author-institution costs will balance out, if universal Green OA leads to universal Gold OA? Or will those institutions that had used more research than they provided benefit while those institutions that had provided more research than they used will lose out?

This would be a reasonable question to ask (and has been asked before) -- except that it is a fundamental mistake to assume that the costs of publishing would remain the same under the conditions of universal Green OA.

It is far more realistic to expect that if and when journals (both their print editions and their online PDF editions) are no longer in demand -- because users are all instead using the authors' OA postprints, self-archived in their IRs, rather than the publisher's proprietary version -- that journals will convert to Gold OA not under the current terms of Gold OA (where journals still provide most of the products and services of conventional journal publishing, apart from the print edition), but under substantially scaled-down terms.

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

In particular, all the current costs of providing both the print edition and the PDF edition, as well as all current costs of access-provision and archiving will vanish (for the publisher), because those functions have been off-loaded onto the distributed network of Green OA IRs, each hosting its own peer-reviewed, published postprint output. The only service that the peer-reviewed journal publisher will still need to provide is peer review itself.

That is why Richard Poynder's recent query (about the true cost of peer review alone) is a relevant one.

As I have said many times before, based on my own experience of editing a peer-reviewed journal for a quarter century, as well as the estimates that can be made from the costs of Gold OA journals that provide only peer review and nothing else today, the costs per paper of peer review alone will be so much lower than the costs per paper of conventional journal publishing today, or even the costs per paper of most Gold OA publishing today, that the problem of the possibility of imbalance between net user-institution costs and net author-institution costs will vanish, just as the the subscription model vanished.

Alma Swan has forwarded the link to a JISC-funded study of such questions being conducted by John Houghton (Australia) and Charles Oppenheim (UK) (in the context of UK research, where there are, I assure you, author-institutions that are every bit as worried about current Gold OA publishing fees as Developing World institutions are) Alma also drew attention to a study just released by RIN.

Peter Suber has pointed to Fytton Rowland's 2002 estimates of the cost of peer review alone:

Rowland, F. (2002) The Peer Review Process. Learned Publishing, 15(4) 247-58.

Peter writes:

"Rowland does a literature survey to determine the costs of peer review (see Section 5). He concludes (Section 7) that it's about $200 per submitted paper, or $400 per published paper at a journal with a rejection rate of 50%.

"I'm not in a position to vouch for the results, but it's the only paper I've seen trying to answer this narrow question.

"Note that the paper came out in 2002 and doesn't reflect the latest generation of journal management software. This matters because steadily improving software (including open-source software) is steadily taking over the clerical chores of facilitating peer review, and thereby reducing its costs."

I would add that even at $400 per paper, that would make peer review alone cost only 10% of the average price of $4000 that Andrew Odlyzko estimated was being paid per article in 1997 (i.e., the total collective contribution summed across subscribing institutions) and less than a third of most Gold OA publishing fees per article today.

Odlyzko, A. (1997) The economics of Electronic Journals. First Monday 2(8)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Commentary on: "Putting Science into Science Publishing" by Joseph Esposito, Publishing Frontier (blog) December 11 2007.

The posting contains the by now familiar litany of lapses:

(1) Open Access is not only -- nor even primarily -- about Open Access Publishing (Gold OA): It is about OA itself, which includes Green OA, the far bigger and faster-growing form of OA: Authors making their own published, peer-reviewed non-OA journal articles (not only or primarily their unpublished preprints) OA by self-archiving them in their own OA Institutional Repositories. Only 10% of journals are Gold OA, but over 90% of journals endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving by their authors -- with over 60% endorsing the immediate self-archiving of the author's final peer-reviewed draft.

(2) The question of whether librarians will cancel journals is not about Gold OA: It is about Green OA. Joseph Esposito contemplates whole-journal cancellations of subscriptions to Gold OA journals, whereas the speculations have been about whether and when librarians would cancel non-OA journals as Green OA self-archiving grows. Green OA self-archiving grows anarchically, not journal by journal. So not only is it hard for a librarian to determine whether and when all the articles in a given journal have become OA, but all the evidence (from the publishers) to date in the few areas (of physics) where Green OA self-archiving is already at or near 100% is that there are as yet no detectable cancellations as a result of 100% Green OA. (Rather, the publishers themselves seem to be adopting Gold OA in these areas: SCOAP3.)

(3) The OA citation impact advantage is not about unpublished or low-impact Gold OA journal articles versus high-impact non-OA journal articles: It is about the additional citation impact provided by OA, for any non-OA article, including those articles published in high impact journals! They don't lose their non-OA citations: they just gain further OA citations.

(4) The international, interdisciplinary survey evidence of Swan and Associates did not just tautologically confirm that people comply with requirements if required: The point was that over 95% of researchers report that they would comply with a Green OA self-archiving mandate from their employers or funders and 81% report they would do so willingly. (Only 14% said they would comply unwillingly, and 5% said they would not comply.) Arthur Sale's comparisons of actual mandates and compliance rates confirmed these findings, with spontaneous (unmandated) self-archiving rates hovering around 15%, encouraged self-archiving rates rising to about 30% and mandated, incentivized self-archiving rates approaching 100% within two years. (Not surprising, since academics are busy, and would be publishing much less too, if it were not for the existing universal publish-or-perish mandate.) Self-archiving is rewarded by the resulting enhanced research impact metrics, which their institutions also collect and credit, if researchers self-archive. [Added: see also Swan's rebuttal.]



In sum, OA is not about publishing, it is about maximizing research progress and impact. The outcome -- 100% OA -- is optimal and inevitable for research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public.

Publishers need to adapt to the optimal and inevitable for research. Research is not conducted and reported in order to provide revenues to the publishing industry. The publishing industry is providing a value-added service -- which, in the online era is rapidly scaling down to just the management of peer review and the certification of its outcome: The peers review for free, the authors can generate and revise their electronic texts themselves, and their institutions can archive and provide access to the final, peer-reviewed drafts in their OA Institutional Repositories.

What is left of peer-reviewed journal publishing, then, is to implement the peer review itself, and to certify the outcome with the journal's name and track-record. For now, journals are still providing much more than that (paper edition, mark-up, PDF, distribution), in exchange for journal subscriptions, and as long there is still a market for all that, the publishing status quo remains.

If and when subscriptions should ever become unsustainable because of universal Green OA, journals can downsize and convert to Gold OA as SCOAP3 is already doing. But for now, it is up to the research community -- and the research community alone -- to hasten the transition to universal Green OA.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Joseph Esposito wrote:

"Hey, Stevan, come off it. Read the article. Once again you pick a fight when I mostly agree with you."

I was commenting on your interview rather than your article, but if you insist, here goes. The comments are much the same. I think we are galaxies apart, Joe, because you keep on imagining that OA is about unrefereed peer-to-peer content, whereas it is about making all peer-reviewed journal articles freely accessible online:

Comments on: Esposito, J. (2007) Open Access 2.0: The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work. The Scientist 21(11) 52.

open access does not appear to increase dissemination significantly... [because] Most researchers are affiliated with institutions, whether academic, governmental, or corporate, that have access to most of the distinguished literature in the field.

Strongly disagree. You think there is little or no access problem; user surveys and library budget statistics suggest otherwise.

Thus, though there may be some exceptional situations, especially in the short term, the increased dissemination brought about by open access takes place largely at the margins of the research community.

Strongly disagree. On the contrary, it is the top 10-20% of articles -- the ones most users use and cite -- that benefit most from being made OA. (They receive 80-90% of the citations.)

Another important reason open access does not significantly increase dissemination is that attention, not scholarly content, is the scarce commodity. You can build it, but they may not come.

Strongly disagree. To repeat, OA is about published journal articles; so making them free online merely adds to whatever access they enjoy already.

It is one thing to write an article and upload it to a Web server somewhere, where it will be indexed by Google and its ilk. It is fully another thing for someone to find that article out of the growing millions on the Internet by happening upon just the right combination of keywords to type into a search bar.

Strongly disagree, and this is the heart of the equivocation. You are speaking here about self-publishing of unrefereed, unpublished papers, whereas OA is about making published, peer-reviewed articles OA -- whether by publishing them in an OA journal or by self-archiving them in an OA Institutional Repository (IR).

The very same indices and search engines that find the published articles will find the OA ones too, because making them OA is just an add-on to publishing them in the first place. It is only because you keep seeing the OA papers as not being peer-reviewed and published, Joe, that you give yourself and others the impression that there is an either/or here -- when in reality OA is about both/and.

Would you rather double the amount of published information available to you, or increase the amount of time you have to review information you can already access by one hour a day? We are awash in information, but short on time to evaluate it. Open access only worsens this by opening the floodgates to more and more unfiltered information.

This is a false opposition: OA is about accessing all journal articles, not just the minority that your institution can afford. If there are too many articles and too little time, affordability is surely not the way to cope with it! Let it all be OA and then decide how much of it you can afford the time to read. The candidates are all available via exactly the same indexes and search engines. The only difference is that without OA, many are inaccessible, whereas with OA they all are.

open access is most meaningful within a small community whose members know each other and formally and informally exchange the terms of discourse.

You are again thinking of direct, peer-to-peer exchange of unrefereed content, whereas OA is about peer-reviewed, published journal articles, irrespective of community size. (The usership of most published research journal articles is very small.)

Many of the trappings of formal publishing are of little interest to many tight-knit communities of researchers. Who needs peer review, copy editing, or sales and marketing?

I agree about not needing the sales and marketing, and perhaps the copy editing too; but since OA is about peer-reviewed journal articles, the answer to that is: all users need it.

what of the work for which there is little or no audience? What if there is simply no market? This is the ideal province of open access publishing: providing services to authors whose work is so highly specialized as to make it impossible to command the attention of a wide readership.

Most journal articles have little or no audience. This is a spurious opposition. And we are talking about OA, not necessarily OA publishing.

the innermost spiral of the shell of a nautilus, where a particular researcher wishes to communicate with a handful of intimates and researchers working in precisely the same area. Many of the trappings of formal publishing are of little interest to this group. Peer review? But these are the peers; they can make their own judgments.

The peers are quite capable of making the distinction between one another's unrefereed preprints and their peer-reviewed journal articles; and the difference is essential, regardless of the size of the field. OA is not about dispensing with peer review. It is about maximizing access to its outcome.

the next spiral is for people in the field but not working exactly on the topic of interest to the author; one more spiral and we have the broader discipline (e.g., biochemistry); beyond that are adjacent disciplines (e.g., organic chemistry); until we move to scientists in general, other highly educated individuals, university administrators, government policy-makers, investors, and ultimately to the outer spirals, where we have consumer media, whose task is to inform the general public.

I can't follow all of this: It seems to me all these "spirals" need peer-reviewed content. There is definitely a continuum from unrefereed preprints to peer-reviewed postprints -- I've called that the "Scholarly Skywriting" continuum -- but peer-review continues to be an essential function in ensuring the quality of the outcome, and certifying it as worth the time to read and the effort of trying to build upon or apply.

Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).

not all brands are created equal.

That's what journal names, peer-review standards and track records are for

Whatever the virtues of traditional publishing, authors may choose to work in an open-access environment for any number of reasons. For one, they simply may want to share information with fellow researchers, and posting an article on the Internet is a relatively easy way to do that

Again the false opposition: It is not "traditional publishing" vs. an unrefereed free-for-all. OA is about making traditionally peer-reviewed and published articles free for all online.

(I think some of the funding agencies have been misinformed about the benefits of open access, and they certainly have been misinformed about the costs, especially over the long term, but it certainly is within the prerogatives of a funding agency to stipulate open-access publishing.)

The funding agencies are mandating OA, not OA publishing. They have been correctly informed about the benefits of OA (it maximizes research access, usage and impact); the costs of IRs and Green OA self-archiving are negligible and the costs of Gold OA publishing are irrelevant (since OA publishing is not what is being mandated).

Whether in the long term mandated Green OA will lead to a transition to Gold OA is a matter of speculation: No one knows whether or when. But if and when it does, the institutional money currently paying for non-OA subscriptions will be more than enough to pay for Gold OA publishing (which will amount to peer review alone) several times over.

open access would be useful for: an article that may have been rejected by one or more publishers, but the author still wants to get the material "out there";

No, OA is not for "research spam" (as you called it, more candidly, in your Interview): OA is for all peer-reviewed research; all 2.5 million articles published in all 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals, in all disciplines, countries and languages, at all levels of the journal quality hierarchy.

an author who may be frustrated by the process and scheduling of traditional publishers;

Authors can certainly self-archive their preprints early if they wish,
but OA begins with the refereed postprint (and that can be self-archived on the day the final draft is accepted).

an author who may have philosophical reservations about working with large organizations, especially those in the for-profit sector, not to mention deep and growing suspicions about the whole concept of intellectual property.

I am not sure what all that means, but it's certainly not researchers' primary motivation for providing OA, nor its primary benefit.

A reason to publish in an open-access format need not be very strong, as the barriers to such publication are indeed low. It takes little: an Internet connection, a Web server somewhere, and an address for others to find the material.

Again, the equivocation: There is no "OA format." The target content is published, peer-reviewed journal articles, and OA means making them accessible free for all online. Peer-to-peer exchange of unrefereed papers is useful, but that is not what OA is about, or for.

Over time the list of invited readers may grow, and some names may be dropped from the list. The author, in other words, controls access to the document. This access can be extended to an academic department or to the members of a professional society; access can be granted to any authenticated directory of users.

This is all just about the exchange of unrefereed content. It is not about OA.

At some point the author may remove all access restrictions, making the document fully open access.

Making unrefereed content freely accessible online is useful, but it is not what OA is about.

It is a matter of debate as to whether any of these steps, including the final one, constitutes "publication," but it is indisputable that access can be augmented and that the marginal cost of doing so approaches zero

. Providing free online access to unrefereed, unpublished content is not what OA is about, or for.

The fundamental tension in scholarly communications today is between the innermost spiral of the nautilus, where peers, narrowly defined, communicate directly with peers, and the outer spirals, which have been historically well-served by traditional means. Open-access advocates sit at the center and attempt to take their model beyond the peers.

There is no tension at all. Unrefereed preprints, circulated for peer feedback, are and have always been an earlier embryological stage of the publication continuum, with peer-review and publication the later stage. OA does not sit at the center. It is very explicitly focused on the published postprint, though self-archiving the preprint is always welcome too.

Now, Joe, can we agree that we do indeed disagree?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Given the undeniable, irreversible and growing clamour for Open Access (OA) worldwide, journal publishers face two Prisoners' Dilemmas. (1) The first concerns whether to continue business as usual, to mounting opprobrium from the academic community as well as the tax-paying public, or to convert directly to Gold OA now, at the risk that institutional subscriptions at current prices for incoming journals may not transmute stably into institutional "memberships" for outgoing article publication costs at the same institutional price. If publishers convert from institutional subscriptions to institutional Gold OA "memberships" today, they counter the opprobrium and lock in current subscription rates for a year (or whatever duration-deal is agreed with institutions), but they risk institutional memberships defecting after the duration elapses, with cost-recovery fragmented to an anarchic individual author/article level that may not be enough to make ends meet. (2) The second Prisoners' Dilemma facing publishers is that if they instead counter the opprobrium by converting to Green OA now (as 62% of them already have done), Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates may still force their conversion to Gold eventually, but because access-provision and archiving (and their costs) will by then be performed by the distributed network of mandated Green OA Institutional Repositories, the revenues (and expenses) of journal publishing then may be reduced from what they are now. (Perhaps this can all be integrated into just a single Prisoners' Dilemma -- or perhaps it is not a Prisoners' Dilemma at all: just the optimal and inevitable outcome of the powerful new potential unleashed by the online medium for the communication of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research.)

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Although I no longer write much about it -- because there are strong reasons for according priority to Green OA Self-Archiving first, and I am ever fretful about doing anything that might instead help get us bogged down, yet again, in passive, pre-emptive speculation rather than practical action -- I too expect and welcome an eventual transition to Gold OA journal publishing, and have done so from the very beginning.

The question, of course, is how we get there from here. My own expectation (based on much-rehearsed reasons and supporting evidence) is that it will be the eventual cancellation pressure from mandated Green OA that both forces and funds the transition to Gold OA, with the institutional cancellation savings paying the institutional Gold OA publication fees. But this scenario is predicated on two necessary prior conditions: (a) universal Green OA and (b) universal journal cancellations.

This scenario for converting to Gold OA does not work if it is not universal; in particular, it cannot unfold "gradually" and piecemeal, either journal by journal or institution by institution. The three reasons for this are that (1) the true, fair costs of Gold OA publishing are not known at this time, (2) nor is the money available to pay for them, (3) nor (and this is perhaps the most important) would publishers be willing to downsize to those asymptotic reduced costs at this time of their own accord. Only (a) the cancellation pressure from universal Green OA, together with (b) the distributed infrastructure provided by universal Green OA -- allowing the functions (and costs) of access-provision and archiving to be offloaded from journal publishers and libraries onto the distributed network of Green OA Institutional Repositories -- will suffice to force both the downsizing and the transition, while at the same time freeing the funds to pay for it.

(My profound ambivalence about again raising this speculative hypothesis concerning the future of journal publishing at this time is that it risks delaying universal Green OA, by increasing publisher resistance to the Green OA mandates that are needed to bring OA about. Yet I keep having to resurrect the hypothesis now and again, as a counter-hypothesis, to answer equally speculative hypotheses about a direct transition from non-OA to Gold OA, neglecting the nonhypothetical, tried, tested, demonstrated and hence feasible, intermediate step of universal mandated Green OA, which is, apart from all else, an end in itself, being eo ipso 100% OA.)

The trouble with the "flip-over" hypothesis (the aggregator's-eye view proposed by then-CEO of Ingenta, Mark Rowse in 2003 -- see Peter Suber's recent summary) is the same as the trouble with the "institutional membership" strategy of BioMed Central as well as the "hybrid Gold" option offered by a number of publishers today (the author/institution can choose either conventional, no-fee non-OA publishing or fee-based OA publishing, paid for per individual article published): The reality is that today most of the potential institutional funds for paying for Gold OA (whatever the price) are still committed to paying for institutional journal subscriptions. Although the idea of locking this all in at current subscription rates, using the very same money, and just "flipping" -- from institutions as users, buying-in journals (i.e., annual collections of articles published by other institutions), to institutions as providers, paying-out for publishing their own individual articles -- sounds appealing (especially to an aggregator, and as long as we forget for the moment that the current subscription prices and publishing costs are arbitrary and inflated, not reflecting the substantial economies to be made from distributing the access-provision and archiving load across the network of Green OA institutional repositories), there is a logical problem inherent in the minutiae of this flip that make it into something of an Escher drawing:

An institution can commit in advance to paying for the buy-in of a certain yearly collection of journals for its users. But can it commit in advance to publishing, in any particular journal, a certain yearly number of articles by its authors? Are even the prior years' publication figures for that journal from that institution a valid predictor of what will be submitted by that institution to that journal the following year? And can a peer-reviewed journal commit in advance to accepting a certain yearly quota of papers from a given institution? (Is it not the referees who must decide, article by article, journal by journal?)

Is it not more likely that the yearly institutional quota of articles published in any particular journal will vary substantially from year to year, and from institution to institution? And is it not the author who must decide, in each case, where he wishes to submit his article (and for the referees to decide whether they will accept it)?

The equation does balance out, even at current prices, if the "flip" is universal. But as long as it is instead piecemeal and local to a journal or institution, it contains certain internal contradictions. While there is no universal OA, individual institutions will still need subscription access to the individual journals their users require. (This is equally true if the subscription access is transfered from the journal level to the individual article level, through "pay-per-view.") As long as an institution is paying for those annual institutional incoming content access-fees, that money is not available to pay for outgoing article publication-fees.

If an individual journal agrees to make all of an institution's outgoing articles OA in exchange for the current subscription fee, that's fine -- so far that's still just a bonus for renaming the "institutional subscription fee" an "institutional publication fee." The institution continues to get access to all the incoming articles in that journal, and, in addition, its own outgoing articles in that journal become OA: What subscribing institution would not happily agree to receiving that bonus as well, in exchange for merely rebaptizing its current "subscription charges" as "publication charges"?

But then (assuming this no-risk bonus is offered to all subscribing institutions rather than just one, and they all accept this renaming), the result would of course be that, next year, virtually all articles in that particular journal become Gold OA, for all institutions, whether or not they publish in or subscribe to that journal. So, the following year (or whenever the "membership" deal elapses), why bother to subscribe to that journal at all, especially for institutions that only publish the occasional article in it every few years?

In evolutionary biology, this is what is called an "evolutionarily unstable strategy". At the single-journal level, it is a recipe for inviting cancellations, soon. It does not scale, either across time, or across individual journals.

The same offer may sound less risky at the publisher "big-deal" level, in which it is a joint subscription to a whole fleet of journals that is at issue, rather than a single journal. But, first, if that is viable at all, it is only viable for publishers with fleets of journals. And even there, it is still the authors (not their institutions) who decide, individually, each year, in what journal they should publish. Libraries can consult annual user statistics to decide what journals to subscribe to next year, but it is not clear that this also translates coherently into author publication statistics. Again, libraries may be happy to take the Gold OA bonus in exchange for just renaming their fleet-subscription fees "publication fees" today, but what happens in subsequent years, when it is author statistics that are consulted on which fleets of publishing fee "memberships" to "renew"?

The system may stay stable for a while, if there is wholesale transition by most journals at a fleet level. In fact, initially, the ones most at risk for cancellation might then be the journals that do not offer the OA bonus in exchange for renaming their subscription fees publication fees; so this would in fact act to further universalize the transition to Gold (a good thing). But we should be clear on the fact that this exercise would have been a name-game, alongside a wholesale voluntary transition to Gold OA publishing on the part of publishers, with libraries ready to commit to pay for it at current rates, for now, as "membership fees."

(For the subscribing institution, the fee-based "product" was incoming journals or fleets of journals; but for the publishing institution, the fee-based "service" is based on individual outgoing articles, each in its own author's chosen journal. A "flip" here would be rather like all countries agreeing to pay McDonalds, Burger King, etc. a flat annual rate out of taxes for all the burgers their tax-payers eat annually, based on their running national averages for the latest N years: Fine for the fixed big-mac-eating tax-payer, perhaps, but not for the ones who never touch the stuff, or prefer more wholesome fare for their money. And that's without taking into account that this would also lock in current prices in a way that is impervious to supply and demand; or the possibility that it could prove a lot cheaper to produce burgers some other way, some day. McDonalds' promise to "pass on" any future economies to the consumer would sound pretty hollow in this captive-market "membership" arrangement.)

Nevertheless, I'd certainly be happy if this could all be agreed quickly and amicably, between publishers and institutional libraries: But can it? Or would publishers, in a kind of prisoner's dilemma, worry that institutions might then defect on some of their journals -- the ones they currently subscribe to and use, but in which their authors do not publish much? The prospect of such selective "cancellations" might well be enough to keep publishers from making the first move, preferring instead to stick with subscriptions and just offer hybrid OA (as many already do) as an option, at an extra institutional fee per article, with no risk to the publisher, rather than as an unconditional freebie in exchange for the current subscription fee (simply renamed), relying on faith that "memberships" will stay loyal in the long term even after everything becomes OA.

I can't second-guess the outcome of this prisoner's dilemma concerning voluntary publisher conversion to Gold OA, but I can already say confidently that the current option of hybrid Gold OA won't scale, because there isn't the extra money to pay the extra OA fees while the potential money for paying them is still paying for subscriptions. So hybrid Gold OA fees will remain just an occasional extra bonus to publishers (and an extra expense to institutions).

The one thing that just might encourage publishers to make the full transition to Gold OA voluntarily, however, is the worry that if they wait to make the transition under the anarchic pressure of Green OA self-archiving and self-archiving mandates at the article level, then the transition may indeed come with a forced downsizing and loss of income, as I have hypothesized, whereas if they convert voluntarily now, at the journal level, then they might hope to "lock in" current prices for a while longer yet. This is in fact a second prisoner's dilemma, and I certainly can't second-guess its outcome either, except to say that if it does drive the transition, then it will have been the prospect of Green OA mandates that induced the transition, rather than the actual practice of Green OA mandates -- but the cause will still have been the Green OA mandates!

What the research community must not do in the meanwhile, however, is to just sit passively, waiting to see whether or not the publisher and library community resolve their Prisoners' Dilemma(s) in favour of Gold OA. Rather than "waiting for Gold," I hope we will continue pushing full-speed for 100% Green OA by mandating it. That way we win, regardless of how the Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved. The Gold OA dilemma, after all, is between the publishing community and the library community, whereas Green OA is entirely between the research community and itself.

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.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: (1) If some publishers (commercial or otherwise) should ever decide to abandon journal publishing because of lowered profit prospects, their titles and editorial boards will migrate, quite naturally, to Gold OA publishers. (2) If ever faced with the (currently hypothetical) question "Do we use our newfound windfall cancellation savings from our former publication buy-in to pay (2a) for our newfound publication costs for our research publication output, or (2b) for something else, letting our research output fend for itself?" universities will find their way, quite naturally, to the obvious solution.

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Sandy Thatcher, President, Association of American University Presses (AAUP) wrote:

ST: "[I]t is not a matter of whether the STM business could be run profitably with NIH-type restrictions in place, but instead the expectations the companies most invested in this business have about profit margins and their willingness to continue in the business at a lower level of profit when their funds might be redirected to more profitable uses elsewhere. Money tends to go where the expectations for profits are greatest."

If some players (commercial or otherwise) eventually abandon the journal publishing game because of lowered prospects for profit, their titles and editorial boards will migrate, quite naturally, to other players (like PLoS or BMC or Hindawi) who are quite happy to stay in, or enter, the Gold OA arena (but we are again getting ahead of ourselves: it is Green OA, Green OA mandates and Institutional OA Repositories whose time is coming first, not Gold OA). Journal title migration itself is not hypothetical: it is happening all the time, irrespective of OA. (So is journal death, and birth.) A learned journal consists of its editorship, peer-reviewership, authorship, and reputation (including its impact metrics), not its publisher. We know (and value) journals by their individual titles and track-records, not their publishers.

ST: "One would hope... that "logic" would apply, of all places, within academic institutions. But I have been writing now for two decades providing "evidence" of ways in which higher education does not act according to logic, or norms of rationality, that one would expect from it."

It is certainly true that universities sometimes (often?) act irrationally, sometimes even with respect to their own best interests: not only universities, but corporations (and even people, individual and plural) betimes obtund. But reality eventually exerts a pressure (if the stakes and consequences are nontrivial) and adaptation occurs -- not necessarily for the best, in ethical and humanistic terms, but at least for the better in terms of "interests".

And the competition of interests in the question of what universities will do with their hypothetical windfall journal-cancellation savings (if/when Green OA mandates ever generate the -- likewise hypothetical -- unsustainable subscription cancellations) is a competition between the other things universities could do with those newfound windfall savings -- e.g., (1) buying more books for the university library, or withdrawing them from the university library budget altogether and spending them on something else -- versus (2) using those savings to pay for the university's newfound research publicaton costs (which, on the very same hypothesis, will emerge pari passu with the university's windfall cancellation savings).

It seems a safe bet that since the logical brainwork in question is just a one-step deduction (which I think university adminstrators, even with their atrophied neurons, should still be capable of making, if they are still capable of getting up in the morning at all), the new dance-step will be mastered: Faced with the question "Do we use our newfound windfall cancellation savings from our former publication buy-in to pay for our newfound publication costs of our research publication output, or for something else, letting our research output fend for itself?" they will -- under the pressure of logic, necessity, practicality, self-interest, and a lot of emails and phone-calls from their research-publishing faculty -- find their way to the dead-obvious (dare I say "optimal and inevitable"? solution...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

I do not quite understand all the fuss about the American Anthropological Association's switch in publishers from the University of California Press to Wiley/Blackwell. Yes, Wiley/Blackwell is a commercial publisher, and UC Press is a university press. But both are "Green" on author Open Access self-archiving, meaning they have both endorsed immediate self-archiving of the author's final, accepted draft (postprint) in the author's Institutional Repository, providing immediate Open Access to the article [but see FOOTNOTE].

The time to raise a hew and cry would be if and when Wiley/Blackwell ever contemplated changing their green self-archiving policy. But green policies (62% of journals currently) are growing in number, not shrinking, and this is largely because university and research-funder Green OA mandates, requiring their researchers to deposit their postprints, are growing in number.

So let the research community focus its voice and its will on Green OA policies for its publishers, as well as for its institutions and funders, rather than on spurious distinctions among commercial, university and learned-society publishers (all of which have their share of both green and non-green publishers!).

FOOTNOTE: There is one substantive point, however, about the AAA's transition to Wiley/Blackwell, which is that some of Blackwell's journals impose embargos on the date at which access to the deposit can be set as Open Access.

If the AAA membership wishes to raise objections to something, then objecting to any OA embargos would be a good target.

But even that is far less important that ensuring that all postprints are immediately deposited, and that immediate-deposit mandates are adopted by all universities and research funders. For universal deposit is the surest guarantor that universal immediate OA will soon follow. OA itself is its own best incentive and reward. The 62% of deposits that are immediately made OA will soon draw the 38% that are Closed Access deposits over to their ranks under the natural pressure of research usage and impact alone; the critical thing is that 100% of them should be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. And meanwhile, the Institutional Repositories' semi-automatic "Fair Use" (email eprint request) Buttons will provide almost-immediate almost-OA to tide over all access needs during any publisher embargo.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Continuing an even earlier tradition of sharing preprints, particle physicists began self-archiving (Green OA) spontaneously in 1991, as soon as the Web was invented (at CERN). They reached 100% Green OA years ago without ever needing a mandate. Meanwhile, spontaneous self-archiving by the rest of the research world has been stalled at about 15% Green OA for years. That is why there is now a worldwide movement to mandate Green OA today. One of the keynotes at IATUL was by Prof. Tom Cochrane of Queensland University of Technology in Australia, one of the godfathers of Green OA Mandates. The other keynote, by Dr. Ruediger Voss of CERN, was about a plan to convert particle physics from Green OA to Gold OA (journal publishing). I focus here on Voss's keynote, to point out that it is inapplicable to all the other disciplines (who have not yet even reached Green OA). It is OA itself that research urgently needs today, not economic reform of journals. It would have been much more helpful if CERN had put its prestige and efforts behind promoting Green OA and Green OA mandates rather than this unnecessary pre-emptive conversion from Green OA to Gold OA. Tom Cochrane's and QUT's example, not CERN's, is hence the one for the rest of the research world to follow here.

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Here are some notes on Richard Akerman's notes on Rudiger Voss's keynote talk at IATUL 2007 today:

One of the two IATUL keynotes was by Rudiger Voss of CERN.



The other keynote was by Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology.

Voss spoke for Gold OA, Cochrane spoke for Green OA and for Green OA Mandates.

Voss based his conclusions on what has been happening in physics since 1991. Certain areas of physics reached near-100% Green OA self-archiving, spontaneously, unmandated, years ago.

The rest of the world's disciplines, however, have not shown the slightest inclination to follow the spontaneous pattern of those areas of physics, and it's been over a decade and a half now.

Hence I would like to suggest that this is neither the right time, nor is there a rational basis, for holding up this latest (unfollowed) example -- of (certain areas of) physics that have already gone Green without the need of a mandate, and are now considering converting their journals to Gold -- as an example for the rest of the disciplines to follow:

Physics's earlier step (Green self-archiving) has not been followed, unmandated, and that is why Green OA Mandates are being strongly promoted now for all the other disciplines.

And physics's next step -- converting from Green to Gold -- is not even relevant to the rest of the disciplines. It's rather like recommending conversion from representative democracy to participatory democracy to a populace that has not yet even shaken off feudalism.

Some comments (based only on Richard Akerman's notes):

IATUL 2007 - June 11 - Dr. Rüdiger Voss - Open Access - SCOAP3, Dr. Rüdiger Voss, Physics Dept, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics

convert entire discipline to open access journal publishing

Not really the whole discipline of physics, just particle physics. But that field already spontaneously converted itself to about 100% Green OA self-archiving years ago.

approximately 10,000 scientists worldwide
5016 articles published in 2005 in peer-reviewed journals
83% of all papers in 6 journals
87% of all papers published by 4 different publishers

Compare that with countless scientists and scholars, publishing about 2.5 million
articles a year in about 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, with less than 15% of
their articles being spontaneously made Green OA through self-archiving.

(There might be an order of magnitude problem here. 5016 articles would be about the annual research output of one medium-sized university. There are about 1000 major universities, and about another 9000 minor ones, worldwide. We are talking here about less than 0.01% of the planet's research output --or 1% if there was a missing zero or two somewhere.)

CERN Convention (1953) is an early OA manifesto

But it was not till 1991 and the creation of the Web that that convention became acted on in earnest. And no other field or institution had such a convention at all.

What the other fields need now is a Green OA mandate, so they can catch up with what the physicists have been doing since 1991, unmandated.

embrace OA movement (arXiv.org)

Arxiv has been there to be embraced since 1991; the rest of the disciplines (and some other fields of physics) have been given plenty of time to embrace Green, but have not done so. So it's time to mandate it, not the time to convert (nonexistent) Green to Gold.

today particle physics is almost entirely green
without mandates, without debate

And that's the point! Today, the rest of the disciplines are not yet Green. So first things first.

peer-reviewed journals remain important as version-of-record archives and as key instruments of merit recognition and career promotion

Well, that makes it unclear what the motivation for the conversion to Gold is, even in these areas of physics: It can't be the need for OA, because they already have OA.

The rest of the research world does not.

OA landscape in 2007
most particle physics journals offer OA options
- hybrid model, authors buy OA to articles
- reluctant take-up by authors

So what? The pressing thing today is not the reluctance of authors or publishers to change economic models. The pressing thing is needless research access and impact loss. That is something these areas of physics have already fixed, and the rest of the disciplines do not. Why not help them achieve Green OA, instead of recommending they take the Nth step when they have not yet taken the prerequisite N-1 steps? And why stress that physicists took those N-1 steps without a mandate? That's the point: The other disciplines have not taken them. So the steps need to be mandated.

gold OA to journals is there, but variety of options bewildering
in 2005: 72.6% NO OA option
in 2007: 86.8% offer OA option
time is ripe for a full transition to OA

Time is ripe for a full transition for whom? And from what? And why?

Outside particle physics, it looks very much as if the badly-needed transition is from non-OA to 100% Green OA, which Green OA mandates will provide.

A direct transition from non-OA to 100% Gold OA is not even on the radar in other disciplines yet. And it is not even obvious (if OA is the goal) why it is so urgent in the areas of physics that already have 100% Green OA.

OA issues
grant universal access to peer-reviewed results of publicly funded research

Green OA mandates do that.

in a green environment authors benefit for peer review and journal prestige

That's right. And it is that Green environment that physicists are already enjoying. It is not obvious why (or even whether) they are so eager to convert to Gold. But if they do, and can, that's fine. That's not the problem. The non-OA world is the problem. It needs to be converted to Green.

bring subscription costs under control

OA itself does not do that. But so what? The reason the out-of-control journal prices are a problem is that those who can't afford them are denied access. Green OA remedies that. Prices are still out of control, but it matters far less:

Let those who can afford it and want to, keep paying. And let those who can't or don't use the Green OA versions instead.

Then, if/when subscriptions ever do become unsustainable, there can be a conversion to Gold (paid for out of the subscription savings).

But why now, when (1) particle physics no longer has an OA problem, whereas (2) the rest of the disciplines do?

raise researcher awareness of economics of scientific publishing

Which researchers? Physicists, who already have (Green) OA? Why?

Researchers in other fields, who do not yet have Green OA? But why should they worry about economic problems when they don't even realize they have an access/impact problem, or what to do about it? Why not just solve their access/impact problem, by mandating that they do what the physicists had the good sense to do spontaneously, years ago?

inject competition into scientific publishing by linking price to quality

Why is this an issue for researchers? First, why is it an issue for researchers who already have (Green) OA? And then why is it an issue for researchers who don't even have (Green) OA? Is their problem not access/impact-loss, rather than "journal price competitiveness"?

stabilize the diversity and future of journals which have served particle physics well - but leave room for new players

Not clear why/how this is an issue at all, let alone an OA issue.

SCOAP3 model
in a nutshell
global consortium of funding agencies and libraries to convert all research journals important to particle physics to open access

Why, since particle physicists already have Green OA?

And if there is a reason for the Green-to-Gold conversion, why hold it up as an example for other disciplines that have not yet even reached Green OA?

- funded through redirect of subscription budgets

That's fine when driven by subscription cancellation pressure from Green OA, but it's a different story when there is no Green OA yet.

OA implemented through contracts between SCOAP3 and publishers
- full sponsoring of core journals
- partial sponsoring of broader topic journals
SCOAP3 sponsors e-journals only; publishers free to charge readers for print and other premium services

It's obvious how an institution like CERN, which only subscribes to physics journals, and already enjoys 100% Green OA, can contemplate doing this. But what about universities, with many disciplines, all but (part of) one of them not yet anywhere near 100% Green OA? And journals in all those fields? How is the "redirection" supposed to scale, if done preemptively, in all those fields?

And most of all: Why? Isn't OA the problem, rather than publishing economics? Green OA mandates solve the OA problem, as it has already been solved in particle physics. What has this conversion exercise, for a field already enjoying OA, to do with all the other fields whose problem is that they don't yet have OA?

estimated annual budget: 10 million euros
contributions on a "fair share" basis by nationality (affiliation) of articles/authors
How to put it together?
LHC is a much bigger project, 40 funding agencies, 550 million $

I have no idea if this Big Deal can be worked out in particle physics, but that's not where the real need is: The need is in all the non-OA fields, for which this exercise is a completely irrelevant distraction from what will solve their problems, namely, Green OA mandates.

Benefits
online journals free to read for anybody

Green OA already provided that.

preserve high-quality peer review process

Green OA already provided that.

free to read and to publish for developing countries

Green OA already provided that.

generate medium and long-term savings for libraries and funding agencies

Is that the real purpose of all of this? But what about the OA for the non-OA fields?

SCOAP3 Status
report distributed
more work needed
potential funding parters to be invited soon to sign Expressions of Interest
once partners commit to sizeable fraction of budget, invite publishers to tender in autumn
Goal: have SCOAP3 operational for the first LHC papers

My hunch is that this is something of a Trojan Horse even for Particle Physics, and even for the goal of saving money, because it will lock in prices in an artificial way, instead of letting Green OA drive cancellations and cost-cutting, if and when it is ever destined to do so.

But who cares. That's just money.

But what about all the non-OA fields that this leaves high and dry (especially if touted as an alternative to mandating Green OA) instead of helping them at least to reach the Green OA that Particle Physics already has luxury (and the good sense that needed to precede it) to enjoy?

To see the way for the 99% of disciplines that are not Particle Physics, I suggest reading the recommendations of the other IATUL Keynote speaker, Tom Cochrane, the DVC of the university with one of the first Green OA mandates:

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Replies to (anonymized) queries about whether journals should convert to Green or Gold today:
(1) Going Green means endorsing immediate (unembargoed) self-archiving by authors.
(2) Going Gold means either:
      (2a) making the entire online edition free for all and continuing to sell the hard copy edition by subscription, as now, or
      (2b) charging an extra fee per article to author-institutions for making their individual article free online on their behalf, on the publisher's website (optional Gold "Open Choice"), or
      (2c) abandoning the subscription model and the hard copy edition entirely, and charging the author-institutions for publishing in the online (and only) edition.
   Going Green carries some risk to subscriptions, but that is unlikely to be significant till after 100% Green self-archiving is being reliably practised by all authors for all journals. Going Gold via (2a) would be far riskier, needlessly, because Green OA grows anarchically, article by article, whereas Gold OA is total and immediate for the journal. Going optional Gold via (2b) would essentially be to levy a gratuitous extra author charge for self-archiving; while continuing to sell the hard copy edition for subscriptions this would be a highly retrogressive step -- indeed, a Trojan Horse -- except if it was also coupled with going Green (1), in which case it would be fine). And (2c) would be needlessly to jettison the hard copy edition and subscription revenue pre-emptively, for no particular reason.
    Journals wishing to do something to help Open Access (OA) should go Green and then wait to see what happens. Green might eventually propel all journals to (2c). (Going Green (1) and hybrid Gold, (2b), is also a reasonable option, though there will not be many takers for optional Gold, with or without mandates, unless the asking price is negligibly low.)

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The following query has been anonymized:

Anon.: "Journal [JX] has a useful (but declining) revenue stream for the hard copy version. At the moment authors have to wait for 1 year before being permitted to put up their published papers on their own website. I'd like to see JX go OA and was hoping that all the UK Research Councils would insist on this for any papers published as a result of public money distributed in the form of research grants."

At this point in time it makes much more sense for a journal like JX to (1) go Green on author OA self-archiving than to convert to (2) OA Gold publishing.

(1) Going Green means endorsing immediate author self-archiving (no embargo).

(2) Going Gold means either:

(2a) making the entire online edition free for all and continuing to sell the hard copy edition for subscriptions, as now, or

(2b) charging an extra fee per article to author-institutions for making that article free online on the publisher's website (hybrid Gold "Open Choice"), or

(2c) abandoning the subscription model and the hard copy edition entirely, and charging the author-institutions for publishing in the online (and only) edition.

Going Green entails some possibility of risk to subscriptions, but that is unlikely to be significant -- it has not caused detectable cancellations for the other 62% of journals that are Green, including the physics journals that have been Green longest (over a decade) and some of whose contents have been 100% self-archived for years now.

Going Gold via (2a) would be far riskier, and needlessly so, than going Green (1), because Green OA grows anarchically, article by article, whereas Gold OA is total and immediate for the journal.

Going hybrid Gold via (2b) would essentially be to make a gratuitous extra author charge for self-archiving -- a highly retrogressive step (unless also coupled with going Green), while continuing to sell the hard copy edition for subscriptions.

And (2c) would be to needlessly jettison the hard copy edition and subscription revenue pre-emptively, for no particular reason.

JX should go Green and then wait to see what happens. Green might eventually propel all journals to (2c), but it certainly won't do it to JX alone, nor soon. (Going Green (1) and hybrid Gold (2b) is also a reasonable option, though you will not have many takers for optional Gold, with or without mandates, unless the fee is negligibly low.)

Anon.: "However, I'm told that EPSRC is holding out, for the moment, against OA as a result of protests from [Society SX] and [Society SY] that they'll be in serious trouble if they lose the revenue stream from their hard copy journals (but in the end this is going to happen anyway it seems to me ...)"

It is not entirely clear why EPSRC is holding out against mandating Green OA. Whatever the reason, it's a bad and counterproductive one, for research, and if SX and/or SY are behind it, all three ought to be named and shamed. In any case, I agree that Green OA is going to happen anyway.

Anon.: "Can you confirm that this is the case? Are EPSRC the only refuseniks? What about MRC?"

Five of the 7 UK research councils have already mandated Green OA (including the MRC). The only two holdouts are EPSRC and AHRC (and AHRC are considering adopting a Green OA mandate). EPSRC have instead decided to wait for the outcome of a long-term "study" of the impact of mandating Green. (Nonsense, of course, because the only way to study its effects is to mandate it.)

Anon.: "As you can imagine UK publicly-funded researchers who want to submit to [JX] are more likely to be getting money from EPSRC than any other of the Councils so this is the one I really need to know about."

Sorry I don't know any more -- except that there is a chance that the UK universities may also mandate Green OA (as a few, such as Southampton and Brunel have already done). In that case, whether or not they are funded by EPSRC, UK authors will all be self-archiving, no matter what journal they publish in.

And of course there is also the European ERC Green OA mandate, and the prospect of more mandates, worldwide.

Anon.: "Any other insight(s) gratefully received."

My suggestion: Urge JX to go Green (and, optionally, also hybrid/optional Gold, 2b) and leave it at that for now. Journal embargoes are in any case easily defeasible by ID/OA mandates (Immediate-Deposit, Optional-Access) paired with the "Fair Use" Button

Anon.: "Sorry to bother you again but it's been drawn to my attention that that [the publisher (PX) of Journal JX already has a hybrid-Gold "Open Choice" policy of selling OA as an option to the author-institution, by the article, for a fee, but PX otherwise embargoes author self-archiving for a year.]

As far as I can see this is an attempt by [PX] to do experiments on what you call Optional Gold (2b) without at the same time allowing immediate Green self-archiving (1)

I'd be glad of your opinions -- particularly about the fees PX proposes to charge for making papers instantly available online on an author's behalf."

I think the answer is already implicit in what I recommended above: Optional Gold (2b) is only justified and welcome if the publisher's policy is also Green on immediate author self-archiving (1) (i.e., should the author elect not to opt for the Gold OA option). Otherwise, with a self-archiving embargo, Optional Gold is a Trojan Horse, to be rejected decisively.

As to the asking price for optional-Gold: this currently varies between $500 and $3000 per article and tends to be reckoned by calculating the journal's annual revenue and dividing it by the annual number of articles. A self-serving figure, of course.

(If and when Green OA eventually causes subscriptions to become unsustainable, it will not only release the institutional subscription funds to be used instead to pay for Gold OA publishing charges, but it will also drive those charges down to a fair and realistic price -- probably just the cost of implementing peer review. So Caveat Pre-Emptor!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: One can calculate the price a subscribing institution pays per article, journal by journal and field by field. The number of institutional subscribers per journal may be listed or estimated, but that's still all revenues rather than costs. If all text-generation, access-provision and archiving are offloaded onto the distributed network of institutional repositories, the only service left for a journal publisher to provide is peer review. The only two factors modulating that cost would be the journal's submission and rejection rates (since the referees are unpaid). That gives a more realistic idea of what Gold OA will cost per article once we have 100% OA (rather than the arbitrary asking-prices we have from today's Gold OA and hybrid Gold "open choice" journals). Green OA self-archiving mandates might have the eventual side-effect of inducing this transition to Gold, but the real objective of OA is not to save money on subscriptions: It is to put an end to needless loss of research usage and impact.This can be achieved by Green OA self-archiving mandates, whether or not they lead to an eventual transition to Gold OA.

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A fellow OA advocate has just asked me whether I know any research or data on the costs of research journal publication, globally and broken down by discipline and/or journal types.

I had to reply that I wish I did, but even 25 years as editor in chief of a very high impact journal did not give me those figures, even for that one journal!

What is easily calculated, journal by journal and field by field, is the price a subscribing institution pays per article. (That's just the annual institutional subscription price divided by the annual number of articles.)

The publisher's revenue per article is a bit harder to determine: Asking the journal publisher for the number of institutional subscribers may provide it in some cases. Using the average ball-park figure of 800-1200 institutional subscriptions for journal sustainability gives a rough estimate.

But that's still all revenues. Costs are another matter, and not only are those data closely guarded by publishers, but in several respects, their reckoning is arbitrary. There is the usual arbitrary figure of "overhead" and "infrastructure." But apart from that it is very hard to tease out how much the print-run, mark-up, distribution, fulfillment, and advertising cost. And then there is the even vaguer task of estimating what expenses would be left if the paper version were scrapped altogether, and the journal were online only.

And last, and in fact most important, no one can say what costs would be left if there were no online edition either: If all text-generation, access-provision and archiving were offloaded onto the distributed network of institutional repositories, what would be left for a journal publisher to do? To implement the peer review (and possibly a certain amount of copy-editing). The only way to find out how much that would cost, per submitted paper, is not to try to infer and extract it from all of the added costs and services with which it is currently (and hopelessly) co-bundled by conventional publishers, but to see what it is costing, per submitted paper, for an OA publisher that is providing that peer-review service, and that service only.

I suspect that if that figure were looked at directly, in actual cases, the only two factors modulating the size of the cost would be the journal's submission and rejection rates (which might require a separate submission fee and, for accepted papers, an acceptance fee), not the journal's discipline or subject matter. This is because on the service-implementational side (which is all that is being paid for) the only variables are the submission and rejection rates. The thoroughness and rigor of the peer review itself, and the effort put in by referees, will no doubt vary from field to field and journal to journal, but that is not what is being paid for (since the referees are unpaid!). Peer review processing costs are just volume-based.

So I am sorry I could not help with the top-down answer. I do think the bottom-up answer can be derived from actual cases of pure OA journals doing nothing but peer review, or almost nothing but that, today. Then that bottom-up answer can be used to estimate how much would be saved by downsizing today's conventional hybrid (paper/online) journals into such peer-review-only OA journals -- and, more important, it could give us a much more realistic idea of what Gold OA is likely to cost per article, once we have 100% OA (rather than the arbitrary asking prices we have from today's Gold OA and hybrid Gold "open choice" journals -- based usually on dividing their current annual revenues from a journal by the annual number of articles published in that journal).

It does not follow, of course, that established journals will willingly downsize to just the peer-review service and its price! But this brings us back to the far more important and urgent matter of Green OA self-archiving, and Green OA self-archiving mandates:

What might possibly have the eventual side-effect of inducing this downsizing by conventional journals is mandated Green OA self-archiving. The competing functional and cancellation pressure from the free Green OA version might force publishers first to cut needless costs, products and services (the paper edition, then the online edition) and to offload all of those instead onto the network of Green OA IRs. Then still further cancellation pressure might not only force a conversion to the Gold OA cost recovery model, but it would then by the very same token release the institutional subscription cancellation funds that would pay for the institutional per-article Gold OA publishing costs.

Estimates like the ones we've just discussed here -- of the ratio between the current per-article revenue of conventional journals and the per-article costs of an OA peer review service alone -- will give an idea of just how much money would be saved by the cancellations and conversion. A conservative estimate might be 3/1 or 4/1, but the ratio could conceivably even turn out to be as much as an order of magnitude.

The real objective of OA, however, is not to save money on subscriptions: it is to put an end to needlessly lost research usage and impact, so as to maximize research productivity and progress.

The Green-to-Gold transition scenario is just speculation, of course; but as there is already so much idle speculation rampant, I would call it counterspeculation. It is not speculation, however, that the real objective of the OA movement, namely, 100% OA, can be reached by mandating Green OA self-archiving, whether or not it leads to an eventual transition to Gold OA.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum