Thursday, May 3. 2007
Asymptotic Costs of Gold Open Access Journal Publication
Martin J. Osborne (MJO), Department of Economics, University of Toronto, wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:SUMMARY: Martin Osborne, the managing editor of the Open Access Journal Theoretical Economics, points out that the publication fee ($75) for his journal is an order of magnitude lower than what I called the "going rate" for Gold OA journal publishing fees. He also points out that if institutional subscriptions were all cancelled and publishing costs were of the order of those charged by his journal, then there would be considerable net savings. I reply that he is quite right to point out that there are Gold OA journals that charge less than the going rate (indeed there are many that do not charge at all). I also agree that the fee his journal charges, though a bit on the low side, is much closer to what will prove to be the true per-article cost of OA publishing, once journals all convert to OA publishing. But the reality is that only about 10% of journals are OA today, and the publishing charges are what they are, today. And with most of the potential funds for paying them still tied up in institutional subscriptions, those publishing charges are an unaffordable burden for most authors, today. They are also an unnecessary burden, if the goal is to provide OA to every published article, to maximize its accessibility, usage and impact, today; for that can be done through Green OA self-archiving, by the research community, for itself, today. In contrast, converting journals to Gold OA, and at an affordable price, is not something the research community can do for itself. The research community can, however, mandate Green OA self-archiving, and thereby provide 100% OA, today. That Green OA itself might in turn eventually generate cost-cutting, downsizing, and conversion to Gold OA by journals, at a fair price, paid for out of the institutional subscription cancellation savings. Meanwhile, it is folly for the research community to just keep waiting for Gold OA, when providing 100% Green OA is already fully within its reach.
SH: "...This journal will charge about $1000 to publish, which is within the current going rate for OA journal publication fees."
MJO: The "going rate" surely depends on the field. Theoretical Economics, an Open Access journal (of which I happen to be the Managing Editor) charges a submission fee of $75 and no publication fee for authors who use the software standard in our field (LaTeX).You are quite right. In fact, as Peter Suber frequently points out, the majority of the Gold OA Journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) do not charge for publication at all. They either continue to cover publishing costs out of subscriptions, while making their online version freely accessible to all, or they have other sources of funding, such as subsidies or voluntarism.
The (unidentified) journal under discussion here, however, as well as all of the high-profile journals usually associated with OA (such as the PLoS and BMC journals) do charge for publication, and in the same range as the (unidentified) journal under discussion (not yet listed in DOAJ). In addition, there is now a very large number of hybrid-Gold OA journals that offer OA as an option to the author, likewise in the price range in question. (Those journals, not being OA journals, but merely offering an extra OA option to the author are, rightly, not covered by DOAJ.)
So I think the description "current going rate for OA journal publication fees" was quite representative and accurate.
Please note that although I of course endorse publishing in Gold OA journals for authors who can afford to do so today, and I also happen to believe that one day all journals will convert to Gold OA, I am not an advocate of publishing in Gold OA journals as the means of providing OA today. There are nine reasons for this, the decisive three being (3) - (6).
Publishing in OA journals in order to provide OA to one's research output, is nonoptimal and premature today because:
(1) Most journals (90%) are still subscription-based journals today.
(2) Hence institutions' potential publication funds are still tied up in paying for ongoing journal subscriptions today.
(3) OA publishing charges are still far too high today; they need to be reduced to just the true costs of implementing peer review alone (and the price you quote, though on the low side, is much closer to those true costs).
(4) 100% OA can be achieved, immediately, today, through (Green) OA self-archiving, by authors, in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs), depositing their own articles, published in today's conventional, subscription-based journals (90%).
(5) Green OA self-archiving can be, and is being, mandated by researchers' institutions and funders worldwide, in order to maximize research usage and impact, and thereby research productivity and progress.
(6) 100% OA is urgently needed today, indeed it is already greatly overdue; research usage and impact, productivity and progress are being lost daily, and cumulatively, as long as we delay mandating Green OA self-archiving (e.g., waiting instead for Gold).
(7) 100% Green OA may also force cost-reduction and downsizing to the true essentials on the part of conventional subscription-based journals, eventually.
(8) 100% Green OA may also force conventional subscription-based journals to convert to Gold OA, eventually, thereby also freeing the subscription cancellation funds to pay for it.
(9) 100% OA, however, is needed today, not eventually, and Green OA mandates can and will provide it, today, without continuing to wait and hope for an eventual, affordable conversion to Gold OA by all journals, perhaps, some day.
SH: "...This means that for now OA publishing charges are over and above what is already being spent on subscriptions."
MJO: I don't understand the meaning of this claim. Suppose journal X charges a subscription and then journal Y, which is OA, enters the scene. If everyone who used to submit to X switches to Y, the subscription fees will be replaced by submission/publication fees. If X charged $500 per volume to 300 libraries and Y publishes 40 papers per volume, even with a publication fee of $1000, the scientific community will save $110,000 (= 300x$500 - 40x$1000).Your calculation is absolutely correct -- and I have made it many, many times before: apologies for not posting the links to the Forum this time: they were included in the blogged version of the same posting. "
The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)"However, that calculation misses the critical elements for this transition:
"Hypothetical Sequel" [after 100% Green Self-Archiving]
(a) Subscriptions are paid by user-institutions; publication fees are paid by author-institutions.Hence one can do the hypothetical a-priori arithmetic all one likes, but that does not convert journals to OA, let alone Gold OA at a price that reflects its true costs; nor does it convert committed institutional subscription budgets to institutional publication-fee budgets for paying those true costs, across all subscribing institutions.
(b) Individual authors, not institutions, decide, article by article, which journal to publish in and when.
(c) Institutions, collectively guided by their users, decide which journals to subscribe to, yearly, journal by journal.
(d) Publishers decide whether and when to convert to Gold OA publishing fees, and at what price, journal by journal.
The downsizing and transition to Gold OA is likely to happen eventually, but only after it has first been preceded (and driven) by the transition to 100% Green OA. The transition to Green OA, however -- unlike the transition to Gold OA -- is entirely within the hands and reach of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders) today: It merely has to be mandated.
The good news is that the transition to Gold OA -- which is not in the research community's hands -- is far less urgent or consequential than the transition to Green OA, which is in their hands. And the transition to Green OA will already provide the 100% OA that the OA movement is all about, and for.
OA is not about journal affordability; it is about research accessibility. Although it will not solve the journal affordability problem, 100% Green OA will reduce it to a far more minor problem, lacking the urgency it has today, when it is still wrapped up with the research accessibility problem. Research accessibility is the true motivation for OA, for the research community, who are the only ones who can provide OA, and are also its primary beneficiaries.
"The Green and the Gold Roads to Open Access"Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
An Exchange Regarding Open Access Journals
This is a reply to an anonymized query:
(2) Nevertheless, it is a good idea to support and promote OA journals if one can.
(3) This particular journal will charge about $1000 to publish, which is within the current going rate for OA journal publication fees.
(4) It is specifically because of this publication charge that OA journals are still premature: Right now, most journals are not OA, and most of the potential institutional funds to pay for publication are currently tied up in paying for it via subscriptions.
(5) This means that for now OA publishing charges are over and above what is already being spent on subscriptions.
(6) $1000 per article is not much for some authors, but a lot for others.
(7) What all authors should be doing is self-archiving their articles, to make them OA.
(8) That will not only provide OA, but it will force subscription journals to cut costs and it may eventually force them to convert to OA publishing (at a much lower price).
(9) The existence of viable OA journals today, however, despite the extra costs (some) entail for authors, helps demonstrate that OA publishing is possible, and refutes the claim by some subscription journals that OA means the destruction of journals.
(10) This, in turn, helps encourage authors to self-archive, and encourages institutions and funders to mandate self-archiving, thereby accelerating the provision of OA (and the eventual transition to OA publishing).
So my advice would be this:
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Identity Deleted:"What do you know about this new journal? [Journal Name deleted](1) OA Journals are a good idea, though a bit premature right now, if the goal is OA: OA can be achieved right now through author self-archiving of articles published in conventional subscription-based journals.
Is it going to be less expensive than other open access journals with their rather hefty fees?"
(2) Nevertheless, it is a good idea to support and promote OA journals if one can.
(3) This particular journal will charge about $1000 to publish, which is within the current going rate for OA journal publication fees.
(4) It is specifically because of this publication charge that OA journals are still premature: Right now, most journals are not OA, and most of the potential institutional funds to pay for publication are currently tied up in paying for it via subscriptions.
(5) This means that for now OA publishing charges are over and above what is already being spent on subscriptions.
(6) $1000 per article is not much for some authors, but a lot for others.
(7) What all authors should be doing is self-archiving their articles, to make them OA.
(8) That will not only provide OA, but it will force subscription journals to cut costs and it may eventually force them to convert to OA publishing (at a much lower price).
(9) The existence of viable OA journals today, however, despite the extra costs (some) entail for authors, helps demonstrate that OA publishing is possible, and refutes the claim by some subscription journals that OA means the destruction of journals.(10) This, in turn, helps encourage authors to self-archive, and encourages institutions and funders to mandate self-archiving, thereby accelerating the provision of OA (and the eventual transition to OA publishing).
So my advice would be this:
(a) If you would otherwise have agreed to serve on the editorial board of a journal like this, then the fact that it is an OA journal should be another point in its favour.Stevan Harnad
(b) If you were submitting an article to a new journal like this, then the fact that it is an OA journal should be another point in its favour -- if you can afford the publishing charges.
(c) Self-archive all articles you publish in any case, and make sure your institution mandates self-archiving.
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Wednesday, April 18. 2007
OA or mOre-pAy?
Jan Velterop of Springer Open Choice continues to campaign for double-paid OA: With publication costs all paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors pay $3000 extra in order to provide Open-Choice Gold OA for their own article.SUMMARY: Springer Open Choice offers authors the choice of paying for Optional Gold OA: While all publication costs are still being paid for by institutional subscriptions, authors can pay Springer $3000 extra to make their article (Gold) OA for them.
But there is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are still paying all publication costs. Researchers' institutions and funders should instead mandate that their researchers self-archive their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to make them (Green) OA.
Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which the publishing industry should have no say whatsoever. The way to remove the publishing industry lobby from this research-community decision loop is the pro-tem compromise -- wherever there is any delay in adopting an OA self-archiving mandate -- of weakening the mandate into an immediate-deposit/optional-access mandate (ID/OA), so that it can be adopted without any further delay.
(Such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate in all cases, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.)
I continue to advocate that authors self-archive (and that their institutions and funders mandate that they self-archive) their published articles in their own Institutional Repositories in order to provide Green OA. There is no need (nor sense) to pay anyone an extra penny while institutional subscriptions are paying all publication costs.
Sixty-two percent of journals (including all 502 Springer journals) already endorse immediate Green OA self-archiving. Yet the adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates has been delayed far too long already by publishers either lobbying against self-archiving mandates, or adopting self-archiving embargoes, or both.
In order to put an end to all further delay in the adoption of self-archiving mandates, publishers need to be taken out of this research-community decision loop altogether. Mandating deposit in an Institutional Repository is a university and funder policy matter in which publishers should have no say whatsoever.
The way to put an end to the publisher filibuster on Green OA self-archiving mandates is the pro-tem compromise of weakening the mandates into immediate-deposit/optional-access mandates (ID/OA), so that they can be adopted without any further delay. This immunizes them from any further attempts by publishers to prevent or delay adoption: Only deposit is mandated (immediately). 
Access to the immediate deposit can then either be set as Open Access immediately, or (in case of a publisher embargo), as Closed Access, provisionally, with almost-OA provided by the "Fair Use" Button during any embargo.This way we have universal immediate-deposit, now, and almost-immediate almost-OA, now. 100% OA can and will follow soon after.
(Note also that such ID/OA mandates can be accompanied by a cap on the maximum allowable length for any publisher embargo on the setting of access to the (immediate) deposit as OA: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months: whatever can be agreed on without delaying the adoption of the ID/OA mandate itself. The most important thing to note is that most of the current, sub-optimal Green OA mandates that have already been adopted or proposed -- the ones that mandate deposit itself only after a capped embargo period [or worse: only if/when the publishers "allows it"] instead of immediately -- are all really subsumed as special cases by the ID/OA mandate. The only difference is that the deposit itself must be immediate, with the allowable delay pertaining only to the date of the OA-setting.)
But Jan Velterop (JV) is not concerned about this. He has a product to sell:
JV: "It almost looks as if there is a new OA sprout on the stem: 'almost-OA'."No new sprout on the stem: Just a temporary compromise in order to usher in universal self-archiving mandates without any further possibility of delay by publishers.
What is strongly recommended is immediate OA self-archiving. But what is mandated is immediate deposit.
Universal immediate-deposit mandates mean immediate OA for at least 62% of articles, and, with the help of the "Fair Use" Button, almost-immediate, almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (For the time being. Embargoes will disappear very soon thereafter, under pressure from the powerful, propagating benefits of universal OA.)
Jan would like to disparage this in order to promote paying for $3000 Open Choice Gold OA. He is free to promote his product, of course, but he is in competition with good sense, which can be promoted too:
JV: "This 'almost-OA', metadata plus a 'fair-use button', has of course been there for a long time already -- almost 15 years, I would say (and much longer if one considers the pre-web era). And it's been there without almost any self-archiving of almost any kind. Go to almost any publisher's web site, and you'll find the metadata for any article, plus a 'fair-use button' (usually, -- dare I say almost always? -- in the guise of an email address represented by an icon that looks like an envelope). Establishing repositories and a deposit mandate may be desired for many reasons, but if their main goal is to achieve 'almost-OA' it rather seems a waste of time and money."Jan misses two fundamental and obvious differences here: (1) Author self-archiving places the article in the author's own Institutional Repository, not a publisher's proprietary paid-access website and (2) the Fair Use Button does not merely offer the author's email address: The requester pastes in his own email address and clicks and the author gets an automatic email with the request and a URL, which he need merely click to have the eprint automatically emailed to the requester.
That, dear Jan, is the difference between night and day; the difference between a system whose goal is 100% OA and a system whose goal is to get paid for yet another thing (even when all bills are already paid and all expenses are already covered).
No, the immediate-deposit mandate plus the Button is not yet 100% OA. But it's close; and 100% immediate-deposit mandates plus the Button will soon lead to 100% OA. The delayed deposits (or no deposits at all) for which some publishers are lobbying never will. The double-paid Open Choice Gold OA even less so.
OA advocates are for OA; just OA. Open-Choice Gold advocates seem more intent on more-pay than OA...
JV: "OA publishing, on the other hand, delivers not 'almost-OA', but true and immediate OA (whether or not the articles are deposited in a repository, which is, by the way, automatically done by the full and hybrid OA publishers I am familiar with)."Green OA delivers "true and immediate" OA. It is publisher embargoes that reduce it to almost-OA! But that's fine. The research community will already be incomparably better off with Green OA for 62% of its articles and almost-OA for the remaining 38%. (Springer journals are among the 62% that endorse immediate Green OA, but, before you say it, yes, even if Springer and others choose to renege, universal almost-OA will be incomparably preferable to the status quo -- and it won't have the deterrent of costing an extra $3000 per article, while subscriptions are still paying all the publishing costs.)
And universal almost-OA, through universal immediate-deposit mandates, will very soon bring on 100% OA.
JV: "So my advice to authors who want secure, sustainable, future-proof, easy OA, is to publish with OA, in a journal that gives that opportunity, be it a new OA journal that only accepts OA articles, or an established and trusted 'hybrid' journal, that offers the OA choice."And my advice to authors is to self-archive in their institutional repositories no matter what else they do -- and to pay for Gold OA only if and when they can afford it, and feel it's worth the extra price.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Saturday, March 24. 2007
Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice: I (of 2)
Saturday, March 17. 2007
Why Cornell's Institutional Repository Is Near-Empty
Critique of:SUMMARY: Cornell University's Institutional Repository (IR) so far houses only a very small percentage of its own annual research output, even though this output is the target content for Open Access (OA) IRs. As such, Cornell's IR is no different from all other IRs worldwide except those that have already adopted a "Green OA" deposit mandate. Alma Swan's international, multidisciplinary surveys have found that most researchers report they will not deposit without a mandate but will comply willingly if deposit is mandated by their institutions and/or their funders. Arthur Sale's comparative analyses of mandated and unmandated IRs have confirmed this in actual practise. Cornell's IR too has confirmed this with high deposit rates for the few subcollections that are mandated. IRs with Green OA mandates approach 100% OA within about 2 years. The worldwide baseline for unmandated self-archiving is about 15%.
Davis & Connolly's 2007 D-Lib article takes no cognizance of this prior published information. It surveys a sample of Cornell researchers for their attitudes to self-archiving and finds the usual series of uninformed misunderstandings, already long-catalogued and answered in published FAQs. The article then draws some incorrect conclusions derived entirely from incorrect assumptions it first makes, among them the following:
(1) The purpose of Green OA self-archiving is to compete with journals? (No, the purpose is to supplement subscription access by depositing the author's final draft online, free for all users who cannot access the subscription-based version.)The only thing Cornell needs to do if it wants its IR filled with Cornell's own research output is to mandate it.
(2) IRs should instead store the "grey literature"? (No, OA's target content is peer-reviewed research.)
(3) IRs are for preservation? (No, they are for research access-provision.)
(4) Some disciplines may not benefit from Green OA self-archiving? (The only disciplines that would not benefit would be those that do not benefit from maximizing the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed journal article output.)
Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace. Davis, P.M. & Connolly, M.J.L. D-Lib Magazine 13(3/4) March/April 2007On the contrary; little has been done to develop IRs apart from creating them; moreover, many surveys and analyses have evaluated faculty non-participation and identified how and why to remedy it: By mandating deposit. (See Sale and Swan references at the end of this posting.)
D & C: "Problem: While there has been considerable attention dedicated to the development and implementation of Institutional Repositories [IRs], there has been little done to evaluate them, especially with regards [sic] to faculty participation."
D & C: "Results: Cornell's DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty."This is most decidedly true! The reason is that Cornell researchers are being given equivocal advice instead of an unequivocal mandate. (See: Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver)
(I note that, unlike Harvard, Cornell is not one of the 132 Universities that have signed in support of the US Federal Green OA Mandate, the FRPAA; this may be a sign of equivocation, but in Cornell's defense, none of the 132 have yet practised what they petitioned (by adopting locally the global mandate they are urging federally). European, Australian and Asian Universities have been faster off the mark.
D & C: "[The only] steady growth [is in] collections in which [Cornell] university has made an administrative investment, such [as] requiring deposits of theses and dissertations into DSpace."This passage states the problem (empty IRs) as well as the solution (mandating deposit) -- but the article itself then proceeds to ignore this obvious and already known outcome, and instead goes on and on about the many groundless (and easily answered) reasons faculty cite for not depositing unless it is mandated.
The D & C article also wrongly imagines that the primary purpose of IRs is to preserve digital content, rather than to maximise research usage and access by supplementing paid journal access with free access to the author's final draft: (See: Against Conflating OA Self-Archiving With Preservation-Archiving )
D & C: "Cornell faculty have little knowledge of and little motivation to use DSpace."Correct. And in that respect Cornell faculty are exactly like faculty at all other universities worldwide that have IRs but no deposit mandate:
Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.
D & C: "Many faculty use alternatives to institutional repositories, such as their personal Web pages and disciplinary repositories"If all or most faculty were indeed spontaneously despositing their peer-reviewed articles on their personal Web pages or in central disciplinary repositories (CRs) (like Arxiv), there would be no problem: 100% Open Access (OA) would already be upon us, for IRs could easily fill themselves by simply harvesting their faculty's output from their web-pages and CRs.
The trouble is that -- except where mandated -- most faculty are not depositing their articles on their Web pages today, and only a few sub-disciplines are depositing in CRs. Hence OA is only at about 15% today.
D & C: "[CRs] are perceived to have higher community salience than one's affiliate institution."Right now, the only two CRs with any appreciable content -- Arxiv and PubMed Central -- certainly do have "higher community salience" than IRs, since most IRs are mostly empty. But institutions need merely mandate depositing and the "salience" of their IRs will sail, along with the size of their contents.
(Moreover, the true success rate of a repository -- whether IR or CR -- is the percentage of its total annual target content that it is currently capturing. By that proportionate measure, central disciplinary CRs are in fact doing just as badly as unmandated IRs and the real champions are (unsurprisingly) the harvesters like Citeseer, OAIster and Google Scholar that trawl their contents from the distributed IRs and CRs.)
All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable. Researchers' institutions cover all of research output space. Hence researchers' own IRs are the natural and optimal locus for direct deposit. Institutions also have a proprietary interest in showcasing, monitoring, evaluating and storing their own research output -- as well as in maximizing its research impact. Hence both funders and institutions should mandate direct deposit in the researcher's own IR. (CRs can then harvest therefrom, if they wish.) (See: Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?)
D & C: "Faculty gave many reasons for not using repositories: redundancy with other modes of disseminating information"There is no "redundancy" with OA's target content: peer-reviewed journal articles. Those users who can afford paid access, have paid access. Those who do not, have no access. The purpose of OA self-archiving in IRs is to supplement the existing paid access, providing free access to the author's final draft, self-archived online, for those would-be users who do not have paid access to the journal's proprietary version.
(The authors of this article, D & C, as we shall see, draw precisely the conclusions from their article that they have themselves put into it, in the form of assumptions, often incorrect ones. Apart from that, all the do is amplify the volume of the faculty misunderstandings they sample, instead of correcting them.)
The purpose of maximizing research access is to maximise research impact (download, usage, applications, citations, productivity, progress).
D & C: "the learning curve [for depositing articles online]"A non-problem, cured by a few moments of instruction, plus a mandate:
Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving)
D & C: "confusion with copyright"A non-problem, already completely mooted by the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate: (See: Generic Rationale and Model for University Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate: Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access (ID/OA))
Only the depositing itself is mandated; setting access to the deposit as Open Access versus Closed Access is recommended but optional.
D & C: "fear of plagiarism"An old canard, cured by referring to Self-Archiving FAQ.
D & C: "having one's work scooped"Another old canard.
D & C: "associating one's work with inconsistent quality"Yet another old canard.
D & C: "concerns about whether posting a manuscript constitutes 'publishing'."One of the oldest canards of them all.
D & C: "Conclusion: While some librarians perceive a crisis in scholarly communication as a crisis in access to the literature, Cornell faculty perceive this essentially as a non-issue."Librarians' journal affordability problems helped draw attention to the research accessibility problem, but the affordability and accessibility problems are not the same, nor are their solutions.
Cornell faculty are right to regard the affordability problem as not their problem. The accessibility problem, however, is their problem, both from the point of view of Cornell researchers' own lost access to the work of researchers at other institutions (in journals that even Cornell cannot afford to subscribe to) and -- even more important (as most researchers at other institutions are not sitting as pretty as Cornell for subscriptions) -- from the point of view of Cornell researchers' lost research impact (owing to the access problems of would-be users at other institutions).
D & C: "Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and traditions. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one's faculty, institutional repositories will need to address this cultural diversity."The target content of OA IRs is peer-reviewed journal articles. If there are any disciplines that do not care about maximising the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed journal article output, then there are indeed reasons to examine discipline differences. If not, then what is needed is not discipline-difference studies but pandisciplinary deposit mandates.
D & C: "most faculty host their digital objects on a personal website, where their long-term preservation is not secure. If institutions truly value the content created by their faculty, they must take some responsibility for the long-term curation of this content."OA IRs are for supplementary access-provision and usage-maximisation, not for preservation. (What needs preservation is the journal published version, not the author's OA draft.) (See: Against Conflating OA Self-Archiving With Preservation-Archiving)
But of course IRs can and will preserve their contents, to make sure their supplementary access provision perdures.
D & C: "There are two opposing philosophical camps among those who work to justify institutional repositories: one that views IRs as competition for traditional publishing, the other that sees IRs as a supplement to traditional publishing."There are indeed two opposing views of what IRs are for, but the opposition is certainly not about whether IRs compete with or supplement traditional publishing. It is about whether IRs are primarily for OA content (i.e., peer-reviewed research) or for other kinds of content (e.g., "grey literature"). (There is also some related confusion about whether IRs are primarily for supplementing access or for digital preservation.)
Among OA advocates there is no divergence whatsoever on the fact that OA IRs (Green OA) supplement journal publishing; they are not a substitute for it, nor a competitor to it.
(There is competition between subscription-based publishing and Gold OA publishing, but that is an entirely different matter, having nothing to do with IRs or Green OA.)
Here is a core example of how the authors of this article first make incorrect assumptions, and then simply proceed to derive their inevitably incorrect consequences:
D & C: "In 1994, Stevan Harnad wrote his Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, in which he argued that all academics should make their research articles publicly available through open repositories. This collective effort would help to reduce the power wielded by publishers who have built economic barriers to limit scholars' access to the literature."(1) From the very outset, the Subversive Proposal was to supplement traditional publishing with (what we have since come to call) Green OA self-archiving of the author's peer-reviewed final draft. Self-archiving was never proposed as a substitute for peer-reviewed journal publication -- as a google search on "harnad supplement substitute" will repeatedly confirm!
Latent in the Subversive Proposal -- a Green OA supplement proposal -- was, of course, the possibility of an eventual transition to Gold OA publishing. But that is and always was treated as a hypothetical possibility, whereas Green OA self-archiving (which eventually led to the first OA IR software, EPrints, and eventually to the OA IR movement) was proposed as a concrete, practical action, within reach of all researchers -- a practical action that has since been widely tried, tested, and confirmed empirically to work, and to deliver the enhanced research usage and impact for which it was intended.
(2) Davis & Connolly have also completely conflated the explicitly stated purpose of the Subversive Proposal -- which was to maximize research access and usage -- with the library community's struggle with the journal affordability problem. Green OA self-archiving is not about "reducing publisher power" nor about changing economics. It is just about maximizing research access.
D & C: "In opposition, Clifford Lynch views IRs as supplements, not primary venues for scholarly publishing, and warns against assuming the role of certification in the scholarly publishing process."All OA IR advocates view IRs as supplements: a way to provide free access to the author's peer-reviewed final draft, accepted for publication by the "primary venue" (the journal) -- not as a substitute form of peer review or certification or publication.
D & C: "[Lynch] argues that "the institutional repository isn't a journal, or a collection of journals, and should not be managed like one""Preaching to the choir: No one thinks IRs are journals.
D & C: "Lynch fears that viewing IRs as instruments for undermining the economics of the current publishing system discounts their importance and reduces their ability to promote a broader spectrum of scholarly communication."IRs are not "instruments for undermining the economics of the current publishing system" they are instruments for maximizing the access and impact of currently published research articles.
D & C: "Institutional repositories may better serve to disseminate the so-called "grey literature": documents such as pamphlets, bulletins, visual conference presentations, and other materials that are typically ignored by traditional publishers."The idea that IRs should focus on the grey (unpublished) literature instead of the OA Green literature remains just as off-the-mark and wrong-headed today as on the day it was first mooted: (See: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives)
D & C: "DSpace was not conceived as competition to commercial publishers, but as a resource to capture, preserve and communicate the diversity of intellectual output of an institution's faculty and researchers It was designed specifically to deal with a wide range of content types including research articles, grey literature, theses, cultural materials, scientific datasets, institutional records, and educational materials, among others."More's the pity that DSpace does not now, nor did it ever, have its priorities straight. The #1 priority for IRs is and always has been (or ought to have been!) OA. (See: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?)
D & C: "On May 1st, 2005, a policy was enacted that recommended, not required, that all researchers receiving grant monies from the National Institutes of Heath deposit final copies of their manuscripts in PubMed Central (PMC), a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PMC offers many valuable services to authors, such as indexing in Medline (the primary literature index for the biomedical and life sciences), as well as dynamic links to the published version of their article. After eight months, the participation rate remained a dismal 3.8%. Lack of awareness of the policy was not cited as contributing to the low compliance rate. On December 14th, 2005, Senator Joseph Lieberman introduced the CURES Act (S.2104), which would require (not recommend) mandatory deposit of final manuscripts"The NIH Public Access Policy failed for three reasons (in order of priority):
The remedy for this was pointed out in advance to NIH (but went unheeded): "A Simple Way to Optimize the NIH Public Access Policy")(1) because it was not a mandate, but merely a request,
(2) because it allowed deposit to be delayed (up to a year) rather than immediate,
(3) and because it insisted upon central deposit, in PMC, instead of local deposit (in the fundee's own IR, harvestable by PMC).
The remedy -- the ID/OA mandate -- has since been taken on board in the European Research Advisory Board's policy recommendation.
ID/OA has just been adopted by University of Liege -- the first, let's hope, of many adopters, including the US's omnibus Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). (See: How to Counter All Opposition to the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate)
D & C: "Cornell's DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty. Its complex organization is seen at comparable institutions, but may discourage contributions to DSpace by making it appear empty. In addition, faculty have little knowledge of and no motivation to use DSpace."The only thing Cornell's DSpace is missing is the ID/OA mandate. That mandate needs to replace or at least complement Cornell's Copyright Advice: Guide for the Perplexed Self-Archiver.
D & C: "Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and inertia. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one's faculty, IRs will need to address this cultural diversity."No, the remedy is not to delve into disciplinary diversity. It is to promote what all disciplines (indeed all of research) have in common, which is the need to maximize the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed research findings -- by mandating Green OA.
Stevan HarnadSwan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.
Swan, Alma and Brown, Sheridan (2005) Open Access self-archiving. An author study. Published by JISC.
Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18(1) pp. 25-40.
Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access: researchers' views and responses, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.
Sale, A. (2006) The Impact of Mandatory Policies on ETD Acquisition. D-Lib Magazine April 2006, 12(4).
Sale, A. (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday, 11(4), April 2006.
Sale, A. (2006) The acquisition of open access research articles. First Monday, 11(9), October 2006.
Sale, A. (2007) The Patchwork Mandate D-Lib Magazine 13 1/2 January/February
Sale, Arthur (2006) Researchers and institutional repositories, in Jacobs, Neil, Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 9, pages 87-100. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited.
Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).
Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos Publishing (Oxford) Limited. .
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Thursday, March 15. 2007
Gold Fever and Trojan Folly
On Sat, 10 Mar 2007, Jan Velterop, of Springer Open Choice, wrote in liblicense:
SUMMARY: Jan Velterop recommends, without any supporting argument, that at a time when publication costs are still being fully covered by subscriptions, research funders and institutions should not mandate Green OA self-archiving, because that would (according to Jan) be merely a "cheap palliative," not a "full cure".
A full cure would be to double-pay for Gold OA (double, because publication costs are still being covered by subscriptions) until publishers voluntarily pass on their excess revenues by gradually discounting and eventually phasing out subscriptions.
Our disease, it appears, is not our lack of OA (for mandating Green OA would provide 100% OA); our disease is our paying for publication in the wrong way (via subscriptions rather than publication charges). And the reason the "cheap palliative" of mandating Green OA is a bad idea (according to Jan) is that it might cause subscriptions to be cancelled.
What Jan does not explain is why not-paying for publication in the right way is our disease, rather than not-having research access -- for it is access to research that the OA movement is all about, and 100% research access -- not something else -- that OA is meant to provide.
Nor does Jan explain why 100% Green OA is not a cure for this lack of research access: Either the 100% OA generated by the Green OA mandates will eventually cause subscriptions to be cancelled so they no longer cover publication costs or it will not. If it does not, then Green OA mandates will merely have generated 100% OA. If it does, then Green OA mandates will also have generated a transition to Gold OA, along with releasing the money (the windfall subscription savings) out of which to pay the Gold OA publication charges without having to find the extra money to double-pay (for publication charges on top of subscriptions). It is not at all clear why Jan regards this as "cheap palliative care" rather than a "full cure," either way.
If, that is, Jan is really for OA, rather than something else.
JV: "The Howard Hughes (HHMI-Elsevier) deal is not a setback for open access, even if it is not the greatest imaginable step forwards perhaps."It is not a setback for the minuscule number of articles for which HHMI will finance paid (Gold) OA. It is a setback for all the other articles that could be made (Green) OA through mandated author self-archiving, for free, while subscriptions are still continuing to pay the publication costs.
It is not only a waste of money, but it plays into the hands of those who are trying to delay or derail Green self-archiving mandates at all costs.
JV: "To knock the HHMI for getting into this deal is short-sighted."It is HHMI that is being short-sighted (and gullible). HHMI ought instead simply to mandate Green OA self-archiving, and to leave it at that.
JV: "And subject lines like 'Trojan Horse' with their insidious negativity raise the suspicion that the agenda of some list participants is not really 'open access', but a desire to get rid of publishers or of the notion that publishing, including open access publishing, actually costs money."Nonsense. Open Choice is a Trojan Horse if it is taken as a pretext for paying for Gold OA instead of mandating Green OA. No one is trying to get rid of publishers. We are trying to get rid of access-barriers. Green OA does just that. And while subscriptions are still being (amply) paid for, no one is unaware of the fact that publishing costs money. What is urgently needed today is not money to pay for Gold OA, but mandates to provide Green OA.
JV: "It's a delusion that one can get open access by self-archiving mandates that imply having to rely on librarians to keep paying for subscriptions to keep journals alive."Institutions are paying for subscriptions today. That is no delusion.
There is little OA today. That is no delusion.
Green self-archiving mandates will generate 100% OA. That is no delusion.
What happens to subscriptions after that is speculation, not delusion.
JV: "Or is the idea that librarians keep paying for journals of which the articles are available with open access part of the proposed mandates?"Institutions are paying for librarians today. That is not proposed; that is already going on.
What is not already going on is OA self-archiving.
That is what the Green mandates are for.
Whether and when institutions will cancel subscriptions because of mandated Green OA is a purely speculative matter, today. What is not speculative is that if and when institutions ever do cancel subscriptions, that money will then be freed to pay for Gold OA costs; not before. Nor is it speculation that Green OA will already have provided 100% OA by then.
JV: "Authors can self-publish easily these days and provide open access to their articles to their hearts' content."Why is Jan telling us this? OA is not -- and never has been -- about self-publishing; nor is it about unpublished articles. It is about providing Open Access to peer-reviewed, published articles.
JV: "Once they involve a publisher, though, they don't do that out of altruistic motives."No. Nor does the publisher. But publishers are being paid in full, today, by subscriptions, whereas Open Access is not being provided, today. And consequently research impact is needlessly being lost today.
It would not just be altruism but profligacy to double-pay for Gold OA today. And it would be (and is) not altruistic but foolhardy in the extreme to continue doing without OA, and with the attendant daily loss in research impact and progress, for failure to mandate Green OA.
(Foolhardy for the research community, and the public that funds it, I mean: Not necessarily foolhardy for the publishing community!)
JV: "They don't 'give' their articles to publishers. They come to ask for a 'label', a 'mark', an official journal reference that makes their article from a piece of text, perhaps interesting, but not recognised by the academic community, into a formally peer-reviewed and published article. It's not the publishers that compel them to do that."I don't know why we are being regaled with all this rhetorical complexity: Researchers submit their papers to journals for two reasons:
(1) to get them peer-reviewed andThat is what subscriptions are already paying for. OA is for those would-be users who cannot afford access to the subscription version.
(2) to provide access to them.
It is not authors who seek or get the revenues from subscriptions, it is publishers. No altruism on either side. And the only thing missing, in the online age, is OA. And Green OA mandates will provide that.
JV: "And publishers cannot provide those services, on the scale they are needed, on a philanthropic basis."No one is asking them to: Subscriptions are paying, amply. OA is about those users who cannot afford access to the subscription version.
JV: "This may be possible for a number of small journals, and where it is possible it deserves to be done that way and probably is already."Jan (and the publishing community) keep talking about journals and journal cost-recovery models. Fine.
The research community is talking about OA, and impact-loss-recovery methods.
The only tried, tested, successful method of impact-loss-recovery within immediate reach is mandating OA self-archiving. That has nothing to do with journal cost-recovery models. Jan is talking at cross-purposes with OA, with his fixation on payment models (when there is no non-payment problem today, whereas there is a no-access problem today).
In thus talking at cross-purposes, Jan (and those of the same persuasion) are standing in the way of a tried, tested, successful, and immediately reachable means of solving the access problem. They are instead promoting a Trojan Horse.
JV: "But the worldwide scientific enterprise needs sustainable large-scale industrial-strength publishing to deal with the publication of more than a million new articles a year (and in terms of submissions a multiple of that, given that most papers are rejected at least once)."Can we transfer the problem of the "sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" to another venue than discussions of OA?
OA is an immediate, pressing, and immediately solvable problem for research and researchers. Its solution is for research institutions and funders to mandate Green OA, as a few have already begun doing, others have proposed to do, and researchers and institutions have petitioned them to do.
The quest for a solution to the "the problem of the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" can proceed in parallel with the quest for OA, but it should not be conflated with it, or get in the way of it.
To oppose Green OA mandates and urge "Open Choice" in their stead is precisely the Trojan Horse against which I am warning.
JV: "The HHMI deal is a very positive step towards sustainable open access and should be recognised for that. The 'cure' of OA publishing is to be preferred to the 'palliative' of self-archiving. The derision that funding agencies suffer who put open access first, and not cost reduction, is uncalled-for."Who on earth is talking about cost-reduction?
The disease is needless, ongoing, online research access/impact loss. The cure is OA. Green OA is OA. It might be merely a "palliative" for "the problem of the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" but it is a cure for the disease of research access/impact loss.
What deserves exposure and derision is the attempt to deter and devalue and deride a sure and reachable immediate cure for the disease of research/impact loss in the name of some other uncured "disease" that has next to nothing to do with the research community's immediate, pressing, and solvable access/impact needs today.
JV: "If a full, safe cure for a disease is possible, though not necessarily cheaper than lifelong symptom-management and the real possibility of a much shorter life, is it better to go for cheap palliative care than for this full cure?"As usual, we are talking about two different "diseases." One -- "the sustainability of large-scale industrial-strength publishing" -- is a long-term, hypothetical money-matter with which the publishing community is concerned; the other -- research access/impact loss -- is an immediate, urgent, ongoing practical research-matter with which the research community is concerned -- and it has an immediate, practical solution: Mandated Green OA.
To deter, defer or derail the research community's solution to the research community's problem, by portraying the publishing community's industrial long-term sustainability problem as if it were the same problem as the research community's immediate access/impact problem is simply false and misleading.
To oppose the research community's immediately reachable solution to its access/impact problem (mandated Green OA) in favour of paying for Gold OA today is nothing more nor less than what I have called it: The promotion of a Trojan Horse.
Caveat Emptor.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Thursday, March 8. 2007
Physics World: The CERN Gold OA Initiative
In Open Access News, Peter Suber comments on John Harnad's critique of the CERN plan for gold OA: Harnad, John (2007) Clarifying Open Access: its implications for the research community (Letter). Physics World 29(3).Here are my comments on Peter Suber's comments. (As will be seen, on some points I agree with John Harnad, and on others I agree with Peter Suber.)
JH 1: 'Green' OA can achieve [OA] quite adequately, without transferring the cost burden to researchers.This has neither been tested nor even thought-through. There are about 10,000 research universities in the world, perhaps 3000 "core" universities, and maybe 800-1200 mainstay institutional subscribers for each average journal.PS: True. But under the CERN plan, there would be no burden to researchers either. Journals in particle physics would convert from TA to OA, and the institutions that formerly paid subscriptions would thereafter pay author-side publication fees. Authors themselves would pay nothing.
There are very few one-discipline research institutions like CERN.
Subscriptions are collective annual packages and commitments.
Institutional BioMedCentral-style "memberships" are not: Journals cannot contract to accept N articles annually from a particular university and universities cannot contract to submit N articles annually to a particular journal.
Even if annual quotas can be estimated annually from prior-year averages, this does not scale to universities that did not previously subscribe to the journal, yet publish articles in it.
Nor does it scale to universities that have many journals in many disciplines, and cannot readily make special arrangements for just a few journals and institutional contributors to those journals.
I -- like Peter Suber and unlike my brother -- do believe, however, that this kind of redirection will be possible, but only if/when all journals in all disciplines at all universities are being cancelled because of 100% or near-100% Green OA.
Pre-emptively doing that redirection now, however, journal by journal -- especially with no necessary match between subscription input and publication output at the journal or field level at a given university -- may look like it makes sense to one-field institutions like CERN, but it looks very different to the overwhelming majority of the c. 10,000 universities that exist -- or even the 800-1200 subscribing universities that make up the mainstay for each individual journal.
CERN may be able to talk this "consortium" of 800-1200 instutions per journal into a BioMedCentral-style "membership" agreement, but the question then is whether it will last, or scale. There is a huge speculative element in the assumption that this can all be done as smoothly as CERN anticipates, in the short- and long term. And either way: what is the point of doing it now, when what is urgently needed is much more OA, not top-down business experiments in fields where OA is already well along its way?
(To put this into context: CERN has been absolutely superb -- a historic pioneer and world leader -- in OA provision and OA provision policy. CERN was one of the first institutions to adopt a Green OA mandate and CERN's OA Institutional Repository has accordingly been filled, with stunning success. CERN is almost 100% OA for current research output. This is the winning model that CERN should now be promoting across institutions and disciplines, not a premature, pre-emptive and unnecessary Gold Rush. The time for that is after the rest of the research world has caught up with CERN and nears 100% Green OA. Not before. Or instead.)
JH 2: Journals must generate revenue by one or more of the following mechanisms....Peter is right that JH's list of funding sources and business models is not exhaustive. But, as Peter says, we don't know much about the long-term viability of these other business models either -- nor whether they would scale to more journals or all journals.PS:This short list oversimplifies the situation. The majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees and we don't know much about what business models they use instead. But we do know that some receive direct or indirect institutional subsidies, and some generate revenue from a separate line of non-OA publications, auxiliary services, membership dues, endowments, reprints, or a print or premium edition. None of these revenue sources appears on JH 's short list.
Again, a needless push is being given toward an untested business model at a time when (1) what is urgently needed is more OA in other fields, not new business models (in a field that is already more advanced in OA than most); and (2) for the reason mentioned earlier, it is not clear whether the pre-emptive "redirection" plans scale even within the field in question, rather than creating hardships for multidiscipline universities that don't fit the CERN model.
JH 3: In most areas of physics...the choice boils down either to "subscriber pays" or "author pays".Again, if that 6.5% is itself sustainable (rather than short-lived) that still leaves JH's point applicable to 93.5% of OA journals -- and much higher, once we consider the percentage of all physics journals (of which the OA ones are only about 10%). So it is probably quite realistic to state that it's a choice between subscriber-institution pays or author-institution pays; and that there are no known, viable options other than subsidy or volunteerism (which are highly unlikely to scale).PS: The DOAJ lists 199 peer-reviewed OA journals in physics (excluding astronomy), of which 13 charge no author-side publication fees. That's about 6.5%, even before the CERN plan takes effect.
JH 4: Although some public funding agencies have expressed themselves in favour of OA, none have indicated willingness to increase their total funding to cover such extra expenses.This is a straight "redirection" of each journal's core 800-1200 subscribers from subscription charges to consortial "memberships." It might or might not work, short- or long-term. What is sure is that it's not what's needed urgently today (OA is). And it is likely that this pre-emptive redirection will cause problems for at least some institutions and researchers.PS: The European Research Council is willing, although I believe its willingness was only made known this week. In any case, the point is moot for the CERN plan, since the publication fees will be covered by the members of the CERN-assembled consortium.
And it will not advance the cause of Green OA or Green OA mandates.
(The ERC funding would mean a redirection of scarce research funds along the lines that researchers worry about; but fortunately it is just an optional way a fundee is permitted to spend alotted funds -- and, most important, it is coupled with a Green OA mandate: the difference between night and day.)
JH 5: There is also a mistaken notion that 'Gold' OA is more cost effective, because electronic papers are much cheaper to produce and distribute. But this has more to do with advances in technology than the OA model itself.I agree completely with Peter that getting rid of the paper edition and offloading access and storage onto the distributed IR network would cut both costs and services in a way that merely going online would not.PS: Not true. Several kinds of savings can be traced to the OA model itself: OA dispenses with print (or prices the optional print edition at cost), eliminates subscription management, eliminates DRM, eliminates lawyer fees for licenses and enforcement, reduces or eliminates marketing, and reduces or eliminates profit margins. Also note that one of CERN's findings in June 2006 was that "sponsoring all journals ready for OA at the time of the enquiry would require an annual budget of 5-6 Million €, significantly less than the present global expenditure for particle physics journal subscriptions."
But to realise those economies, the paper edition first has to be abandoned, and the offloading network needs to be in place, and filled. Cancellation pressure from universal Green OA might just give rise to that outcome. But the pre-emptive redirection that is instead being contemplated here sounds more like just re-baptising the current core subscriptions as "consortial memberships" at the current asking price. So no economies, just redirection.
JH 6: [T]he scientific quality of journals switching to the author-pays model may be adversely affected.I agree with Peter that this is not a worry at all.PS: For the case on the other side, see my October 2006 article, Open access and quality.
JH 7: The ideal of open access can largely be achieved, however, simply by encouraging deposit of all publications in freely accessible archives.But that is the point! What is the point of going in this needless, untested direction when what is urgently needed is to mandate (not just "encourage") Green self-archiving, in the rest of particle physics as well as the rest of the disciplines and institutions, so we can have 100% OA at long last? Why the Gold Rush instead?PS: Agreed!
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Monday, March 5. 2007
The Siren Call of Speculations About Publishing Reform
As it's unclear how to log on to post a comment to Jim Till's blog, I do it here:(1) OA means Open Access, not Open Access Publishing (Gold OA).
(2) The "transition phase" we are in is between non-OA and OA, not particularly between non-OA publishing and OA publishing (Gold) (although possibly, after OA, an eventual transition to Gold OA might follow)
(3) Hence the pertinent "transitional scenario" today is neither "Scenario A" (research funders allow fundees to use research funds, optionally, to pay Gold OA fees), nor "Scenario B" (research funders allow fundees to use research funds, nonoptionally, designated to pay Gold OA fees).
(4) The pertinent transitional scenario today -- the one adopted and proposed by all funder mandates to date (except the Wellcome Trust mandate, which also funds Gold) -- is "Scenario OA": research funders mandate that fundees make their published articles OA by self-archiving them free for all on the web: Green OA.
(5) Scenario OA (Green) is the one wisely proposed by CIHR: Not scenarios A or B.
(6) I continue to be baffled, utterly baffled, by the preoccupation with speculating about hypothetical transitions to Gold OA instead of the practical, immediate transition to OA, via Green OA mandates.
(7) Green OA is within immediate reach.
(8) Those who prefer instead to keep speculating about Gold OA should at least declare that their interest is not really in OA itself, but merely in reforming the business model of journal publishers.
(9) The research community, in the meantime, keeps losing its daily, weekly, monthly, yearly usage and impact, cumulatively, while we keep debating about hypothetical transitions to Gold OA.
(10) The full weight of those whose primary interest is in the transition to OA should accordingly be thrown behind the Green OA mandates, forsaking all others (till 100% OA is safely upon us or imminent).
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Saturday, March 3. 2007
On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving Mandates
The online age has given birth to a very profound conflict of interest between what is best for (1) the research journal publishing industry, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what is best for (2) research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research.
SUMMARY: The online age has made powerful new benefits for research possible, but these benefits entail a profound conflict of interest between (1) what is best for the research journal publishing industry and (2) what is best for research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research.
What is at stake is (1) a hypothetical risk of potential future losses in subscription revenue for publishers versus (2) actual, ongoing losses in current research impact for researchers. How this conflict of interest will have to be resolved is already clear: Research publishing is a service industry; it will have to adapt to what is best for research, and not vice versa. And what is best for research is Open Access (OA), provided through research funders and universities mandating the OA self-archiving of all their researchers' peer-reviewed research output.
The conventional (non-OA) publishing industry's first commitment is of course to what is best for its own business interests, rather than to what is best for research and researchers; hence it is lobbying vigorously against the many OA self-archiving mandates that are currently being adopted, recommended and petitioned for by the research community worldwide.
But what is especially disappointing, if not deplorable, is when "OA" publishers take the very same stance against OA itself (by opposing OA self-archiving mandates) that non-OA publishers do. Conventional publisher opposition to OA will be viewed, historically, as having been a regrettable, counterproductive (and eventually countermanded) but comprehensible strategy, from a purely business standpoint. OA publisher opposition to OA, however, will be seen as having been self-deluded if not hypocritical.
I close with a reply to Jan Velterop, of Springer's "Open Choice": Jan opposes Green OA self-archiving mandates, because they would provide OA without paying the publisher extra for it. But all publishing costs are currently being paid for already: via subscriptions. So opposition to Green OA self-archiving mandates by a hybrid Gold "Open Choice" Publisher sounds very much like wanting to have their cake and eat it too (even though that is precisely what they like to describe Green OA advocates as trying to do!).
It is no one's fault that this conflict of interest has emerged. It was a consequence of the revolutionary new power and potential for research that was opened up by the Web era. What is at stake can also be put in very concrete terms:
(1) hypothetical risk of future losses in publisher revenueThe way in which this conflict of interest will need to be resolved is also quite evident: The research publishing industry is a service industry. It will have to adapt to what is best for research, and not vice versa. And what is best for research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the R&D industry and the tax-paying public in the online age is: Open Access (free online access). That is what maximizes research usage and impact, productivity and progress.
versus
(2) actual daily losses in research usage and impact
The research publishing industry lobby of course does not quite see it this way. It is understandable that their first commitment is to their own business interests, hence to what is best for their bottom lines, rather than to something else, such as Open Access, and what is best for research and researchers.
But what is especially disappointing, if not deplorable, is when so-called "Open Access" publishers take exactly the same stance against Open Access (OA) itself (sic) that conventional publishers do. Conventional publisher opposition to OA will be viewed, historically, as having been a regrettable, counterproductive (and eventually countermanded) but comprehensible strategy, from a purely business standpoint. OA publisher opposition to OA, however, will be seen as having been self-deluded if not hypocritical.
Let me be very specific: There are two ways to provide OA: Either individual authors make their own (conventionally) published journal article's final draft ("postprint") freely accessible on the Web, or their journals make their published drafts freely accessible on the Web. The first is called "Green OA" (OA self-archiving) and the second is called "Gold OA" (OA publishing).
In other words, one of the forms of OA (OA publishing, Gold OA) is a new form of publishing, whereas the other (OA author self-archiving, Green OA) is not: Green OA is just conventional subscription-based publishing plus author self-help; the author supplements the usual access to the publisher's subscription-based version for those users who can afford it with a free onine version for those who cannot. Both forms of OA are equivalent; both maximize research usage and impact. But Green OA depends on the author whereas Gold OA depends on the publisher.
Now both forms of OA do represent some possible risk to publishers' current revenue streams:
With Green OA, there is the risk that the authors' free online versions will make subscription revenue decline, possibly unsustainably.So let us not deny the possibility that OA in either form may represent some risk to publishers' revenues and hence to their current way of doing business. The real question is whether or not that risk, and the possibility of having to adapt to it by changing the way publishers do business, outweighs the vast and certain benefits of OA to research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the R&D industry and the tax-paying public.
With Gold OA, there is the risk that either subscription revenue will decline unsustainably or author/institution publication charges will not generate enough revenue to cover expenses (or make a profit).
This question has been addressed by the various interested parties for several years now. But lately -- after much (too much) delay and debate with publishers -- research funders as well as research institutions have begun to take OA matters into their own hands by mandating Green OA.
Funder Mandates: As a condition for receiving research grants, fundees must self-archive in their Institutional OA Repositories (or Central OA Repositories) the final drafts of any resulting articles that are accepted for publication: The European Research Council (ERC), 5 of 8 (and soon 6 out of 7) UK Research Councils, the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Wellcome Trust have already mandated Green OA self-archiving. In the US both the Federal Public Research Access Act (FRPAA) and a mandated upgrade of the NIH Public Access Policy are likewise proposing a self-archiving mandate. Similar proposals are under consideration in Canada, individual European countries, and Asia.These Green OA mandates by research funders and institutions have been vigorously opposed by some (not all) portions of the publishing industry: the opposing lobby has already succeeded in delaying the adoption of Green OA mandates on a number of occasions.
University Mandates: In parallel, Green OA mandates have also been adopted locally by a growing number of universities and research institutions worldwide, each requiring all of its own institutional research output to be self-archived in its own Institutional OA Repository.
Nevertheless, the benefits of OA to research are so great that such attempts to delay or derail the Green OA mandates are proving unsuccessful.
The specific issue I wish to address here, however, is the stance of (some) Gold OA publishers on the Green OA mandates: Most Gold OA publishers support Green OA mandates. After all, a Gold OA journal is also, a fortiori, a Green journal (as are about 65% of conventional journals), in that it explicitly endorses OA self-archiving by its authors.
But endorsing individual author self-archiving is not the same as endorsing self-archiving mandates by funders and universities. So it is not surprising that although most conventional journal publishers endorse individual author self-archiving, many of them oppose self-archiving mandates.
So what about those Gold OA journal publishers that oppose Green OA mandates? This is an extremely telling question, as it goes straight to the heart of OA, and the rationale and justification for insisting on OA.
Gold OA journals rightly represent themselves as differing from conventional journals in that they provide OA. To put it crudely, what they propose to authors is: "Publish in my journal instead of a conventional journal if you want your article to be Openly Accessible to all users." (And, for those Gold OA journals that charge publication fees: "Publish in my journal instead of a conventional journal and pay my publication fee if you want your article to be Openly Accessible to all users.")
Apart from that, there is the usual competition among journals: OA journals compete with non-OA journals, and journals of all kinds within the same field compete among themselves. For conventional journals and for OA Gold journals supported by subscriptions, there is competition for subscription fees. For all journals there is competition for authors. And for Gold OA journals that charge publication fees, the competition for authors is compounded by the competition for publication fees.
What about OA itself? In order to be successful over its competition, a product-provider or service-provider has to provide and promote the advantages of his product/service over the competition. In the competition between OA and non-OA journals, the cardinal advantage of the OA journal is OA itself: OA journals provide OA, maximizing research usage and impact; conventional journals do not. For subscription-based Gold OA journals, OA is a drawing point. For publication-fee-based Gold OA journals, OA is a selling point.
So what about Green OA mandates? For the 35% of conventional journals that have not endorsed OA self-archiving by their authors, their opposition to Green OA mandates is just an extension of their opposition to OA: We know where they stand. "What matters is what is best for our bottom line, not what is best for research."
For the 65% of conventional journals that are "Green" in that they have endorsed OA self-archiving by their authors, those of them (their percentage is not yet clear) that oppose Green OA mandates are in a sense in conflict with themselves: "It's ok if individual authors self-archive to enjoy the advantages of OA, but it's not ok if their institutions or funders mandate that they do so." (This is an awkward stance, rather hard to justify, and will probably succumb to the underlying premise that OA is indeed an undeniable benefit to research.)
But then what about opposition to Green OA mandates from Gold (or hybrid-Gold) OA publishers -- publishers that are presumably 100% committed to the benefits of OA for research? This is the stance that is the hardest of all to justify. For the fact is that Green OA is in a sense a "competitor" to Gold OA: It offers OA without constraints on the author's choice of journal, and without having to pay publication fees.
The only resolution open to a Gold OA publisher who wishes to justify opposing Green OA mandates is to adopt precisely the same argument as the one being used by the non-OA publishers that oppose Green OA mandates: that mandated OA self-archiving poses a potential risk to their subscription revenues -- in other words, again putting what is best for publishers' bottom lines above what is best for research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the R&D industry and the tax-paying public.
Perhaps this was bound to come to pass in any joint venture between a producer who is not seeking any revenue for his product (i.e., the researcher-authors, their institutions and their funders) and a vendor who is seeking revenue for the value he adds to the (joint) product.
I happen to think that this conflict-of-interest will only sort itself out if and when what used to be a product -- a peer-reviewed, published journal article, online or on paper -- ceases to be a product at all (or at least a publisher's product), sold to the user-institution, and becomes instead a service (the 3rd-party management of peer review, and the certification of its outcome), provided by the publisher to the author's institution and funder.
I also happen to think that only Green OA mandates can drive this transition from the current subscription-based cost-recovery model to the publication service-fee-based model, with the distributed network of institutional OA repositories making it possible for journals to offload all their current access-provision and archiving burden and its costs onto the repositories, distributed worldwide, thereby allowing journals to cut publication costs and downsize to become providers of the peer-review service alone, with its reduced cost recovered via institutional publication fees paid out of the institutional subscription-cancellation savings.
Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.But this is all hypothetical: We are not there now. Right now, the cost of publication is being amply paid by subscriptions. Publishers are hypothesizing that OA self-archiving mandates will make that revenue source unsustainable -- but no actual evidence at all is being provided to show either that that hypothesis is correct, or when and how quickly subscriptions will become unsustainable, if the hypothesis is indeed correct. Most important, publishers are giving no indications whatsoever as to why the peaceful transition scenario described above will not be the (equally hypothetical, but quite natural) sequel to unsustainable subscriptions.
Instead, the only thing publishers are offering is hypothetical doomsday scenarios: the destruction of peer review, of journals, and of a viable industry. Then, on the pretext of the need to protect their current revenue streams and their current ways of doing business from this hypothetical doomsday scenario, publishers try to block OA self-archiving mandates, despite OA's substantial demonstrated benefits to all the other parties involved, viz, researchers, research institutions and funders, R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that funds the research.
This is indeed a conflict of interest, although the future revenue losses to the publishing industry are completely hypothetical, whereas the current ongoing access/impact losses to research are very real, and already demonstrated (to the satisfaction of all the players except the publishing industry).
I close with a reply to Jan Velterop, of Springer's "Open Choice": Springer is a subscription-based, hybrid Green/Gold publisher: Springer sells journals by subscription; Springer is fully Green, endorsing author self-archiving; Springer offers authors fee-based Gold OA as an option; and Jan opposes Green OA mandates.
The following exchange begins with an attempt to justify (some) publishers' insistence on the transfer of exclusive rights (rather than just publishing rights) to the publisher; Jan suggests that transferring exclusive rights is a form of "payment" by the author to the publisher, but he never explains why the rights need to be exclusive. Then Jan goes on to oppose Green OA self-archiving mandates, because they would provide OA without paying for it. (No mention is made of the fact that all publishing costs are currently being paid for already -- via subscriptions...)
On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Jan Velterop, Springer UK wrote: JV: "transfer of exclusive rights to a publisher is a form of 'payment'. Payment for the services of a publisher."Is it? And then what are subscription revenues? A fringe benefit?
(I would have thought that assigning a publisher the right to publish and the exclusive right to collect revenues for selling an author's work, without even paying any royalties to the author, was "payment" enough for the value added by the publisher...)
JV: "The publisher subsequently uses these exclusive rights to sell subscriptions and licences in order to recoup his costs"Why exclusive rights?
JV: "The advantage is seemingly for the author, who (mistakenly) has the feeling that he doesn't have to pay for the services of formal publication of his article, but who seldom realizes why he is asked to transfer exclusive rights."Authors are naive, but not quite as foolish as that. They know the publisher needs to sell subscriptions to make ends meet. But what you haven't explained is why the publisher needs exclusive rights in order to do that.
JV: "The disadvantage is that payment in the form of exclusive rights limits access, because it needs a subscription/licence model to convert this form of 'payment' into money."Disadvantage or no disadvantage, subscriptions are currently making ends meet quite successfully.
And you still haven't explained why the rights transferred need to be exclusive.
JV: "And subscriptions/licences are by definition restrictive in terms of dissemination."No problem, once the author supplements the access provided by subscriptions with free online access to his own self-archived draft (Green OA), providing eprints to would-be users who cannot afford the published version, exactly as authors had provided reprints in paper days.
JV: "Article-fee supported open access publishing, where the transfer of exclusive rights is replaced by the transfer of money, consequently doesn't have the need for subscriptions and can therefore abolish all restrictions on dissemination.Yes. But where is the need for "article-fee supported open access publishing" (Gold OA) at a time when (a) most journals are still subscription-based, (b) subscriptions are still paying the costs of publishing, and (c) the only thing the author needs to do to provide (Green) OA is to self-archive (and the only thing the author's funder or institution need do is mandate it)?
JV: "Stevan Harnad c.s. will argue that none of this matters, because there is 'green', meaning that whatever 'exclusive' rights have been transferred, authors can still disseminate their articles via self-archiving in open repositories. In that model, having transferred 'exclusive' rights is meaningless, and that implies that the 'payment' that exclusive rights transfer actually is, has become worthless."(1) You have not yet replied about why the transferred rights need to be exclusive.
(2) Nor about what the problem is, as long as subscriptions are paying for publication costs, as they are.
(3) If you choose to invoke the hypothetical "doomsday" scenario -- that mandated self-archiving will cause cancellations and drive subscriptions down to unsustainable levels -- by way of response, kindly first cite (3a) the evidence that self-archiving causes subscription cancellations and (3b) the arguments and evidence as to why publishing will not quite naturally make the adaptive transition to the Gold OA cost-recovery model that you favor, if and when self-archiving mandates ever do cause subscriptions to become unsustainable.
JV: "In mandates with embargos, the 'payment' may not be completely worthless (depending on the length of the embargo) but is at least severely devalued."You seem to be singularly fixated (for an OA advocate) on payment rather than access (at a time when all payments are being made, but much access and impact is being lost).
You also seem to be more concerned about payments than access delays, and you seem to be expressing some sympathy for embargoed access over Open Access in your (unsupported) defense of exclusive rights as a form of "payment."
JV: "I am a great fan of open access, but not a great fan of 'green'."Translation: I am a great fan of OA as long as it is paid Gold OA. (The accent seems to be on the "paid" rather than on the "OA".)
But what is missing today is not publisher payment, but OA...
JV: "'Green' is a kind of appeasement by publishers (some of who, it must be said, themselves didn't [and sometimes still don't] realise the 'payment' nature of exclusive rights transfer)."Perhaps my interpretation is more charitable: 92% of journals did not endorse Green OA (65% for immediate postprint OA) merely to "appease" or "placate," but because they recognized that OA is indeed a great benefit to research and researchers, and that trying to oppose OA would be neither creditable nor successful.
Jan seems to prefer the less charitable idea that endorsing Green self-archiving was merely a cynical sop, granted on the assumption that it would not be used, and perhaps even to be taken back, "Indian-Giver" Style, if too many researchers actually went ahead and self-archived.
JV: "Appeasement is often regretted with hindsight. Instead of allowing the nature of exclusive rights transfer to be compromised, publishers should much earlier have offered authors the choice of payment either transfer of exclusive rights, or cash. The appeasement, the 'green', now acts as a hurdle to structural open access, perhaps even an impediment."In other words, publishers should have refused to endorse Green OA self-archiving unless they were paid extra for it. Never mind that all publication costs were and still are being fully paid via subscriptions. No OA without extra pay (Gold).
Because of this impetuous Green appeasement, Springer (a Green publisher) is now stuck with only being able to ask payment for Gold, not for Green too...
JV: "Harnadian orthodoxy will dismiss this. It holds that subscription journals will survive, that they will be paid for by librarians even if the content is freely disseminated in parallel via open repositories, and that it doesn't matter anyway"Shorn of the above rhetoric, my position is much simpler:
Nothing of the sort. There is no guru, but all I say is what I have been saying all along: if and when OA self-archiving makes subscriptions unsustainable, journals can and will adapt by converting to Gold OA, and institutions will pay the Gold OA fees out of (a portion of) their windfall subscription cancellation savings. (Only a part, because journals will have down-sized to peer-review service-provision alone.)Mandate self-archiving now, for immediate Green OA.JV: "(the guru is tentatively beginning to admit that large scale uptake of self-archiving, for instance as the result of mandates, may indeed destroy journals)"
If and when 100% Green OA ever does cause universal subscription cancellation, then use the self-same windfall subscription savings to pay for Gold OA.
But not now, when there is next to no OA and no Green-induced subscription cancellations.
JV: "because a new order will only come about after the complete destruction of the old order."No destruction: merely a natural adaptation to the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, made possible by the online medium.
JV: "After all, morphing the old order into the new, without complete destruction, entails a cost in terms of money, which "isn't there", and anyway, the cost that comes with complete destruction of the old order is preferred to spending money on any transition, in that school of thought."Translation, shorn of Jan's rhetoric:
And the objection isn't primarily to the redirection of scarce research funds to pay for needless Gold OA costs. If the research community is foolish enough to want to do that, it is welcome to do so. The objection is to any further delay in mandating Green OA, wasting still more time instead on continued bickering about paying pre-emptive Gold publishing fees. Let research funders and institutions mandate OA Green self-archiving, now, thereby guaranteeing 100% OA, now, and then let them spend their spare time and money in any way they see fit.'Harnad (and many others) are objecting to needlessly (and wastefully) redirecting scarce research funds toward paying for Gold OA now, when (1) 100% Green OA is reachable without it, when (2) subscriptions are still covering publishing costs, and when (3) it is still a speculative matter whether and when Green OA will ever cause subscriptions to become unsustainable. The time to redirect funds toward paying for Gold OA is when the hypothesized subscription cancellations have actually materialized, so the new savings can be redirected to pay for the new Gold OA publishing costs.'
JV: "I doubt that a complete wipe-out will come. But there are quite a large number of vulnerable journals and a partial wipe-out as a result of mandated self-archiving is entirely plausible."If what Jan is saying here is that journals will continue to be born and die, as they do now, I agree. Green self-archiving mandates don't affect journals individually, they affect them all, jointly, and the effects are gradual. No one funder or institution generates the contents of an individual journal. So as the percentage of self-archiving rises, there will be a (possibly long) uncertain period when it is unclear how much of the contents of any given journal are accessible online for free.
If and when a point is reached where journal subscriptions do become unsustainable, there will be a natural mass transition to Gold OA. Before that time, it is a matter of the sheerest of sheer speculation whether Green OA will or will not alter either the rate or the direction of spontaneous journal births and deaths.
JV: "Although there seems to be a myth that journals are very, even extremely, profitable, the fact is that a great many journals are not profitable or 'surplus-able' (in not-for-profit parlance). In my estimate it is the majority. Within the portfolio of larger publishers these journals are often absorbed and cross-subsidised by the journals that are profitable. Smaller (e.g. society-) publishers cannot do that. Marginal journals do not have to suffer a lot of subscription loss before they go under. Some of these, especially society ones, will be 'salvaged' by being given the opportunity to shelter under the umbrella of the portfolio of one of the larger independent publishers. Others will just perish if they lose subscriptions. They could of course convert to open access journals with article processing fees, but setting those up is no sinecure, and requires a substantial financial commitment, as the experience of PLoS and BMC has shown. Journals that are run for the love of it, by the commendable voluntary efforts of academics, are mostly very small, and are the first to be affected, unless, of course, they do not need any income because they are crypto-subsidised by the institutions with which their editors are affiliated. Such journals have always been there and there are probably more now than ever (and some are very good indeed, or so I'm told), but to imagine scaling them up to deal with the million plus articles per year published as a result of global research efforts seems far-fetched, indeed."Part of this speculative account had some plausibility: Yes, journals are born and die. Yes some struggle to make ends meet (irrespective of OA). Yes some are subsidised. None of this has anything at all to do with OA.
The causal influence of OA on this already ongoing birth/death/survival process, however, is pure speculation: Some titles will die; some will migrate (possibly to OA Gold publishers like Jan's former employer, BioMed Central -- which, I note in passing, has signed the EC petition in support of the EC OA Self-Archiving Mandate, whereas Jan's current employer, Springer, did not); some will survive, with or without subsidy, just as before. Nothing to do with Green OA, either in terms of rate or direction.
But where on earth did Jan get to the non-sequitur of "scaling... up the [border-line and subsidised journals] to deal with the million plus articles per year"?
Journals will continue to make ends meet as they did before, on subscriptions or subsidies; some will die, as they always did; others will migrate. Then, if and when subscriptions become unsustainable, there will be a transition (and downsizing) to OA Gold, paid for out of (a portion of) the very same subscription cancellation savings that drove the transition, redirected toward paying for Gold OA fees.
Jan's own speculation only sounds like an Escher impossible-figure because he chooses to paint it that way. Without the imposition of that arbitrary distortion, the transitional landscape looks perfectly natural.
JV: "Open access is the inevitable future, and it is worth working on a truly robust and sustainable way to achieve it."OA means free online access, and that is indeed worth reaching for right now, via Green OA self-archiving mandates, which are reachable right now. Jan instead recommends continuing to sit and wait for a hypothetical outcome, while meanwhile refraining from reaching for a sure outcome: 100% OA via Green mandates. Jan urges the research community instead to "work on" finding a way to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA now, when Gold OA is neither needed, nor are the funds available for paying for it (without poaching them from research) because the funds to pay for publishing are still paying for subscriptions.
Caveat pre-emptor.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Thursday, January 25. 2007
Green OA is no threat to grants: Pre-emptive Gold OA, today, might be
Peter Suber has excerpted in OA News the following passages fromSUMMARY: An article in The Australian -- "Open access a threat to grants" -- has wrongly implied that the Australian Research Council [ARC] OA policy would redirect research grant money toward the payment of OA journal publishing charges. What ARC has mandated is OA self-archiving ("Green OA"). It has definitely not proposed diverting research funds to OA publishing ("Gold OA").
(1) The first OA priority is 100% OA itself, via Green OA self-archiving mandates.
(2) The need to redirect funds toward Gold OA is hypothetical.
(3) Any "Gold Rush" today is premature and unnecessary.
(4) 100% Green OA does not take a penny from research.
(5) But direct conversions to Gold now certainly do.
(6) Most Gold journals don't charge publication fees today, but it is unlikely this will scale to 100% Gold OA.
(7) It is not a bad idea to start thinking about how to prepare for that eventuality.
(8) But it is misleading to think of and plan for the conversion to 100% Gold OA as a redirection of current research funds toward OA Gold publication charges.
(9) The "redirection" that needs to be planned is from the (vast) funds that are currently being used to pay for (non-OA) publication -- namely, institutional subscription/license fees, if and when those are ever cancelled.
(10) Hence pre-emptive redirection of scarce research funds to pay for Gold is premature and unnecessary today; what is necessary today is the Green mandates for which so many are now petitioning the European community.
(11) Once Green OA prevails, we have 100% OA already.
(12) Then, if/when Green OA causes unsustainable subscription cancellations, those very savings will pay the OA Gold publication costs without taking a penny from the current research pot.
Mandating OA self-archiving ("Green OA") by researchers is what needs to be focussed upon, as that is the pressing issue today, and mandating self-archiving by its fundees is exactly what ARC has done. But ARC has definitely not proposed diverting research funds to OA publishing ("Gold OA"), as the Lane article incorrectly assumes and implies.Lane, Bernard (2007) Open access a threat to grants."The historically low success rate for competitive grant applications could dip further as an unintended consequence of the move to open access publishing.
The Australian, January 23, 2007
"The Australian Research Council [ARC], which has just adopted its first policy to encourage grant winners to make their results widely and freely available, said open access was shifting publication costs to authors.
"If authors were allowed to cover those costs from grant money, then a new administrative and financial burden would fall on agencies such as the ARC.
"Funding agencies would have to estimate publication costs before giving a grant and would probably have to audit this expenditure at project's end, the ARC says in a new submission to the Productivity Commission's inquiry into public support for science and innovation.
" 'If the agencies' budgets were not supplemented to cover those costs in full, then the proportion of grant funding devoted to research activity would diminish,' the ARC says...."
(1) The first OA priority today, and an immediately reachable one, once we reach for it, is 100% OA itself, via Green OA self-archiving mandates from funders and universities.
(2) The need to redirect funds toward Gold OA is hypothetical, not real and actual, like the need to mandate Green OA. And the constant speculative focus on hypothetical (Gold) economics is getting in the way of actual, reachable (Green) OA.
(3) In addition, as we see from the Lane article, as well as from the concerns occasioned by CERN's move toward immediate conversion to Gold in particle physics: This premature and unnecessary "Gold Rush" is generating opposition to OA itself, of either hue, on the grounds that it would take money away from research.
(4) In reality, of course, 100% Green OA does not take a single penny away from research.
(5) But direct conversion to Gold now certainly does divert money from research, in a number of prominent cases (PLoS, BMC, plus all the hybrids like Springer Open Choice, etc.).
(6) It is repeatedly pointed out, by way of mitigating this, that most Gold journals don't charge publication fees -- but this is rather hollow reassurance, since most Gold journals -- other than the prominent ones, which do charge -- are more minor journals. And, more important, no one has the faintest idea whether not charging for Gold OA would scale, if most or all journals were Gold. (I would say it is virtually certain that not charging would not scale, and that publication fees would have to be charged.)
(7) It is not a bad idea to start thinking about how to prepare for that eventuality. (I myself think 100% Green OA will eventually lead to a conversion to 100% Gold OA.)
"The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition" (Started Sep 1998!)(8) However (and here is the crux of it), it is misleading in the extreme to think of and plan for the conversion to 100% Gold OA as a redirection of current research funds toward OA Gold publication charges.
Harnad, S. (2006) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition
(9) The "redirection" that needs to be planned is from the (vast) funds that are currently being used to pay for publication -- namely, institutional subscription/license fees! It is those funds that will need to be redirected toward Gold OA publication fees if/when subscriptions are cancelled, not today's research funds, which are already stretched to the limit. (I know that some research funds today already go toward library subscriptions: there the redirection will be direct and straighforward; but most institutional library subscription funds today do not explicitly come from a research pot.)
(10) Hence all this talk about OA costing more and taking money away from research is being generated by all the overhasty "Gold Fever" for direct, immediate conversion to Gold, rather than the rational, reachable intermediate step of "conversion" to 100% OA Green first, via the Green mandates for which so many are now petitioning the European community.
(11) For, once Green OA prevails, we have 100% OA already.
(12) Then, if and when Green OA should ever cause unsustainable subscription cancellations, that very eventuality will in and of itself generate the funds out of which to pay OA Gold publication costs without taking a penny from the current research pot. (And it will almost certainly generate substantial overall savings too.)
In short, the Gold Rush is premature, unnecessary, misleading, and counterproductive for OA at this time.
100% Green OA is not a funding issue today; it requires negligible resources, distributed across institutions. And preservation costs are not an issue either (even though preservation is of course being taken care of by Institutional Repositories [IRs]) as long as Green is merely a parallel supplement to subscription-based publishing, rather than a substitute for it. It is not Green self-archiving that bears the preservation burden for the journal literature at this time. And if/when there is a wholesale conversion to Gold, offloading all archiving and preservation functions onto the worldwide network of IRs, this will distribute the cost of archiving and preservation far more economically than it is distributed now (via subscriptions).
Once institutions are self-archiving 100% of their research output (thanks to Green mandates) instead of about 15%, as now, costs will not rise. (Just ask the (few) institutions that are already approaching 100%.) Green can manage on not much more than its negligible current budget for years to come.
We are not talking about "the cost of a new research dissemination system": we are talking about (mandating) 100% Green OA, which is merely a parallel supplement to the current "research dissemination system."
If and when there is indeed a transition to a new "research dissemination system," with all journal subscriptions cancelled, all access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the Institutional Repositories, and all journals converted to recovering their remaining costs via the Gold OA publication-fee model, then the funds to pay those fees will indeed be drawn from one institutional pocket to the other, out of existing funds, namely, the windfall subscription cancellation savings.
But before we can get there, we first have to get to the 100% Green OA that will both generate the OA and (perhaps) generate the cancellations and their attendant savings. (If not, then we are speculating for nothing, and the system just continues in parallel.) But going instead for direct conversion to Gold right now, without journal cancellations first, of necessity draws on existing research funds that are far better used for funding research itself (whilst researchers are busy providing OA to their findings via OA Green self-archiving).
In summary, The Australian (and many others) have the wrong end of the OA stick. We should all get the Gold Dust out of our eyes and get our fingers moving, to perform the few keystrokes that are in reality the only barrier between us and 100% OA today.
(Arthur Sale has since submitted an excellent critique of the Lane article to The Australian, bringing out every salient point and correcting all the systematic misunderstandings. It has also been posted on the American Scientist Open Access Forum.)
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
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