Open Access Archivangelism

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SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the university's potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees are currently committed to paying their annual journal subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will only provide OA for a small fraction of a university's total research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals' contents are otherwise accessible to a university's users. (In addition, the very same scarcity of funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable.) Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay the publishing costs of Gold OA.

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On 19-Sep-09, at 10:17 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote (in liblicense):

ST: "I applaud these five universities for putting their money where their mouth is. This will help obviate one of the perils of the Green OA system that Stevan Harnad advocates, viz., the proliferation of different versions of articles as publishers allow peer-reviewed but unedited articles to be posted while reserving the right to distribute the final versions themselves exclusively."

"Two of the five universities (Harvard and MIT) who have so far signed the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) are to be applauded -- for putting their total refereed research output where their mouth is by mandating that it must all be made OA (through Green OA self-archiving) today.

Sandy Thatcher can rest assured that the many access-denied would-be users worldwide who would otherwise not have had access to a particular item of that refereed research, because their institutions could not afford subscription access to that item, do not feel imperiled but "empowered" by the fact that they now have access to its self-archived final refereed draft (though not the publisher's PDF) rather than no access at all. Research progress -- and OA -- are about content, not form.

Nor do those access-denied would-be users care one bit about "version proliferation." What they care about is access proliferation, so they can get on with their research using all the relevant refereed research there is rather than just the fraction of it that their institutions can afford to subscribe to today.

But there is nothing whatsoever to applaud in the case of the three out of five universities (Cornell, Dartmouth and Berkeley) who have signed COPE but failed to put their total research output where either their mouth or their money is: They have committed to use whatever spare cash they have available today to pay "equitable" Gold OA publishing fees for the small fraction of their total research output for which Gold OA is available and affordable today, while failing to mandate Green OA self-archiving for all the rest.

Nor is this bad example to other universities -- of unnecessarily committing scarce cash to pay for Gold OA for a token subset of their research output without the cost-free, necessary, urgent and long overdue provision of Green OA to all the rest of their research output -- to be applauded or welcomed, for if followed, it will just serve to keep delaying OA still longer, instead of reaching for what is already within the university community's grasp today.

The reason universities are cash-strapped and can only afford to buy Gold OA for a tiny fraction of their total refereed research output is that their cash is currently committed to journal subscriptions that are providing whatever access they can afford for their own users today. Those subscriptions are also paying the full cost of peer-reviewed publication for most research output today.

Universities committing to spend still more cash, for Gold OA, over and above the cash they are already spending on subscriptions, amounts to a token, a symbolic pittance, insofar as OA itself is concerned. It provides OA for a small fraction of a university's total research output at a high extra cost, unnecessarily, while leaving users access-denied for all the rest, instead of mandating Green OA self-archiving for all of the university's research output, at no extra cost.

Nor can the cash that universities are committing to pay for subscriptions (and hence publication) today be liberated, through individual cancellations, to pay instead for Gold OA -- as long as the necessary content that ongoing subscriptions are buying in for each university's own users is not yet otherwise accessible to those users.

What the reader who is thinking reflectively rather than just reflexively applauding COPE will realize at once is that the only realistic way that the world's 10,000 individual universities can liberate their current subscription funds to pay for a transition to universal Gold OA is if universities first provide universal OA to their total research output. The means of providing this universal OA today is through the universal adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates by most or all universities, not by by committing scarce surplus cash toward paying pre-emptively for Gold OA for some small fraction of each university's total research output.

Provide OA Unto Others As You Would Have Them Provide OA Unto You:

Charity begins at home, with cost-free mandates to provide Green OA to each university's own total refereed research output, not with expensive, unnecessary and ineffectual gestures like COPE, which merely serve to mask and paper over the already long overdue need to mandate Green OA.

See:

"Please Commit To Providing Green OA Before Committing To Pay For Gold OA"

"Fund Gold OA Only AFTER Mandating Green OA, Not INSTEAD"

ST: "But by all rights OA should apply to monographs, too. It makes no intellectual sense to isolate book-length works in print form in a few hundred libraries while making journal literature on the same subjects accessible worldwide for free. So, when will these universities, and others, step up to the plate and pay author fees for monographs, too?"

Step up to the plate with author fees for monographs: sure enough, but where is the requisite cash supposed to come from?

Maybe if (1) the worldwide university community has the sense to do what is the very first urgent priority -- to mandate Green OA self-archiving for the refereed final drafts of all their research article output today -- then the resultant universal Green OA will eventually induce (2) the subscription cancellations, downsizing and transition to universal Gold OA publication for refereed research journal articles at "equitable" prices, paid for out of the windfall savings from the subscription cancellations.

Then this in turn might (3) leave some left-over windfall savings to pay for Gold OA for monographs too.

But this certainly won't be possible as long as universities lack even the cash to buy in print monographs for their libraries, as they do today, because the potential funds to pay for them are still tied up in paying for their journal subscriptions...

Having said all this so many times before, all I can offer is clichés: Charity begins at home. First things first. Don't put the cart before the horse. Keep your eye on the ball. Don't build (golden) castles in Spain...

Your weary archivangelist,

Stevan Harnad

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SUMMARY: There is no realistic or coherent transition scenario from subscription-based publication to universal Open Access (OA) via the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE), a commitment by universities to pay for whatever Gold OA publishing fees they have the funds to pay today. Green OA self-archiving first needs to be mandated by universities. That will generate universal (Green) OA for sure, and universal Green OA may in turn eventually generate the subscription cancellations that will fund a transition to universal Gold OA.

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On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 Heather Morrison wrote in the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

HM: "the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) is a key initiative in the transition to open access."

In my last two postings -- "Please Commit To Providing Green OA Before Committing To Pay For Gold OA" and "Fund Gold OA Only AFTER Mandating Green OA, Not INSTEAD" -- I have been at pains to make it as clear as possible precisely why and how COPE, far from being "a key initiative in the transition to open access," is at best a waste of a university's scarce funds today and at worst a distraction from and retardant to a university's taking the substantive initiative that actually needs to be taken today to ensure a transition to open access (OA).

OA means free online access to published journal articles. A transition to OA on the part of a university means a transition to making all of its own published journal article output OA.

Committing to COPE makes only a fraction of university article output OA today -- that fraction for which the university has the extra cash today to pay "equitable" Gold OA publishing fees -- while the lion's share of the university's potential funds to pay for publication are still tied up in journal subscriptions. Hence, at best, this token pre-emptive payment for Gold OA is a waste of scarce funds.

But if -- because a university imagines that committing to COPE is the "key initiative" for providing OA today -- the university does not first take the initiative to make its own article output OA by mandating that it must be self-archived in the university's OA repository (Green OA), then committing to COPE is not just wasteful, but a diversion from and retardant to doing what universities urgently need to do to provide OA today.

HM: "Signatories are asked to make a commitment to provide support for open access publishing that is equitable to the support currently provided to journals through subscriptions."

Universities currently "provide support" for whatever journals they are currently subscribing to. That is what is what is paying the cost of most peer-reviewed publication today.

Universities committing to spend whatever extra funds they might have available to pay for Gold OA publishing fees today provides as much OA as the university can currently afford to buy, at "equitable" prices, over and above what it subscribes to.

One need only go ahead and do the arithmetic -- calculating the number of articles a university publishes every year, multiplied by the "equitable" Gold OA price per article -- to see that a university can only afford to pay for Gold OA today for a small fraction of its annual article output as long as it is still subscribing to non-OA journals. (Most journals -- especially the top journals that most universities want and need to subscribe to and most authors want and need to publish in -- are non-OA today, let alone "equitably" priced Gold OA.)

The notion that a commitment to paying pre-emptively for "equitably" priced Gold OA today only creates the illusion of being "a key initiative in the transition to open access" if one equates OA with Gold OA. Otherwise it is clear that COPE is just a very expensive way of generating some OA for a small fraction of a university's research output.

Meanwhile, as I have also pointed out, three out of the five signatories of COPE to date (60%) have not mandated Green OA self-archiving for their research output.

That means that those signatories have failed to take the "initiative in the transition to open access" that really is "key" (if the meaning of "OA" is indeed open access, rather than just "the Gold OA publishing cost-recovery model"), namely, the initiative to mandate that all of their own research output must be made OA through author self-archiving.

Instead, the majority of the COPE signatories so far have indeed assumed that signing the commitment to pay for whatever Gold OA is available and affordable really is the "key initiative in the transition to open access."

If all universities who commit to paying for whatever "equitable" Gold OA they can afford today by signing COPE would first commit to making all their research output OA by mandating Green OA self-archiving today, then there would be nothing to object to in promoting and signing COPE. COPE would simply be universities spending their spare cash to try to steer publishing toward their preferred cost-recovery model, at their preferred asking price, having already ensured that all their research output is made OA (by mandating Green OA self-archiving).

But if universities commit to paying for whatever "equitable" Gold OA they can afford today instead of committing to make all their research output OA by mandating Green OA self-archiving today, then COPE is a highly counterproductive red herring, giving universities the false illusion of having adopted a "key initiative in the transition to open access" while in reality diverting and dissipating the initiative for the transition to open access from a substantive step (mandating Green OA) toward a superficial and superfluous step (funding Gold OA).

(Heather Morrison seems to be missing this substantive strategic point completely.)

HM: "One of the reasons COPE is key is simply the recognition that universities (largely through libraries) are the support system for scholarly communication."

It is hard to see the substance or purpose of this formal statement of the obvious. Everyone who already knows that it is university library subscriptions that both pay the publication costs of and provide access to most journals already "recognizes" that "universities (largely through their library budgets) are the support system for scholarly communication."

Did universities have to go on to commit whatever spare cash they had, over and above what they are already spending for journal subscriptions, in order to earn "recognition" for this obvious fact?

And what has all this formal recognition of the obvious to do with providing OA?

No, the incoherent, Escherian notion behind all of this formalism is obvious: COPE is about the hope that instead of paying to subscribe to their incoming non-OA journals, as they do now, universities will one day be able instead to pay "equitable" fees to publish their outgoing articles in Gold OA journals. (The COPE initiative has even been called HOPE.)

But hope alone cannot resolve a geometrically self-contradictory Escher Drawing: Universities subscribe by the incoming journal but they publish by the individual outgoing article. There are 25,000 journals, most of them not Gold OA, let alone equitably priced Gold OA, publishing 2.5 million articles a year from 10,000 universities worldwide. The tacit hope of COPE is to persuade all journals to abandon subscriptions and convert to equitably priced Gold OA by committing to pay them pre-emptively for equitably priced Gold OA publication today.

Now here is the crux of it: There is no incentive for journals to renounce subscription fees and convert to equitably priced Gold OA today just because some universities offer a commitment to pay for it. To induce publishers to abandon subscriptions, we would not only have to wait until most or all universities committed to pay for Gold OA, but until they also backed up that commitment by collectively committing to cancel their subscriptions (in order to release the subscription funds that each can then redirect to pay instead for Gold OA).

Without that cancellation pressure, the inelastic market for university subscriptions remains, so the best that can be hoped for is the publishers' hedged option of "Hybrid Gold OA" -- the option either to leave an individual article in a subscription-based journal non-OA or to pay that same journal a Gold-OA fee to make that individual article Gold OA.

This Trojan Horse (which really amounts to publishers being double-paid for publication) is (some) publishers' "hope" -- their counterpart for universities' COPE/HOPE -- to the effect that universities will buy into this double-pay/Hybrid Gold model in exchange for the promise that publishers will faithfully reduce their subscription and Gold OA fees in such a way as to keep their revenues constant, as and when the demand for the paid Gold-OA option grows.

Such an equitable deal between 10,000 universities and 25,000 journals for 2.5 million individual articles -- each university subscribing to different subsets of the journals annually, and publishing in a still different subset of journals, depending on author, and varying from year to year -- is just the publishers' self-serving variant of the incoherent Escherian transition scenario that the signatories of COPE (and SCOAP) are likewise hoping for.

What is clear is that this imaginary transition is not only speculative, untested, remote and far-fetched, but it does not depend on the university community: It is a transition that depends on the publishing community, journal by journal.

In contrast, open access to all of OA's target content -- the 2.5 million articles published annually in the 25,000 journals, virtually all of them originating from the planet's 10,000 universities -- is already within immediate reach: The only thing universities have to do to grasp it is to mandate Green OA self-archiving, as Harvard and MIT have already done, before signing COPE. (Then the availability of universal Green OA itself may eventually generate the subscription cancellation pressure that frees the funds that will pay for a transition to Gold OA.)

Hence my only point -- but the crucial one, if our goal is OA, now, and not something else -- is that universities should on no account commit to funding Gold OA before or instead of mandating Green OA. Mandate Green OA now.

HM: "Scholarly publishing is not a straightforward business transaction where one side produces goods and the other purchases them. -- Rather, it is university faculty who do the research, writing, reviewing, and often the editing, often on time and in space provided by the universities. -- Scholarly publishing is a service, rather than a good."

This is again stating the obvious in a formalistic way that sheds no light at all on what makes peer-reviewed research publication such a special case, let alone how to resolve the Escher drawing:

"Scholarly publishing is a service, rather than a good": What does this actually mean? What is the service? And who is performing it for whom? And who is charging whom for what?

Assuming we are talking about journals (and not books), is the publisher's printed copy of a journal not a good? Is that good not to be bought and sold? Individually and by subscription?

Same question about the publisher's digital edition: Is that not a good, bought and sold, individually and by subscription?

Should publishers be giving away print journals and online PDFs, as a public service?

To be sure, scholars do research as a profession, and because they are funded to do so. Perhaps we can call this a "service." They also write up their research, submit it for peer review, revise it, and finally allow it to be published, without asking for any revenue in exchange, because that too is part of their profession and what they are employed and funded to do; and because the impact of their publications -- how much they are used and cited -- is beneficial both to research progress and to their careers. So let's say that's a service too.

It is also a fact that scholars do peer review for publishers for free. So let's say that's a service too.

But how is this complicated, intertwined and interdependent picture of what researchers -- as authors and referees -- their institutions and funders, and their publishers, do, jointly, captured by saying that "scholarly publishing is a service, rather than a good"?

Is the devil not in the details of who is doing what for whom, why, and how?

HM: "Once we understand that academic library budgets are the support for scholarly communication, it is much easier to see that we should be prioritizing supports that make sense for scholarly communication into the future, and equity for open access publishing is a great beginning."

OA is not about academic library budgets. It is about access to research articles. Universities are the research providers. They now need to also become the access providers for their own (peer-reviewed) research output (through their OA repositories). That leaves only the peer review itself to be implemented by independent honest brokers (journals), the results certified by each journal's name and track-record for quality standards.

But these vague generalities about scholarly publishing being a "service rather than a good" do not give even a hint about how to get there from here -- i.e., how to generate a coherent transition that resolves the Escher drawing.

And neither does COPE.

Yet the answer is ever so simple, and has nothing to do with COPE, nor with academic library budgets: Universities need to provide OA for their own research output by mandating Green OA self-archiving, today.

That done, universities can, if they wish, commit to whatever they like if they think it will speed a transition to a publication funding model that they find more congenial.

But committing to a more congenial funding model without first committing to providing OA itself is certainly not "a key initiative in the transition to open access."

HM: "Best wishes to COPE. =A0I encourage every library and university to join. =A0There is no immediate financial commitment required, rather a commitment to develop models for equity."

Would it not be more timely and useful (for OA) to encourage every university to provide OA for its own research output, by mandating Green OA self-archiving, rather than making formal or financial commitments before or instead of doing so?

HM: "Supporting transition to gold OA, in my opinion, in no way diminishes the importance of green OA. =A0There are good reasons for pursuing both strategies, both in the short and the long term."

This again blurs the point at issue completely, and turns priorities upside down: The issue is not short- or long-term pursuits but immediate and urgent priorities. Mandate Green OA today, and go ahead and pursue Gold OA in any way you think will help. But pursue Gold OA only if you have first mandated Green OA.

(Stuart Shieber, by the way, has proposed another rationale for COPE, based on his experience with having successfully forged a consensus on adopting Green OA mandates at Harvard: COPE assuages authors' prima facie worries about the viability of peer-reviewed journal publication should subscriptions eventually be made unsustainable by Green OA mandates. But this rationale for COPE is only justifiable if committing to COPE is indeed coupled with mandating Green OA. The actual evidence to date includes not only COPE, which has more non-mandating signatories than mandating ones, but also the very similar SCOAP3 commitment in physics, which includes incomparably more non-mandating universities than mandating ones. To support Stuart's hypothesis, universities committing to COPE or SCOAP3 should also be committing to Green OA mandates. The effect instead looks more like the reverse.)

Stevan Harnad

Phil Davis, in Scholarly Kitchen, raises the right questions regarding the “Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity”:

"If the creation of a funding line to support a particular form of publishing is designed as a hypothesis, what result are they expecting?  What constitutes a successful or failed experiment?... If this is about access, let’s talk about whether this type of publishing results in disseminating scientific results to more readers.  If this debate is about economics, let’s talk about whether Cornell and the four other signatory institutions will save money under this model."

Underlying the proposed “Compact” is the usual conflation of the access problem with the affordability problem, as well as the conflation of their respective solutions: Green OA self-archiving and Gold OA publishing.

Open Access (OA) is about access, not about journal economics. The journal affordability problem is only relevant (to OA) inasmuch as it reduces access; and Gold OA publishing is only relevant (to OA) inasmuch as it increases access -- which for a given university, is not much (today): Authors must remain free to publish in their journal of choice. Most refereed journals are not Gold OA journals today. Nor could universities afford to pay Gold OA fees for the publication of all or most of their authors' research output today, because universities are already paying for publication via their subscription fees today.

Hence the only measure of the success of a university's OA policy (for OA) is the degree to which it provides OA to the university's own research article output. By that measure, a Gold OA funding compact provides OA to the fraction of a university's total research output for which there exist Gold OA journals today that are suitable to the author and affordable to the university today. That fraction will vary with the institution, but it will always be small (today).

In contrast, a Green OA self-archiving mandate provides OA to most or all of a university's research article output within two years of adoption.

There are 5 signatories to the Gold OA "Compact" so far. Two of them (Harvard and MIT) have already mandated Green OA, so what they go on to do with their available funds does not matter here, one way or the other.

The other three signatories (Cornell, Dartmouth and Berkeley), however, have not yet mandated Green OA. As such, their "success" in providing OA to their own research article output will not only be minimal, but they will be setting an extremely bad example for other universities, who may likewise decide that they are doing their part for OA by signing this compact for Gold OA (in exchange for next to no OA, at a high cost) instead of mandating Green OA (in exchange for OA to most or all their research articles output, at next to no extra cost).

What universities, funders, researchers and research itself need, urgently, is Green OA mandates, not Gold OA Compacts. Mandate Green OA first, and then compact to do whatever you like with your spare cash. But on no account commit to spending it pre-emptively on funding Gold OA instead of mandating Green OA -- not if OA is your goal, rather than something else.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

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

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

/signed/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But most important of all is the fact that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

In The argument for gold OA support, Stuart Shieber [SS] wrote:

SS: "Are green and gold open access independent of each other? In particular, is worry about gold OA a waste of time, and are expenditures on it a waste of money?
   Stevan Harnad has brought up this issue in response to a recent talk I gave at Cal Tech, and in particular my remarks about a potential “open access compact”. I will take this opportunity to explain why I think that the answer to both questions is 'no'."

I welcome this dialogue with Stuart Shieber, who, with his patient, resourceful, tireless efforts at Harvard succeeded in achieving consensus on the adoption of what is indisputably the most important and influential of Green OA self-archiving mandates to date – a historic milestone and turning point for the entire global OA movement.

Although Green and Gold OA are definitely not independent of each other, their interdependence is subtle and not at all the simple, parallel complementarity that many imagine it to be. I will try to show why worry about Gold OA at this time is indeed a waste of time (though it is not a waste of time to explain to those who are worrying about Gold OA how and why their worries are groundless). 

I will also try to show why spending money pre-emptively -- whether redirected from the university’s (serials-crisis-burdened) library acquisitions budget or from funding agencies’ scarce research funds -- to pay for Gold OA at this time is indeed a waste of money (though it will not be a waste of money if and when gold OA’s time actually comes – which it certainly has not done yet). 

I will argue that all efforts by universities – the universal research providers – should be directed toward doing what Harvard (thanks to Stuart) and 85 other institutions, departments and funders have already done, which is to mandate Green OA (i.e., to require the immediate deposit in the institution's OA repository of all peer-reviewed journal articles, irrespective of whether they are published in a subscription-based journal or a Gold OA journal).

Once (1) universal mandates have made Green OA universal and (2) if and when that universal Green OA in turn makes journal subscriptions unsustainable, then and only then is it time for a transition to paying for peer review on the Gold OA model: not before, when what is urgently needed is far more OA -- which is provided by implementing Green OA mandates to deposit all journal articles, not by paying needlessly for Gold OA journal publishing.

Moreover, the price for Gold OA then -- when it is actually needed -- will be much lower than what is being asked now, pre-emptively, when subscriptions are intact and Gold OA is not yet needed. And the money to pay for Gold OA (then) will come out of the windfall savings from the very same institutional subscription cancellations on which this if/then scenario is predicated, rather than out of universities’ already overstretched library budgets and/or funders' overstretched research budgets.

SS: "Enaction of green OA policies at universities requires the broad support of faculty and administration, and careful attending to their wholly reasonable concerns. Chief among these is the following argument against a green OA policy:
   The services that the journals provide are important, as are the scholarly societies that publish many of the journals. They constitute a good to the scholarly community. But now consider the following dystopian scenario.
   Suppose the green OA policy being proposed were to be adopted universally, and further that it were widely followed so that the vast majority of scholarly articles were thereby openly available (though admittedly in the deprecated form of author’s final manuscript rather than publisher’s version).
   This might lead some libraries to feel freer about canceling subscriptions, which would lead to price pressure on journals. This price pressure might become so great that publishers might not even be able to recoup their costs by sale of subscriptions. In the absence of other business models, the publishers will have no choice but to shut down their journals.
   Then by a Kantian argument, it follows that the green OA policy should not be supported."

And the Kantian reply to this wholly reasonable concern is that if and when there is cancellation pressure on journal publishers – whether commercial or learned-society publishers – they will need to cut costs and downsize to providing only those services for which there is still a demand. Those essential services (as Stuart goes on to agree below) consist of peer review and the certification of its outcome with the journal’s “imprimatur” – i.e., the journal name and its track-record for quality.

And that service will be paid for by authors' institutions, per outgoing peer-reviewed journal article published, out of a fraction of their total annual windfall savings released by the cancellation of what they had previously been paying for, per journal subscription, to access the incoming peer-reviewed articles from other institutions.

The products and services (and their associated costs) that will have been phased out in the downsizing under cancellation pressure from universal Green OA will have been the print edition, the online edition, access provision (subscription fulfillment), archiving and preservation. All of these will instead have been offloaded onto the distributed network of institutional Green OA IRs worldwide. 

Hence the only thing left to pay for will be the peer-review (and possibly some copy-editing), with its outcome certified by the journal's name. 

Yes, downsizing means downsizing, and that means revenue loss for both commercial and learned-society publishers. And learned societies do perform “good works” (conferences, scholarships, lobbying) that are currently supported from their publishing revenues. If institutions and authors are interested in continuing to subsidize those good works after subscription collapse and a transition to Gold OA, then that too can be added to the asking price.

But I strongly doubt that institutions and authors will want to continue subsidizing learned societies' good works (conferences, scholarships, lobbying) as a surcharge on their Gold OA publication fees (as they do now, indirectly, through subscription fees). Let’s wait and see. It certainly makes no sense at all to pay for Gold OA pre-emptively now, when subscriptions are doing fine and what’s urgently lacking is universal OA!

SS: "This worry is by far the most common one that I encountered in working with three Harvard faculties in passing green OA policies, and still encounter as I work with the remaining faculties at Harvard and talk with other institutions."

The worry certainly has a long pedigree. I have been tracking it since at least the early 1990’s. For years now it’s been #19 in the Self-Archiving FAQ (along with 33 other equally groundless worries underlying that "Zeno's Paralysis" that have been delaying OA). The right response has been available for just as long, but it needs to be clearly explained on every occasion that #19 arises... 

SS: "Of course, there are a lot of “might”s in the worry. But, it doesn’t matter that there is no evidence that such a scenario will transpire, and that there is in fact evidence against it. (The case of physics is well known.) It doesn’t matter that many of the steps in the process may not occur. I myself have recapitulated these counterarguments many a time. What is important is that it certainly might occur, it is consistent with the laws of economics (even if not dictated by them), and most importantly, it is widely perceived as being a real possibility. For that reason alone, it is important to have a response."

It is consistent with the laws of economics that if and when universal Green OA ever does make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of recovering the costs of peer review, then that will at the very same time generate the subscription cancellation savings out of which to pay those costs! That is the very core of the counterargument for #19.

But from a clear explication of that, it also follows that there is no need (or source) to make any extra payment  for Gold OA until and unless universal Green OA makes subscriptions become unsustainable. The logic of this cause/effect scenario needs to be spelled out, clearly, to ensure that it is understood by naive authors when worry #19 arises (quite naturally and predictably) in their minds.

SS: "Let me first dismiss two inadequate responses:

[SH] “Once mandates become universal, even if the journal affordability problem is left entirely unaltered, that problem immediately becomes far less urgent, since all of its urgency derives from the accessibility problem, which universal mandates will have solved, completely!”

If all that journals provided were access, then this response would be entirely correct. However, access is the least important of the services that journals currently provide—least important because technological advances have led to the ability to provide access at essentially zero marginal cost by the authors themselves.
   The important and valuable services that publishers provide in greater or lesser quantity are management of peer review, a variety of production services, and imprimatur. Of these, the last is by far the most important to the authors, but all are valuable to the scholarly community.
   If universal green OA were to make journals unsustainable by not addressing the affordability problem, and the dystopia ensued, then all of these services (other than access) would be lost. This potentiality introduces its own urgency. We cannot postpone the urgency until the dystopia ensues, as its mere possibility impedes the enactment of green OA policies right now."

Access may be "the least important of the services that journals currently provide," but access is what the Open Access movement is about, and for! And it is technology -- the new online medium -- that made OA possible. And unimportant as access may be as a journal service, it is of paramount importance to researchers.

(1) But first, there seems to be a misunderstanding here: The journal affordability problem is that institutions don’t have enough money to subscribe to all the journals whose articles their users might need to access. I don’t think Stuart disagrees that if and when all articles are made Green OA, (hence all users can access them all), the fact that institutions don’t have enough money to subscribe to all the journals whose articles their users might need to access becomes a far less urgent matter than it is today, at a time when all users still cannot access all articles. That's the fundamental difference between the journal affordability problem and the article accessibility problem.

(2) The  “dystopia” to which Stuart is referring is subscriptions becoming unsustainable as the means of paying for peer review, imprimatur (and a variety of unspecified “production services”). 

(3) But the premise of the subscription collapse hypothesis is that (institutional) subscriptions collapse, which means that each institution's funds to pay for peer review, imprimatur (and a variety of unspecied “production services”) are released (by the cancellations) to be used for payment in a universal transition to Gold OA fee-based publication in place of subscription fee-based publication.

(4) In contrast, that very same money is right now tied up in paying for subscription fee-based publication – while users still have next to no Green OA (without mandates).

(5) Hence the only real urgency today is to provide universal Green OA.

(6) And it would be the “dystopia” of universal Green-OA-induced subscription collapse that would eo ipso generate the “potentiality” to pay for publication via Gold OA (but only if and when universal Green OA actually does generate subscription collapse).

(7) So the urgency that we should not postpone is that of mandating Green OA universally, rather than that of finding a way to pay for a Gold OA that institutions don’t yet need, while they are still paying for publication via subscriptions.

By the way, there seems to be a logical oversight in supposing that if "dystopia ensued [because of universal Green OA], then all... [journal] services (other than access) would be lost." 

This cannot be right. It is peer-reviewed journal articles that Green OA mandates require authors to deposit. Without those peer-reviewed articles there would be nothing to provide access to! 

Hence what Stuart must mean here by "dystopia" is universal Green OA + subscription collapse leading to journal collapse, which then destroys both journals and Green OA! 

This would be a perfect example of an “evolutionarily unstable strategy” – if it weren’t for the obvious and natural transition scenario, whereby peer-reviewed journals don’t collapse, but simply downsize to become what they always had been, if considered medium-independently, namely: providers and certifiers (with their journal name and track-record) of peer-review quality-level; and institutions pay journals (out of their windfall subscription cancellations savings) for continuing to provide this longstanding, essential service.

(The journal titles, editorial boards, referees and track-records of those publishers who may not be interested in downsizing to peer-review service provision alone should subscriptions become unsustainable can and will of course migrate to other publishers who will be happy to take them over on the Gold OA cost-recovery model. Journal migration itself is nothing new.)

That may sound dystopic to those who want to sustain the current scale and revenues of journals (print edition, the online edition, access provision, [subscription fulfillment], archiving and preservation) come what may, rather than downsize to just peer review. But it does not sound dystopic to those who want universal OA, come what may, and have no particular problem with journal publishing having to downsize to just providing peer review alone as a consequence.

But supply and demand can be allowed to decide: If institutions decide they want to use their windfall savings from Green-OA-induced subscription collapse to pay for more than just peer review, they are certainly welcome to do so...

(In the meanwhile, does it not make more sense to calm the worry about “dystopia” by drawing the natural transition scenario and self-faq #19 to the attention of worriers, rather than by needlessly throwing scarce money at it, prematurely, and at inflated prices, while journal budgets are still tied up in subscriptions and it is OA itself that is missing and urgently needed?)

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

SS: "A response that “the market will solve this problem down the line” is not sufficient for two reasons.
   First, markets are not magic. They solve problems by virtue of the behaviors of their participants and within rule systems that surround them. It therefore behooves us as participants to make sure that our behaviors and rule systems are set up to allow salutary changes to occur.
   If eventual conversion to gold OA publishing is the way that the problem (if it arises) ought to be eventually solved, then we must make it possible for a publisher to convert a journal to a gold OA business model.
   Currently, publishers cannot feasibly do so, as gold OA journals are at a systematic disadvantage against subscription-based journals from the point of view of attracting authors, since universities and funding agencies subsidize the subscription-based journals through their library subscription payments, whereas they do not subsidize article-processing charges for gold OA journals."

If the goal is to "make it possible for a publisher to convert a journal to a gold OA business model," then how can it be that "gold OA journals are at a systematic disadvantage against subscription-based journals"? Conversion means we are talking about the very same journals! It sounds as if Stuart may be talking about conversion but thinking about competition between subscription journals and Gold OA journals.

Until there is universal Green OA, the institutions and funders have no choice -- or need -- other than to keep "subsidizing" subscriptions to the journals that their authors want and need now. Indeed that is their obligation. The only additional thing institutions and funders need to do is mandate Green OA. 

There’s no need to start-up or subsidize or otherwise favor new Gold OA journals. (A handful were enough to demonstrate – for those who had any doubts – that peer-reviewed journals are peer-reviewed journals, regardless of their cost-recovery model, and that a natural cost-recovery model [Gold] is available as a viable alternative if and when subscriptions should ever prove unsustainable.)

“Hybrid” subscription/Gold journals are in a sense experimenting with a transition mechanism, by offering an “open choice” between the two alternatives – but not only is there no reason, yet, for authors’ institutions and funders to take up their Gold OA option, but it is almost certainly vastly overpriced, and will only start to look attractive once the needless add-ons (and their costs) that are currently co-bundled with it (print edition, the online edition, access provision, [subscription fulfillment], archiving and preservation) have been phased out under cost-cutting pressure from the universal availability of Green OA. It seems not only unnecessary but downright profligate to pay hybrid Gold OA’s asking price today.

Much the same is true of paying to publish in pure-Gold OA journals today too: It’s fine for those who have cash to spare. But if all you want is OA, Green OA is the cost-free way to provide it. And institutions and funders trying to tilt the balance so as to favor today’s Gold OA journals over today’s subscription journals by providing the funds to pay for Gold OA pre-emptively, when it’s not even needed, strikes me as singularly short-sighted (even though it is touted as the far-sighted strategy!): 

Paying for pre-emptive Gold OA today -- when it is completely unnecessary if OA is all you want -- not only diverts attention and action from the obvious, cost-free way to provide OA (Green OA, through Green OA mandates), but it also helps to lock in the co-bundled  obsolescent add-ons and their extra costs into the current Gold OA asking price and modus operandi. Pure Gold journals have phased out the print edition, but they are still far from having downsized to just peer-review service provision alone.

(By the way, I would not be writing any of this if we were already well on the way to universal Green OA mandates worldwide [instead of only 85/10,000ths of the way, as we are today]; for then all we would stand to lose would be some money. But the pre-emptive and premature preoccupation with Gold OA today is also losing us attention and action that should be dedicated to universalizing Green OA, and that's my only real concern.)

SS: "I return to the underlying issue, which is assuaging the worries of faculty considering green OA policies who are imagining the possibility of the dystopian scenario. The natural response is to assure the worrier that there is a reasonable alternative business model in the wings, namely gold OA. And to make that assurance plausible, we must address the viability of gold OA journals in a realistic way, at least under the same universalization that leads to the dystopian scenario. That is what the open access compact that I discussed at Cal Tech and elsewhere is intended to do."

If the underlying issue is assuaging groundless worries about the “dystopian scenario” then the logical, evidential and practical bases of the worries should be addressed with the logical, evidential and practical answers. 

When it has been the publisher lobby raising these same groundless worries, we have known how to answer them, decisively. Why then, when it is naive authors who are raising some of the very same worries, do we not share those decisive answers with them too, instead of just throwing money at it, needlessly and distractingly, as if the groundless worries had some intrinsic validity? 

There is no need to subsidize Gold OA today, in order to assuage worries about Green OA destroying journals: Describe the Gold OA cost-recovery model, point out some of the viable (and in some cases, like PLoS, top-rank) Gold OA journals in existence today as proof that the model is indeed viable, explain the quid pro quo transition scenario that naturally arises if and when universal Green OA should ever make subscriptions unsustainable, and then focus on the one thing that is urgently needed for all of this to happen, namely, universal Green OA mandates. 

Once Green OA mandates are safely universalizing, then any institution or funder that has cash to spare can spend as much of it as it likes on Gold OA. But not now, when talk of Gold OA just distracts -- and talk of spending extra money on it deters -- from mandating Green OA.

SS: "In summary, a university that commits to the open access compact will more easily be able to answer objections against green OA policies specifically because it has an approach to long-range support for gold OA publishing, not in spite of it. The two models are inextricably tied.
   I, like Professor Harnad, am interested in facilitating the adoption of green OA policies. I proposed the open access compact in large part because I expect that adoption of the compact will lead to more green OA policies. The open access compact is therefore contributory to the promotion of green OA, not a sidetrack to it.
   I of course encourage universities to adopt green OA policies before gold OA support, but given that dystopian fears of faculty are preventing adoption of such policies, an open access compact that might assuage these worries should not be delayed."

Most universities don't yet mandate OA and most are also not as wealthy as Harvard. Why would one imagine that universities become more likely to adopt a Green OA mandate if it is coupled with a commitment to spend money on Gold OA? (The opposite outcome sounds much more likely, with universities failing to mandate Green OA, but thinking that they are doing their bit for OA by providing some funds for it -- as University of California and University of Calgary, for example, have done.)

For the dystopian fears of faculty, give them facts and figures; don’t couple them with proposals to squander funds needlessly. Apart from the palliative facts (about the quid pro quo in the collapse/transition scenario), Gold OA should not be further mentioned until the Green OA mandate is successfully adopted. (After that, spend away – but please don’t make that supererogatory and superfluous expense part of the best-practice model that is meant to inspire the rest of the planet’s 10,000 universities and research institutions to follow Harvard’s lead and mandate Green OA!)

SS: "Let me conclude by arguing against a view that support for the open access compact is at best “a needless waste of scarce research funds.”
   At least in the near term, the cost of the open access compact as I have proposed it is minimal. Universities implementing the compact would not underwrite hybrid gold OA fees, would not pay fees where grants had funded the research, and would be able to set up market mechanisms to ensure that economic signals from the fees are passed on to authors. A university supporting the open access compact may even choose to implement it by limiting its application to faculties falling under a green open access policy (as I hope and expect we will do at Harvard).
   All of these are consistent with the point of the compact, that it has the appropriate effect in mitigating the dystopian scenario, which arises from universalized green OA, just in case it is universalized in the same way.
   The point is subtle, but important. Not all mechanisms for supporting gold OA charges are equal. Some may involve wastes of money; indeed all of the extant OA funds that I know of collapse under universalization of their practice. But that does not mean that gold OA underwriting cannot be implemented in a way that supports the goal of allowing transition to gold OA in case of the dystopian scenario without wasting money now. And to the extent that we can provide such a system, the counterarguments against green OA policies will be much more easily dealt with.
   Insofar as the open access compact increases the odds of establishing green OA policies, it is ipso facto not a waste of the minimal funds that it requires."

It is as difficult to have to disagree occasionally with Stuart Shieber as it is to have to disagree occasionally with Peter Suber. Both have made monumental contributions to OA. Both have displayed dedication and resourcefulness on a scale that will be sooner or later recognized to merit the eternal gratitude of the worldwide research community in perpetuo. Both have a profound and detailed grasp of virtually all the intricate OA issues. (The circumspect summary paragraph above by Stuart, for example, is as close to spot-on in its mastery of  the subtle nuances of the Gold OA issue as a reasonable person could wish.)

So please do not take the relatively small points on which I sometimes have to diverge from Stuart or Peter as any sort of aspersion on their invaluable and unabating contributions to OA, for which I feel nothing but admiration and gratitude.

With that preface, let me close by demonstrating, again, that I am not a reasonable [sic] person! 

(1) Any needless cost at all associated with adopting and implementing a Green OA mandate is a deterrent to arriving at consensus on adoption, not an incentive.

(2) Minimal costs for Harvard U are not necessarily minimal for HaveNot U.

(3) The way to explain the possible eventual transition to universal Gold OA is via its causal antecedent: universal Green OA.

(4) The way to allay worries about Learned Society Publishers’ future after universal Green OA is to explain the simple, straightforward relation between institutional subscription collapse and institutional subscription cancellation savings, and how it releases the funds to continue paying for publication via Gold OA. (And remind faculty that if their institutions really want to keep subsidizing Learned Society publishers' "good works" (conferences, scholarships, lobbying) as they are now through subscription-fees, they can certainly continue to do so through publication fees too, as a surcharge, on the Gold OA model, if they wish.)

(5) Reserve any plans for promoting pre-emptive payment of Gold OA fees for those institutions that have already mandated Green OA (and preferably only after we are further along the road from 85 mandates to 10,000!).

(6) Pre-emptive payment for Gold OA before universal Green OA just retards and distracts from providing and mandating Green OA. Moreover, it is incoherent and does not scale ("universalize"): It is like an Escher drawing, leading nowhere, even though it seems to.

Dixit.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

---

Stuart Shieber, the tireless architect of the historic Harvard self-archiving mandate that may at last have tipped the scale for global Open Access, has been traveling to spread the message, to Caltech on March 26th and to Berkeley on March 30th.

Click here to see the video of his CalTech talk. It was very clear and articulate (and often funny, too!).

I would add one strategic suggestion on how to make the message and priorities crystal clear to the 10,000 minus 76 institutions and funders worldwide that have not yet mandated OA:

Mandate Green OA Self-Archiving First
as Harvard FAS and 75 other universities/departments and funders have done
(and only then consider funding gold OA publishing,
if you wish).

---

More than half of the CalTech talk (and just about all of the subsequent discussion session) was focused on journal costs, OA journal business models, and Harvard's "Compact" to subsidize "reasonable" gold OA publishing fees for Harvard authors that need it. There was next to no mention of mandates in the discussion session, although I'm certain that Stuart hoped, as I do, that CalTech too would consider adopting a self-archiving mandate like Harvard's.

The talk was of course addressed to a librarian audience rather than a researcher audience, and libraries are most interested in serials budget and pricing problems. But I think it is still a strategic mistake to focus on journal economics, and on new "compacts" for university funding of OA journal publication fees, instead of stressing the all-important priority:

To date, there exist 76 OA self-archiving mandates (40 of them adopted before the Harvard Mandate, 35 since), out of at least 10,000 universities and research funders worldwide.

For the universal OA that is now within reach, mandate adoption has to be significantly accelerated globally.

After over 20 long years of experience with this it is crystal clear to me that focusing instead on journal business models simply takes and keeps everyone's eyes off the ball.

If one can just manage to get mandates to propagate across universities worldwide, all the rest will take care of itself, quite naturally, of its own accord.

The Harvard mandate (now that it has been upgraded to include an immediate-deposit requirement even if the author opts-out of rights-retention, hence OA) is just wonderful: Thus revised, Harvard's is now the optimal mandate model for global adoption.

My suggestion to Stuart and to all others who are promoting OA is hence to promote the mandate very directly and exclusively, presenting the evidence of all of its advantages for research access and impact, and to talk about potential future business models for journals only if and when the (inevitable) question gets raised, rather than letting the urgent and immediate and solvable research accessibility problem get subsumed, yet again, by the journal affordability problem.

Once mandates become universal, even if the journal affordability problem is left entirely unaltered, that problem immediately becomes far less urgent, since all of its urgency derives from the accessibility problem, which universal mandates will have solved, completely! (Once everyone has online access to everything, it matters incomparably less how much journal subscriptions cost, and how many of them a university can afford to subscribe to.)

Apart from this basic strategic suggestion about priorities and focus, I have just two small comments, one on "branding" and one on what "reasonable" gold OA publishing charges would/will be:

1. Branding: What authors really care about in choosing a journal -- and what it is that they really mean by "imprimatur" or "brand" -- is the journal's known track-record for article and author quality. It is not a mysterious property of the "brand-name" but an empirical running average that the journal must earn, and sustain. It basically refers to the journal's ongoing quality standards for peer review (what portion and proportion of the overall quality distribution curve they accept for publication).

I think Stuart knows all this. It was latent in the very interesting data he presented in the video by way of reply to the familiar "vanity-press/plummeting-standards" argument -- though, again, the talk put the accent on pricing issues, whereas the real point is that authors try to publish in the journals that have the track-record for the highest quality-standards, and quality standards mean selectivity, based on quality alone: any lowering of peer-review standards so as to accept more articles will simply lower the journal's quality, and hence its attractiveness to authors seeking the highest-quality journals. As Stuart notes in the video, there are both subscription and OA journals at all quality levels (and, one might add, there are articles and authors at all quality levels).

But the urgent issue now is access -- and especially access to the higher quality journals.

(There are are about 4000 OA journals, out of a total of perhaps 25,000 refereed journals in all, and there are OA journals among the top journals too. However, it is also a fact that the proportion of OA journals among the top journals is far lower today than their proportion among journals as a whole. This simply re-emphasizes that what is urgent today is to make all articles in all journals openly accessible -- by mandating self-archiving -- rather than to find ways of paying for publication in OA journals.)

2. "Reasonable" gold OA publishing charges: Stuart also speaks in the video about what would be "reasonable" charges for publishing in OA journals. But surely this depends on what the true costs will turn out to be: Today, subscription journals publish both online and print editions and (as Stuart notes) they charge whatever they can get. But now let us focus just on what universal self-archiving mandates will bring, entirely independent of journal price:

With OA self-archiving mandated universally, all articles will be accessible to all users online for free. This, in and of itself, solves the research access/impact problem, completely, and with certainty. Its other side-effects are only a matter for speculation, but here are the possibilities:

2a. Nothing else changes: Universities continue to subscribe to the print and/or online edition of whatever journals they can afford, and journal costs (and prices, and price increases) continue as before, unchanged.

So what? The access problem is completely solved. Everyone has online access to everything they need. So university subscriptions are now decided on the basis of other considerations (demand for the print edition, demand for the luxury PDF edition, preservation, prestige, habit, charity, superstition). These are all worthy supply/demand issues, but there would certainly be nothing left that could be described with the urgency of the "serials crisis," because that crisis derived all of its urgency from the need to provide access, and the universal OA mandates will already have taken care of that need, completely.

2b. More likely, the availability of the authors' OA versions will eventually reduce the demand for the publisher's print and online versions, and subscription cancellations will grow. The publishers' first response will probably be to try to raise prices, but if that just further increases cancellations, supply/demand implies that they will instead have to try to cut costs by doing away with inessential products and services. The ways are many. Cancel the online edition: If print subscriptions still cover costs sustainably, fine, it stops there. If cancellations continue to grow, then journals will have to cancel the print edition too. But then there is nothing left to sell via subscription. So journals must then convert to gold OA publishing, which means charging for their only remaining service: managing peer review.

It is that eventual price -- the price for managing peer review alone -- that is really at issue here. That, and that alone, is the "reasonable" (indeed essential) cost of peer-reviewed journal publishing, once all access-provision and archiving has been offloaded onto the distributed network of (mandated) institutional repositories.

Not a single gold OA publisher today is operating on -- or even knows -- that irreducible, essential cost, because none of them have downsized yet to doing peer-review alone (because they have not yet had to do so, out of necessity, because universal Green OA is not yet there, exerting the pressure to do so, while at the same time providing the distributed infrastructure on which to offload all access-provision and archiving, and their associated costs). For this reason, it does not make sense to speak of (let alone subsidize) this "reasonable" price today, when the necessary precondition for downsizing to it (namely, universal OA mandates) has not yet been provided:

In other words, today's asking-prices are necessarily inflated, and will remain so, until universal OA itself forces the requisite downsizing.

So this, it seems to me, is yet another reason for not putting the accent on a pre-emptive "compact" to cover "reasonable" gold OA publication fees today, in the absence of universal OA mandates.

I hasten to add that Harvard, having already mandated OA, is of course entitled and welcome to do whatever it likes with its spare cash! But this should be separated completely from the really urgent message, which still needs to be communicated to the remaining 10,000 not-yet-mandating universities of the world, which is first to mandate OA, as Harvard did, before making plans on how to spend their spare cash. Otherwise they are just subsidizing an arbitrary gold OA publishing fee, for a minority of the journals (and an even smaller minority of the top journals) without first doing their essential part toward solving the research access problem.

(Lest it's not self-evident, however, let me reaffirm that all this carping and unsolicited advice on my part in no way diminishes my great admiration and appreciation for the enormous contribution Stuart Shieber has made, and continues to make, in having gotten a mandate adopted at Harvard, and now promoting mandate adoption globally!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum