Open Access Archivangelism

Preamble: If you wish to sample some of the most absurd, incoherent, pseudo-legal gibberish on the subject of "rights" retention, "systematicity" and free will, please have a look at what follows under "Elsevier Article Posting Policies" below. (And bear in mind that an institution only provides a tiny fraction of any journal's content.)

Any author foolish enough to be intimidated by this kind of garbled double-talk deserves everything that's coming to him.

My Advice to Authors: Ignore this embarrassing, self-contradictory nonsense completely and exercise your retained "right" to post your final refereed draft ("AAM") in your institutional repository immediately upon acceptance, whether or not it is mandatory, secure in the knowledge that from a logical contradiction anything and everything (and its opposite) follows! (And be prepared to declare, with hand on heart, that as an adult, every right you exercise with your striate musculature is exercised "voluntarily.")

[By the way, as long as Elsevier states that its authors retain the right to post "voluntarily", Elsevier, too, remains on the Side of the Angels insofar as immediate, unembargoed Green OA self-archiving is concerned. It's just that the Angels are a bit glossolalic...]

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Elsevier Article Posting Policies

Accepted author manuscripts (AAMs)

Definition: An accepted author manuscript (AAM) is the author's version of the manuscript of an article that has been accepted for publication and which may include any author-incorporated changes suggested through the processes of submission processing, peer review, and editor-author communications. AAMs do not include other publisher value-added contributions such as copy-editing, formatting, technical enhancements and (if relevant) pagination.

Policy: Authors retain the right to use the accepted author manuscript for personal use, internal institutional use and for permitted scholarly posting provided that these are not for purposes of commercial use or systematic distribution...

Permitted scholarly posting: Voluntary [emphasis added] posting by an author on open websites operated by the author or the author's institution for scholarly purposes, as determined by the author, or (in connection with preprints) on preprint servers...

...Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary [emphasis added] needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution's repository, e-mailing to colleagues. However, our policies differ regarding the systematic aggregation or distribution of AAMs to ensure the sustainability of the journals to which AAMs are submitted [emphasis added]. Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates [emphasis added] is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the publisher's policies concerning such repositories. Voluntary [emphasis added] posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted.

Systematic distribution means: policies or other mechanisms designed to aggregate and openly disseminate, or to substitute for journal-provided services, including:

--- The systematic distribution to others via e-mail lists or list servers (to parties other than known colleagues), whether for a fee or for free...

--- Institutional, funding body or government manuscript posting policies or mandates that aim to aggregate and openly distribute the work by its researchers or funded researchers...

Comment on:
Martin Hall (2012) "Green or Gold? Open Access After Finch" UKSG Insights 25(3)

This turns out to be a stunningly superficial defence of the Finch Report by one of its authors (and the one from whom one might have hoped for a much fuller grasp of the Green/Gold contingencies, priorities and pragmatics).

The substance of Martin Hall's defence of the Finch recommendation that the UK should (double-)pay for Gold instead of strengthening its mandate for Green is that (1) Gold provides the publisher's version of record, rather than just the author's peer-reviewed final draft, that (2) Gold provides text-mining rights and that (3) Gold is the way to solve the journal price problem.

What Hall does not even consider is whether the publisher's version of record and text-mining rights are worth the asking price of Gold, compared to cost-free Green. His account (like everyone else's) is also astonishingly vague and fuzzy about how the transition to Gold is to take place in the UK. And Hall (like Finch) completely fails to take the rest of the world into account. All the reckoning about the future of publishing is based on the UK's policy for its 6% share.

Hall quotes Peter Suber's objection but does not answer it; and he does not even bother to mention (nor give any sign of being aware of) the substance of my own many, very specific points of criticism about both the Finch recommendations and the RCUK policy. (This is rather consistent, however, since if Hall had given any of these points some serious thought, it is hard to see how he could have endorsed the Finch recommendations in the first place; most had already been made before Finch.)

The Swan/Houghton economic analyses, too, are cited by Hall, as if in support, but in fact not heeded at all.

It will be instructive to see whether the remarkable superficiality of Hall's defence of Finch is noticed by the UK academic community, or it is just catalogued as further "authoritative support" for Finch/RCUK.

Stevan Harnad

Reply to Ross Mounce:

1.The affordability problem loses all of its importance and urgency once globally mandated Green OA has its dual effect of (i) making peer-reviewed journal articles free for all (not just subscribers), thereby (ii) making it possible for institutions to cancel subscriptions if they can no longer afford -- or no longer wish -- to pay for them:

2. "If and when global Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model. Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs."

3. In other words, it is global Green OA itself that will "decouple the scholarly journal, and separate the peer-review process from the integrated set of services that traditional journals provide." (And then the natural way to charge for the service of peer review will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome [acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection], minimizing cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.)

4. Because of the Gaussian distribution of virtually all human qualities and quantities, research quality and quality-assessment is not just a 0/1, pass/fail matter. Research and researchers need the much more nuanced and informative hierarchy of quality levels that journals afford.

5. Please don't conflate the simplistic reliance on the journal impact factor (the journal's articles' average citation counts) -- which is not, by the way, an OA issue -- with the much more substantive and important fact that the existing journal hierarchy does represent a vertical array of research quality levels, corresponding to different standards of peer-review rigour and hence selectivity.

6. This hierarchy is already provided by the known track-records of journals, and can and will be enhanced by a growing set of new, rich and diverse metrics of journal and article quality, importance, usage and impact. What authors and users need is not just a "Gold OA plot" but a clear sense of the quality standards of journals.

7. I think it is exceedingly unrealistic and counterproductive to advise researchers to simply give up the journal with the known and established quality standards and track-record for their work in favour of another journal just for the sake of making their paper Gold OA (let alone for the sake of freeing it from the tyranny of the impact factor) -- and especially at today's still vastly-inflated Gold OA "publishing fee," and whilst the money to pay for it is still locked into institutional subscriptions that cannot be cancelled until/unless those journal articles are accessible in some other way.

8. That other way is cost-free Green OA. And it is global Green OA self-archiving of all journal articles, published in the journal with the highest quality standards the author's work can meet -- not a pre-emptive switch to new journals just because they offer Gold OA today -- that will make those journal articles accessible in the "other way" that (i) solves the accessibility problem immediately, (ii) mitigates the affordability problem immediately, and (iii) eventually induces a transition to Gold OA at a fair and affordable price.

9. Today (i.e., pre-Green-OA), Gold OA means double-pay -- whether for hybrid Gold OA, or for pure Gold OA, as long as subscriptions must still be paid too.

10. It is short-sighted in the extreme to wish authors to renounce journals of established quality and pay extra pre-emptively to new Gold OA journals for an OA that they can already provide cost-free today through Green OA self-archiving, with the additional prospect of easing the affordability problem now, as well as preparing the road for an eventual liberation from subscriptions and a leveraged transition to affordable, sustainable Gold (and Libre) OA.

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.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012

Jan Velterop wrote:

(1) Stevan trades off expected speed of achieving OA against quality of the resulting OA. It's his right to do that. I just point out that that's what it is. That's my right. He calls it 'deprecating green OA'; I prefer to call it 'comparing outcome'.

(2) My 'jumping with a closed parachute' is not in any way a criticism of green OA or advocating green OA. It is a criticism of presenting green OA (in which the publication of articles is being paid for by subscriptions) as the only way until all scholarly literature is available as green OA, and only then considering alternatives to the subscription system. I consider that deeply unrealistic, utterly unfeasible and not viable, and I favour developing gold OA as a replacement of the subscription system alongside green OA, gradually replacing the subscription system.

(3) The agreement reached at the BOAI to pursue both strategies (later called green and gold) proved short-lived. This has been most unfortunate, in my view. Stevan has introduced the idea that gold and green are rivalrous. They aren't. They both contribute to growing OA. They both come with a transition price. In one case the price is lower quality of the resulting OA; in the other it is money.

TRADING OFF -- OR OFF-LOADING TRADE?
Green vs. Gold is not a question of rivalry, it's a question of priority.

The twin reasons why Green has to come first are very simple: (i) Gold OA journal publishing is vastly over-priced today and (ii) the money to pay for Gold OA (even if it is downsized to a fair, affordable price) is still locked into institutional journal subscriptions.

Green OA needs to come first in order to fix both these problems:

Over and above providing 100% OA (which is the primary objective of the OA movement), Green OA (which is now only at 25% when unmandated, but can be increased to 100% when mandated by institutions and funders) also provides the way both to (ii) release the subscription money to pay for Gold OA and to (ii) force journals to cut costs and downsize to a fair, affordable, sustainable price for Gold OA (namely, the price of managing peer review alone, as a per-review (sic) service: no more print edition; no more online edition; all access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories):

Institutions can only cancel subscriptions when the subscribed content is available as Green OA. Until then they can only double-pay (whether for hybrid subscription/Gold journals or for subscription journals plus Gold journals).

And publishers will not unbundle and cut costs to the minimum (peer review service alone, nothing else) until cancellations force them to do so.

And (before you say it): If a new Gold OA journal enters the market today with a truly rock-bottom price, for the peer-review service alone, the money to pay for it is still over and above what is being paid for subscriptions today, because the subscriptions cannot be cancelled until most journals (or at least the most important ones) likewise downsize to the bare essentials.

And most journals are not downsizing to the bare essentials.

And institutions and funders cannot make journals downsize.

All institutions and funders can do is pay them even more than what they are paying them already (which is exactly what the publisher lobby has managed to persuade the UK and the Finch Committee to do).

I do not call that a "parachute" toward a "soft landing": I call it good publisher PR, to preserve their bottom-lines. And for most institutions and funders, it not only costs more money, but it is even more unaffordable and unsustainable than the serials status-quo today (which is reputedly in crisis).

The promise from hybrid Gold publishers to cut subscription costs in proportion to growth in Gold uptake revenues, even if kept, is unaffordable, because it involves first paying more, in advance; and all it does is lock in the current status quo insofar as total publisher revenue is concerned, in exchange for OA that researchers can already provide for themselves via Green, since publication and its costs are already being fully paid for -- via subscriptions.

Nor is "price competition" the corrective: Authors don't pick journals for their price but for their quality standards, which means their peer-review standards. It would be nothing short of grotesque to imagine that it should be otherwise (think about it!).

The corrective is global Green OA mandates: That -- and not "price competition" between Gold OA journals -- will see to it that the huge, unnecessary overlay of commercially co-bundled products and services that scholarly journal publishing inherited from the Gutenberg (and Robert-Maxwell) era is phased out and scaled down, at long last, to the only thing that scholars and scientists really still want and need in the online era, which is a reliable peer review service, provided by a hierarchy of journals, in different fields, each with its own established track record for quality -- hence selectivity -- at the various quality levels required by the field.

So what's at issue is not a trade-off of "speed" vs. "quality" (whether peer review quality, or re-use/text-mining rights) at all, but a trade-off of speed vs. the status quo.

And yes, that's speed, in the first instance, toward 100% free online access (Gratis OA) -- of which, let us remind ourselves, we currently have only about 25% via Green and maybe another 12% via Gold -- because that is what is within immediate reach (although we have kept failing to grasp it for over a decade).

The rest of the "quality" -- Gold OA and Libre OA -- will come once we have 100% Green OA, and publishers are forced (by Green-OA enabled subscription cancelations, making subscriptions no loner sustainable) to downsize and convert to Gold.

But not if we keep playing the snail's-pace game of double-paying pre-emptively for Gold while research access and impact keeping being lost, year upon year -- all in order to cushion the landing for the only ones that are comfortable with the status quo (and in no hurry!): toll-access publishers.

And please let's stop solemnly invoking the BOAI as a justification for continuing this no-sum, no-win game of no-OA unless you double-pay.

Publication costs are being paid, in full (and fulsomely) today. What's missing is not more revenue for publishers, but OA.

And Green OA mandates will provide it.

The rest will take care of itself, as a natural process of adaptation, by the publishing trade, to the new reality of global Green OA.

Stevan Harnad

Another brilliant (and timely) OA whodunnit by Richard Poynder!

Yet the plot thickens, with the mystery of the outcome of the 2004 UK Select Committee deliberations still not altogether dispelled.

Ian Gibson is clearly brilliant, and his heart is clearly in the right place. But although his 2004 Gibson Committee Report clearly had (and continues to have) enormous (positive) ramifications for OA worldwide, Ian himself just as clearly does not fully grasp those ramifications!

Journal and Author Selectivity. Ian still thinks that OA is about somehow weaning authors from their preferred highly selective journals (such as Nature), even though the cost-free Green OA that his own Report recommended mandating does not require authors to give up their preferred journals, thereby mooting this issue (and even though the ominous new prospect of double-paying publishers for hybrid Gold OA out of shrinking research funds favoured by the Finch Committee Report does not require authors to give up their preferred journals either).

Research access, assessment and affordability are being conflated here. Green OA does not solve the affordability problem directly, but it sure makes it much less of a life/death matter (since everyone has Green access, whether or not they can afford subscription access). And of course that in turn makes subscription cancelations, publisher cost-cutting, downsizing and conversion to Gold much more likely -- while also releasing the institutional subscription cancelation windfall savings to pay the much lower post-Green Gold OA cost many times over. This leaves journals' peer-review standards and selectivity up to the peers -- and journal choice up to the authors -- where both belong.

Giving up authors' preferred journals in favour of pure Gold OA journals was what (I think) BMC's Vitek Tracz and Jan Velterop had been lobbying for at the time (and that is not what the Gibson Report ended up recommending)!

Emily Commander. So I think if you really want to get to the heart of the mystery of how the Gibson Report crystallized into the epochal recommendation for all UK universities and funders to mandate Green OA you will have to dig deeper, Richard, and interview its author, Emily Commander, who -- as Ian indicates -- was the one who crafted the text out of the cacophony of conflicting testimonials.

Don't ask Emily about the bulk of the report, which is largely just ballast, but about how she arrived at its revolutionary core recommendation (highlighted in boldface below). That's what this is all about...

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Select Committee on Science and Technology
Tenth Report
(2004)

Summary
[boldface added]

Academic libraries are struggling to purchase subscriptions to all the journal titles needed by their users. This is due both to the high and increasing journal prices imposed by commercial publishers and the inadequacy of library budgets to meet the demands placed upon them by a system supporting an ever increasing volume of research. Whilst there are a number of measures that can be taken by publishers, libraries and academics to improve the provision of scientific publications, a Government strategy is urgently needed.

This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way. The Government will need to appoint a central body to oversee the implementation of the repositories; to help with networking; and to ensure compliance with the technical standards needed to provide maximum functionality. Set-up and running costs are relatively low, making institutional repositories a cost-effective way of improving access to scientific publications.

Institutional repositories will help to improve access to journals but a more radical solution may be required in the long term. Early indications suggest that the author-pays publishing model could be viable. We remain unconvinced by many of the arguments mounted against it. Nonetheless, this Report concludes that further experimentation is necessary, particularly to establish the impact that a change of publishing models would have on learned societies and in respect of the "free rider" problem. In order to encourage such experimentation the Report recommends that the Research Councils each establish a fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish. The UK Government has failed to respond to issues surrounding scientific publications in a coherent manner and we are not convinced that it would be ready to deal with any changes to the publishing process. The Report recommends that Government formulate a strategy for future action as a matter of urgency.

The preservation of digital material is an expensive process that poses a significant technical challenge. This Report recommends that the British Library receives sufficient funding to enable it to carry out this work. It also recommends that work on new regulations for the legal deposit of non-print publications begins immediately. Failure to take these steps would result in a substantial breach in the intellectual record of the UK.

The market for scientific publications is international. The UK cannot act alone. For this reason we recommended that the UK Government act as a proponent for change on the international stage and lead by example. This will ultimately benefit researchers across the globe.

These are comments on Stephen Curry's
"The inexorable rise of open access scientific publishing".

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Our (Gargouri, Lariviere, Gingras, Carr & Harnad) estimate (for publication years 2005-2010, measured in 2011, based on articles published in the c. 12,000 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters ISI) is 35% total OA in the UK (10% above the worldwide total OA average of 25%): This is the sum of both Green and Gold OA.

Our sample yields a Gold OA estimate much lower than Laakso & Björk's. Our estimate of about 25% OA worldwide is composed of 22.5% Green plus 2.5% Gold. And the growth rate of neither Gold nor (unmandated) Green is exponential.

There are a number of reasons neither "carrots vs. lettuce" nor "UK vs. non-UK produce" nor L&B estimates vs. G et al estimates can be compared or combined in a straightforward way.

Please take the following as coming from a fervent supporter of OA, not an ill-wisher, but one who has been disappointed across the long years by far too many failures to seize the day -- amidst surges of "tipping-point" euphoria -- to be ready once again to tout triumph.

First, note that the hubbub is yet again about Gold OA (publishing), even though all estimates agree that there is far less of Gold OA than there is of Green OA (self-archiving), and even though it is Green OA that can be fast-forwarded to 100%: all it takes is effective Green OA mandates (I will return to this point at the end).

So Stephen Curry asks why there is a discrepancy between our (Gargouri et al) estimates of Gold OA -- in the UK and worldwide (c. <5%) -- the estimates of Laakso & Björk (17%). Here are some of the multiple reasons (several of them already pointed out by Richard van Noorden in his comments too):

1. Thomson-Reuters ISI Subset: Our estimates are based solely on articles in the Thomson-Reuters ISI database of c. 12,000 journals. This database is more selective than the SCOPUS database on which L&B's sample is based. The more selective journals have higher quality standards and are hence the ones that both authors and users prefer.

(Without getting into the controversy about journal citation impact factors, another recent L&B study has shown that the higher the journal's impact factor, the less likely that the journal is Gold OA. -- But let me add that this is now likely to change, because of the perverse effects of the Finch Report and the RCUK OA Policy: Thanks to the UK's announced readiness to divert UK research funds to double-paying subscription journal publishers for hybrid Gold OA, most journals, including the top journals, will soon be offering hybrid Gold OA -- a very pricey way to add the UK's 6% of worldwide research output to the worldwide Gold OA total: The very same effect could be achieved free of extra cost if RCUK instead adopted a compliance-verification mechanism for its existing Green OA mandates.)

2. Embargoed "Gold OA": L&B included in their Gold OA estimates "OA" that was embargoed for a year. That's not OA, and certainly should not be credited to the total OA for any given year -- whence it is absent -- but to the next year. By that time, the Green OA embargoes of most journals have already expired. So, again, any OA purchased in this pricey way -- instead of for a few extra cost-free keystrokes by the author, for Green -- is more of a head-shaker than occasion for heady triumph.

3. 1% Annual Growth: The 1% annual growth of Gold OA is not much headway either, if you do the growth curves for the projected date they will reach 100%! (The more heady Gold OA growth percentages are not Gold OA growth as a percentage of all articles published, but Gold OA growth as a percentage of the preceding year's Gold OA articles.)

4. Green Achromatopsia: The relevant data for comparing Gold OA -- both its proportion and its growth rate -- with Green come from a source L&B do not study, namely, institutions with (effective) Green OA mandates. Here the proportions within two years of mandate adoption (60%+) and the subsequent growth rate toward 100% eclipse not only the worldwide Gold OA proportions and growth rate, but also the larger but still unimpressive worldwide Green OA proportions and growth rate for unmandated Green OA (which is still mostly all there is).

5. Mandate Effectiveness: Note also that RCUK's prior Green OA mandate was not an effective one (because it had no compliance verification mechanism), even though it may have increased UK OA (35%) by 10% over the global average (25%).

Stephen Curry: "A cheaper green route is also available, whereby the author usually deposits an unformatted version of the paper in a university repository without incurring a publisher's charge, but it remains to be seen if this will be adopted in practice. Universities and research institutions are only now beginning to work out how to implement the new policy (recently clarified by the RCUK)."

Well, actually RCUK has had Green OA mandates for over a half-decade now. But RCUK has failed to draw the obvious conclusion from its pioneering experiment -- which is that the RCUK mandates require an effective compliance-verification mechanism (of the kind that the effective university mandates have -- indeed, the universities themselves need to be recruited as the compliance-verifiers).

Instead, taking their cue from the Finch Report -- which in turn took its cue from the publisher lobby -- RCUK is doing a U-turn from its existing Green OA mandate, and electing to double-pay publishers for Gold instead.

A much more constructive strategy would be for RCUK to build on its belated grudging concession (that although Gold is RCUK's preference, RCUK fundees may still choose Green) by adopting an effective Green OA compliance verification mechanism. That (rather than the obsession with how to spend "block grants" for Gold) is what the fundees' institutions should be recruited to do for RCUK.

6. Discipline Differences: The main difference between the Gargouri, Lariviere, Gingras, Carr & Harnad estimates of average percent Gold in the ISI sample (2.5%) and the Laakso & Bjork estimates (10.3% for 2010) probably arise because L&B's sample included all ISI articles per year for 12 years (2000-2011), whereas ours was a sample of 1300 articles per year, per discipline, separately, for each of 14 disciplines, for 6 years (2005-2010: a total of about 100,000 articles).

7. Biomedicine Preponderance? Our sample was much smaller than L&B's because L&B were just counting total Gold articles, using DOAJ, whereas we were sending out a robot to look for Green OA versions on the Web for each of the 100,000 articles in our sample. It may be this equal sampling across disciplines that leads to our lower estimates of Gold: L&B's higher estimate may reflect the fact that certain disciplines are both more Gold and publish more articles (in our sample, Biomed was 7.9% Gold). Note that both studies agree on the annual growth rate of Gold (about 1%)

8. Growth Spurts? Our projection does not assume a linear year-to-year growth rate (1%), it detects it. There have so far been no detectable annual growth spurts (of either Gold or Green). (I agree, however, that Finch/RCUK could herald one forthcoming annual spurt of 6% Gold (the UK's share of world research output) -- but that would be a rather pricey (and, I suspect, unscaleable and unsustainable) one-off growth spurt. )

9. RCUK Compliance Verification Mechanism for Green OA Deposits: I certainly hope Stephen Curry is right that I am overstating the ambiguity of the RCUK policy!

But I was not at all reassured at the LSHTM meeting on Open Access by Ben Ryan's rather vague remarks about monitoring RCUK mandate compliance, especially compliance with Green. After all that (and not the failure to prefer and fund Gold) was the main weakness of the prior RCUK OA mandate.

Stevan Harnad

This is a response to a proposal (by some individuals in the researcher community) to raise the goalposts of Green OA self-archiving and Green OA mandates from where they are now (free online access) to CC-BY (free online access plus unlimited re-use and re-publication rights):

1. For the reasons I will try to describe here, raising the goal-posts for Green OA self-archiving and Green OA mandates to CC-BY (free online access PLUS unlimited re-use and re-publication rights) would be very deleterious to Green OA growth, Green OA mandate growth, and hence global OA growth (and would thereby provide yet another triumph for the publisher lobby and double-paid hybrid-Gold CC-BY).

2. The fundamental practical reason why global Green Gratis OA (free online access) is readily reachable is precisely because it requires only free online access and not more.

3. That is also why 60% of journals endorse immediate, un-embargoed Green OA today.

4. That is also why repositories' Almost-OA Button can tide over user needs during any embargo for the remaining 40% of journals.

5. "Upgrading" Green OA and Green OA mandates to requiring CC-BY would mean that most journals would immediately adopt Green OA embargoes, and their length would be years, not months.

6. It would also mean that emailing (or mailing) eprints would become legally actionable, if the eprint was tagged and treated as CC-BY, thereby doing in a half-century's worth of established scholarly practice.

7. And all because impatient ideology got the better of patient pragmatics and realism, a few fields' urgent need for CC-BY was put ahead of all fields' urgent need for free online access -- and another publisher lobby victory was scored for double-paid hybrid Gold-CC-BY (hence simply prolonging the worldwide status quo of mostly subscription publishing and little OA).

8. If Green OA self-archiving meant CC-BY then any rival publisher would immediately be licensed to free-ride on any subscription journal's content, offering it at cut-rate price in any form, thereby undercutting all chances of the original publisher recouping his costs: Hence for all journal publishers that would amount to either ruin or a forced immediate conversion to Gold CC-BY...

9. ...If publishers allowed Green CC-BY self-archiving by authors, and Green CC-BY mandates by their institutions, without legal action.

10. But of course publishers would not allow the assertion of CC-BY by its authors without legal action (and it is the fear of legal action that motivates the quest for CC-BY!):

11. And the very real threat of legal action facing Green CC-BY self-archiving by authors and Green CC-BY mandates by institutions (unlike the bogus threat of legal action against Gratis Green self-archiving and Gratis Green mandates) would of course put an end to authors' providing Green OA and institutions' mandating Green OA.

12. In theory, funders, unlike institutions, can mandate whatever they like, since they are paying for the research: But if a funder Gold OA mandate like Finch/RCUK's -- that denies fundees the right to publish in any journal that does not offer either Gold CC-BY or Gratis-Green with at most a 6-12 month embargo, and that only allows authors to pick Green if the journal does not offer Gold -- is already doomed to author resentment, resistance and non-compliance, then adding the constraint that any Green must be CC-BY would be to court outright researcher rebellion.

In short, the pre-emptive insistence upon CC-BY OA, if recklessly and irrationally heeded, would bring the (already slow) progress toward OA, and the promise of progress, to a grinding halt.

Finch/RCUK's bias toward paid Gold over cost-free Green was clearly a result of self-interested publisher lobbying. But if it were compounded by a premature and counterproductive insistence on CC-BY for all by a small segment of the researcher community, then the prospects of OA (both Gratis and CC-BY), so fertile if we at last take the realistic, pragmatic course of mandating Gratis Green OA globally first, would become as fallow as they have been for the past two decades, for decades to come.

Some quote/comments follow below:

Jan Velterop: We've always heard, from Stevan Harnad, that the author was the one who intrinsically had copyright on the manuscript version, so could deposit it, as an open access article, in an open repository irrespective of the publisher's views.

I said -- because it's true, and two decades' objective evidence shows it -- that authors can deposit the refereed, final draft with no realistic threat of copyright action from the publisher.

JV: If that is correct, then the author could also attach a CC-BY licence to the manuscript version.

Nothing of the sort. Author self-archiving to provide free online access (Gratis Green OA) is one thing -- claiming and dispensing re-use and republication rights (CC-BY) is quite another.

JV: If it is incorrect, the author can't deposit the manuscript with open access without the explicit permission of the publisher of his final, published version, and the argument advanced for more than a decade by Stevan Harnad is invalid.

Incorrect. Authors can make their refereed final drafts free for all online without the prospect of legal action from the publisher, but not with a CC-BY license to re-use and re-publish.

Moreover, for authors who elect to comply with publisher embargoes on Green Gratis OA, there is the option of depositing in Closed Access and relying on the Almost-OA Button to provide eprint-requesters with individual eprints during the embargo. This likewise does not come with CC-BY rights.

JV: Which is it? I think Stevan was right, and a manuscript can be deposited with open access whether or not the publisher likes it. Whence his U-turn, I don't know

.No U-turn whatsoever. Just never the slightest implication from me that anything more than free online access was intended.

JV: But if he was right at first, and I believe that's the case, that also means that it can be covered by a CC-BY licence. Repositories can't attach the licence, but 'gold' OA publishers can't either. It's always the author, as copyright holder by default. All repositories and OA publishers can do is require it as a condition of acceptance (to be included in the repository or to be published). What the publisher can do if he doesn't like the author making available the manuscript with open access, is apply the Ingelfinger rule or simply refuse to publish the article.

The above is extremely unrealistic and counterproductive policy advice to institutions and funders.

If an OA mandate is gratuitously upgraded to CC-BY it just means that most authors will be unable to get their papers published in their journal of choice if they comply with the mandate. So authors will not comply with the mandate, and the mandate will fail.

Peter Murray-Rust: If we can establish the idea of Green-CC-BY as the norm for deposition in repositories then I would embrace it enthusiastically. I can see no downside other than that some publishers will fight it. But they fight anyway

The downside is that authors won't fight, and hence OA itself will lose the global Gratis Green OA that is fully within its reach, and stay in the non-OA limbo (neither Gratis nor CC-BY, neither Green nor Gold) in which most research still is today -- and has been for two decades.

And the irony is that -- speaking practically rather than ideologically -- the fastest and surest prospect for both CC-BY and Gold is to first quickly reach global Gratis Green OA. Needlessly over-reaching can undermine all of OA's objectives.

PMR: It would resolve all the apparent problems of the Finch reoprt etc. It is only because Green licences are undefined that we have this problem at all.

On the contrary: raising the Gratis Green 6-12 goalposts to immediate Green CC-BY would make the Finch/RCUK a pure hybrid-Gold mandate and nothing else. And its failure would be a resounding one.

PMR: And if we all agreed it could be launched for Open Access Week

That would certainly be a prominent historic epitaph for OA. I hope, on the contrary, that pragmatic voices will be raised during OA week, so that we can get on with reaching for the reachable instead of gratuitously raising the goalposts to unrealistic heights.

Stevan Harnad

Comments on "Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal"
Richard Poynder's interview of publisher Jan Velterop in Open and Shut

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Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part II:
Comments on Jan Velterop's Responses to Poynder Interview

Jan Velterop:“‘Gold’ is to a large degree developed by new entrants, not the traditional publishers. It should be built up alongside ‘green’. That is more likely to force the traditional publishers’ hands than ‘green’ alone.”

Not if the UK motivates traditional publishers to offer optional hybrid Gold, while continuing to collect subscriptions (and adopting and increasing embargoes on Green). (Jan seems to systematically misunderstand or forget hybrid Gold, thinking instead that the contest is just between pure Gold and subscriptions.)

Jan Velterop:
“The ’New Big Deal”… unlike the old Big Deal… would comprise both “a national licensing agreement” that gave researchers free-at-the-point-of-use access to all the papers still sitting behind subscription paywalls, plus a “national procurement service”. The latter would buy free-at-the-point-of-use OA publishing services for UK researchers, allowing them to publish in OA journals without having to foot the bill themselves.”

Except if both are being offered by and paid to the very same journals, because subscription journals go hybrid for UK Gold.

Jan Velterop:
“Yes, the subscription model as applied in the academic world has the drawback that it's not the user who pays. Neither in his role of reader, nor in his role of author. But that is a very widespread problem with any common resource. Think of the roads, or mail, or rail, or police, or schools, or hospitals.”

Managing peer review (provided for free by researchers) is a public good, like roads or hospitals??

What’s wrong with authors paying for the peer review service alone, per paper, once it’s been unbundled and liberated from the obsolete publishing functions and their costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving) by mandatory Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories -- and then using just a fraction of the institutional savings from cancelling subscriptions to pay for just that peer review alone?

Jan Velterop:
“The “benefit principle” (only those who actually make use of the provision pay) can only apply in a limited way, if at all, for common provisions. There is a perennial tension between common interests and the ego-system”

Where’s the tension with no-fault peer review services, paid by authors, out of their institution’s subscription savings?

And how is the management of a peer review service (performed by unpaid peers) a “common” that warrants McNopolistic national licensing instead of just per-piece payment for the service itself? And especially while the service is still co-bundled with a lot of other obscolescent products and services and their costs?

Jan Velterop:
“a shift to an author-side payment for the service of arranging peer review and publication is a logical one”

The service of arranging peer review I understand.

But what’s the rest? What’s “Arranging publication”? Once a paper has been peer-reviewed, revised and accepted, what’s left for publishers to do (for a fee) that authors can’t do for free (by depositing the peer-reviewed, revised, accepted paper in their institutional repository)?

And how to get there, from here -- and at a fair price for just peer review alone? Publishers won’t unbundle, downsize and renounce revenue until there’s no more market for the extras and their costs – and Green OA is what will put paid to that market. Pre-emptive Gold payment, while subscriptions are still being paid, will not – and especially not hybrid Gold.

Jan Velterop:
“Authors… publish a given paper in only one journal, and more often than not they have a real choice, at least to submit. This introduces market mechanisms that are lacking in the subscription system”

Except that the author’s choice is based on the journal’s quality standards, not its price.

(And what about the journal’s choice? Unless the peer-review is no-fault, why would a journal choose quality over income – especially when readership is no longer a price-factor?)

And where’s the author choice in a national McNopoly?

Jan Velterop:
“the “benefit principle”… is possibly not the best model, but the only one that makes OA possible and sustainable. The “green” model is often portrayed as cheaper, but that's only the case if the subscription model continues to be paid for. And those costs need to be added to the “green” model, in my view”

There is no “benefit principle.” The publication costs are already being paid today as subscriptions – without providing OA. So there’s nothing to “add” but Green OA. And then it is the availability of Green OA that will drive downsizing all the way down to just no-fault peer review alone, at a fair, affordable and sustainable price, paid for on the post- Green Gold OA model, out of the subscription cancellation savings.

Jan Velterop:
“Any transition from subscription to OA is hampered by the fact that in one model the “research-consumption-intensive” institutions pay more; in the other the “research-production-intensive” institutions. They are rarely the same, but the difference is pretty much ironed out if looked at on a large enough scale — a national one”

The differences are also ironed out if the price drops so low as to no longer make a difference. No-fault peer review will be uniform and affordable by all (out of a fraction of institutional subscription cancellation savings). The only differences between journals will be (as now) in their subject matter and their quality standards. (Authors, as always, will try to meet the highest standards they can meet; and journals will find their niche in the hierarchy.)

Jan Velterop:
“the benefit principle is possibly not the best for academic knowledge sharing… the money now used to pay for the system via subscriptions, on the readers’ side, could be used to pay for the system on the authors’ side. It comes pretty much from the same ultimate source, after all”

But only globally mandated Green OA can force the downsizing to peer review alone, and release the money to pay for it in the form of Gold OA fees. Publishers won’t unbundle and downsize on their own, if double-paid for Gold in advance, and on top of subscriptions. They will just do as they are doing now: preserve their current revenue streams, which in turn makes even a transition to Gold OA at par take an eternity, if ever.

Meanwhile, year in and year out, research access and impact are being lost, even though that – and not journal economics – is the real, urgent, and completely soluble problem, fully within the reach of the research community, and still not grasped (by mandating Green OA).

Jan Velterop:
“The potential advantages of a system based on payment for publication, rather than on payment for access, are enormous…”

The advantages of McNopoly hybrid Gold payment for preserving publishers’ income streams are evident -- but not the incentive to un-bundle and downsize to fair, no-frills no-fault peer review service costs alone. Nor the publisher incentive for providing global OA any time soon…

Jan Velterop:
“If done properly, and on a national scale, IDEAL-like arrangements might be possible, covering all institutions in the country, for no more, or even less, than is being paid now.”

As already discussed above, that would be a governmental consortium of all UK institutions bargaining with a publisher cartel of all worldwide publishers – all in order to preserve a subscription/license-like cartel’s current grotesquely bloated revenue streams.

And yet Jan agrees that the only essential service at issue is a peer-review service, per individual article.

This sort of national consortial bargaining scheme could, as I’ve often said, be used to pre-pay for daily Big Macs for every UK citizen: A national McLicense McNopoly.

Does anyone stop to think why we would never dream of doing that for anything else -- apart from Jan Velterop’s common goods like roads and hospitals? But is that really the kind of life-and-death common good that managing the peer review service is, too?

And isn’t there something to be said for keeping service-providers independent and competing (for submission quality as well as APC quantity), as with other products and services, rather than combined and colluding? (Not to mention that no-fault peer review prevents journals from lowering acceptance standards for more revenue: they get paid regardless of the outcome (accept, revise or reject) – and the higher-standard ones will get more authors competing for acceptance.)

Jan Velterop:
“For traditional publishers with hybrid options, such a membership and a national licence could be combined. When I was at Springer we had such a combined deal with The Netherlands for a few years. I don’t think it is still in place… the librarians couldn’t reach consensus to extend it. I am in no doubt that a truly national approach could have achieved more lasting success.”

Why no doubts, if it did not prove sustainable even in a small country like the Netherlands? (What would be evidence that would make Jan doubt the sustainability of a McNopoly, then, if failure to sustain it is not evidence enough?)

Jan Velterop:
“On a world scale the same tension exists between “research-consumption-intensive” countries and “research-production-intensive” ones as exists between institutions”

But once journal publishing has been downsized by Green OA mandates to just the essentials -- a no-fault peer-review service, per submission, unbundled from the obsolete hold-overs from the print era -- the cost will be so low that the consumption/production difference makes no difference. (My guess is about $100-$200 per round of peer review -- paid for out of a fraction of institutional subscription cancellation savings.)

Jan Velterop:
“If indeed the author-side paid OA model introduces a market mechanism, hybrid journals can be as expensive as they wish, but they won’t have any OA articles, since those would go to cheaper journals”

Does Jan really think that authors would pick journals for their price rather than their quality level? Does he think peer-review standards are generic and uniform? (And has Jan forgotten that with hybrid journals we are talking about the very same journals that authors are publishing in today?)

Jan Velterop:
“‘Hybrid OA’ doesn’t exist. It is just “gold” OA. OA in a hybrid journal is the same as OA in a fully OA journal for any given article.”

Gold OA is indeed Gold OA whether the journal is hybrid or pure (and whether the Gold is Gratis or CC-BY)

But “hybrid” does not refer to a kind of OA, it refers to a kind of journal: the kind that charges both subscriptions and (optionally) Gold OA fees.

That kind of journal certainly exists; and they certainly can and do double-dip. And that’s certainly an expensive way to get (Gratis) Gold OA.

And the Finch/RCUK policy will certainly encourage many if not all journals to go hybrid Gold, and publishers, to maximize their chances of making an extra 6% revenue from the UK, will in turn jack up their Green embargoes past RCUK’s permissible limits.

Jan Velterop:
“The “double-dipping” argument is a red herring. There seems to be a notion that subscription prices should be proportional to the number of articles in a journal. How would that work? There are journals with 100 subscribers… and journals with thousands of subscribers. There are journals that publish 25 articles a year and journals that publish 25 or more articles a week.”

Double-dipping is not about the number articles or subscribers a journal has, but about charging subscriptions and, in addition, charging, per article, for Gold OA. That has nothing to do with number of articles, journals or subscribers: It’s simply double-charging.

Jan Velterop:
“The cost, and indeed the revenue, of an individual article can only usefully — and realistically — be expressed as an average, and then probably company-wide. What would otherwise be the situation for a loss-making hybrid journal that receives in one year 10% of its articles as gold, and the next year only 2%? Impossible to work out. A subscription system is inherently lacking in transparency”

Nothing of the sort, and extremely simple, for a publisher who really does not want to double-dip, but to give all excess back as a rebate:

Count the total number of articles, N, and the total subscription revenue, S.

From that you get the revenue per article: S/N.

Hybrid Gold OA income is than added to that total revenue (say, at a fee of S/N per article).

That means that for k Gold OA articles, total hybrid journal revenue is S + kS/N.

And if the journal really wants to reduce subscriptions proportionately, at the end of the year, it simply sends a rebate to each subscribing institution:

Suppose there are U subscribing institutions. Each one gets a year-end rebate of kS/UN (regardless of the yearly value of k, S, U or N).

(Alternatively, if the journal wants to give back all of the rebate only to the institutions that actually paid for the extra Gold, don’t charge subscribing institutions for Gold OA at all: But that approach shows most clearly why and how this pre-emptive morphing scheme for a transition from subscriptions to hybrid Gold to pure Gold is unscaleable and unsustainable, hence incoherent. It is an Escher impossible figure, either way, because collective subscriptions/“memberships” – including McNopolies -- only make sense for co-bundled incoming content; for individual pieces of outgoing content the peer-review service costs must be paid by the individual piece. There are at least 20,000 research-active institutions on the planet and at least 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, publishing several million individual articles per year. No basis – or need --for a pre-emptive cartel/consortium McNopoly.)

Jan Velterop:
“If journals should reduce their subscription price when they get a percentage of papers paid for as gold, what should happen if they lose the same percentage (for completely different reasons) of subscriptions?”

Less Gold – the value of the year-end institutional rebate -- kS/UN – is less that year.

Jan Velterop:
“What if a journal which decided to go hybrid has published a steady amount of 50 articles a year for ages and all of a sudden attracts an extra 10 gold OA articles? By how much should it reduce its subscription price?”

By exactly10S/50U per subscribing institution U.

Jan Velterop:
“If an article is worth £2,000 to have published with OA in a full-OA journal, why is it not worth the same £2,000 if published in a hybrid journal?”

Simple answer: it’s not worth the price either way. Both prices are grotesquely inflated. No-fault peer review should cost about $100-200 per round.

Jan Velterop:
“In my view, without CC-BY no article is worth the label OA”

Fine, let those who want and need CC-BY pay extra for it, if they wish, and can.

But mandate that everyone most provide Gratis Green, whether or not they wish to pay for CC-BY.

Jan Velterop:
“Of course, publishers could price themselves out of the market. And then they would simply go under”

Not hybrid Gold publishers. They stay in the market no matter what they charge for Gold, as long as subscriptions hold.

But they will probably be careful not to charge more than 1/Nth of their revenue per article to be sure to get the extra RCUK Gold subsidy…

Jan Velterop:
“Stevan’s solution has characteristics of “having one’s cake and eating it”. It is saying ‘we want open access but we want the dysfunctional market system of subscriptions to survive, too’”

Not in the least. It’s saying: The cake’s paid for already, through subscriptions. Let everyone eat (OA).

And we want OA now, and can provide it via Green OA self-archiving.

If and when that goes on to make subscriptions unsustainable, the dysfunctional market will downsize to peer review service alone, paid for, per article, out of the subscription savings, as post-Green Gold OA, fairly, affordably, scalably and sustainably.

But the purpose of OA is OA – access to research for all users, not just those whose institutions can afford subscriptions.

Whether and when Green OA will fix the dysfunctional journal market is a secondary matter. It’s sure that 100% Green OA will provide 100% OA, solving the research access problem – and thereby making the journal affordability problem a much less important matter.

If global Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, forcing journals to unbundle, cut costs and downsize to peer review alone (as I think it is eventually likely to do) all the better. It will have fixed the “dysfunctional market” too.

But what is urgently needed now, and already a decade overdue even though it is fully within reach, is 100% OA – through global Green OA mandates from institutions and funders.

Jan Velterop: “I think it is more likely that [it is not because of publisher lobbying that] the Finch group has adopted the view that “gold” is indeed the most straightforward, scalable (proportional to the research effort and funding), and particularly because of this proportionality, economically sustainable model. After all, the “green” model needs subscriptions to be maintained, and the cost of those needs to be taken into account when comparing what is financially the best option for the country.”

See above.

But it’s not just subscription publishers that were doing the lobbying: so were Gold OA publishers (pure and hybrid). And there was also (very valid and timely) lobbying for Open Data (CC-BY) as well, but the latter was unwittingly was conflated by Finch/BIS with the urgent need in some fields only (e.g., crystallography) for CC-BY data-mining rights for journal articles too.

Not only is there no need, but it makes no sense to pay extra for CC-BY gold for all UK journal articles, when most fields only need Gratis OA (which can be provided via cost-free Green). And even for the few fields that do urgently need CC-BY Gold, the UK paying for it pre-emptively will only provide CC-BY for 6% of worldwide journal articles in the field, which is no use when what is needed is data-mining rights for 100% of worldwide output.

Meanwhile, subscriptions are already being paid by the UK and the rest of the world, covering the costs of publication in full and fulsomely. An effective Green OA mandate can provide Gratis OA to 100% of UK output at no extra cost. And if Green OA mandates eventually globalize and make subscriptions unsustainable, it will also provide the means to downsize journal publishing affordably to just the peer review service alone, and will release the subscription funds to pay for it – instead of gratuitously paying extra, pre-emptively, today, out of already scarce research funds, as Finch/BIS proposes (under the lobbying of publishers, for which that would of course be the optimal outcome, at the expense of research and researchers).

And that, in turn, will usher in as much CC-BY as users need and authors wish to provide, with no constraints from publishers, embargoes or copyright transfer.

Jan Velterop:
“What I genuinely don't understand is the enthusiasm of the publishers for the “gold” model (apart from the OA publishers, of course). The current per-article revenues are, in my estimate, on average well over $5,000, whereas for APCs it's well less than $3,000. This is revenues, not list-price.”

What difference does it make for subscription publishers who go hybrid Gold? Their bets are hedged. It’s win/win, thanks to their UK subsidy (and any others who care to pay for hybrid Gold): S + kS/N

Besides, publishers all no doubt see the OA writing on the wall and see hybrid Gold, subsidized by the UK, as their best bet for preserving their current revenue levels. So they characterizing Green OA to Finch/BIS as inadequate and a failure – and, for good measure, adding that if Green grows then it will destroy journal publishing as well as peer review. (Odd effect for something inadequate…)

Jan Velterop:
“Privately, some publishers have expressed concern about “gold”. The ones I've talked to recently much prefer “green” on the premise that the take-up is likely to be relatively low, in spite of mandates, and chaotic, and difficult to find, with some articles of a given journal available in OA and others not, and most only after a delay”

Stay tuned. You haven’t seen how effective Green OA mandates work yet. (And their anarchic growth is a strength, not a weakness.)

Besides, one of the reasons mandates need to be strengthened is because many publishers who “prefer” Gold are at the same time doing their level best to (1) stave off Green mandates with embargoes (making the “delay” they complain of into a self-fulfilling prophecy) – and (2) to talk RCUK out of mandating Green at all (because it is inadequate as well as ruinous)!

But if the ‘inadequacy” is that Green OA articles are hard to find, publishers should wake up and smell the coffee (and surf, say, Google Scholar). The only content that is hard to find is the content that is not there – because it has not been made Green OA, thanks to publishers’ efforts to prevent it. It is disingenuous (but rather endearing, because of its utter transparency) for publishers to tout as an inadequacy of Green OA obstacle created by publishers themselves!

Jan Velterop:
“National arrangements would deal with Stevan’s problem of increasing APCs for hybrid journals”

My problem is not increasing APCs! It’s increasing Green embargoes -- and being forced to pick and pay for Gold (out of scarce research funds) instead of being able to fulfill the RCUK OA mandate with cost-free Green.

Jan Velterop:
“[With Gold], the market mechanism… is transposed to a national level from an individual scientist level… and not inflationary like the traditional subscription system… market mechanism… [Gold] keeps unwarranted inflationary price increases at bay… [UK should] use some of Willetts’ £10 million transition fund to hire some good negotiators … progressively try to offset subscription prices against OA fees so overall costs for UK don't increase…”

Let Jan keep speculating about economics and McNopolies, and let publishers keep negotiating licenses to their heart’s content – but let RCUK mandate (gratis) Green so we can have OA in the meanwhile, at no added cost.

Jan Velterop:
“I don’t buy the argument that a transition to “gold” OA were possible only if done globally and simultaneously. As you say, that would render it impossible.”

A global transition to Gold OA is only possible when institutional subscriptions are no longer being paid for – freed up by cancellations to pay for Gold OA, at a fair price.

Pre-emptively subsidizing hybrid Gold OA will not bring any of that about: Mandating Green OA will.

And subscriptions can’t be cancelled till all or nearly all journal contents are accessible by another means (Green OA). This is why anarchic growth is possible, and a strength rather than a weakness of mandating Green OA globally.

Jan Velterop:
“I don’t mind “green”. What I don’t see as remotely realistic is the idea that “green” should first force the publishers into submission before “gold” is being built up”

And I don’t mind voluntary Gold – as long as Green is first made mandatory.

Green can and will first provide global OA – and that’s what this has all been about, for over two long decades now.

Whether and when it makes subscriptions unsustainable, and forces downsizing to peer review and a transition to Gold OA at a fair, affordable, sustainable price is a far less urgent and important matter. Green OA will solve the access problem in the online era. Publishing -- a service profession -- will adapt.

Jan Velterop:
“‘Gold’ is to a large degree developed by new entrants, not the traditional publishers. It should be built up alongside “green”. That is more likely to force the traditional publishers’ hands than “green” alone.”

That would be fine. But RCUK is forcing (hybrid) Gold. And the objective is OA, not Gold.

Jan Velterop:
“‘Green’, especially with embargoes, risks setting the subscription system in aspic... The defence of traditional publishers is more likely to consist of an increase of subscription prices to compensate for any loss of subscribers as a result of “green”. And to refuse articles unless they come with a full copyright transfer as well as to impose long embargoes.”

1. Because of the distributed, anarchic nature of the growth of Green – article by article and institution by institution rather than journal by journal – Green cannot cause cancellations till it is at or near 100% globally.

2. Green can grow regardless of whether publishers raise journal prices.

3. The most effective Green mandate (ID/OA + the Button) is immune to embargoes.

4. If embargoes are lengthened, it’s more likely to be because of Finch/RCUK hybrid Gold mandates rather than Green mandates.

5. The purpose of Green mandates is not to fix the subscription system but to get all articles deposited immediately, to provide OA as soon as possible, and to provide Almost-OA via the semi-automated email-eprint-request Button during any embargo.

Jan Velterop:
“Not being able to persuade RCUK to change its OA policy will be good for OA. And it will only cost more if institutions fail to come together and collectively negotiate what they pay for subscriptions in order to be able to compensate for the cost of APCs”

If RCUK is not fixed, it will fail: researcher resistance, resentment and non-compliance.

And the problem is not how good a McNopoly Deal the UK negotiates for hybrid Gold but the negative effects of the RCUK U-Turn on worldwide OA growth, because it provides a gratuitous incentive to publishers to offer hybrid Gold and lengthen Green embargoes.

Jan Velterop:
“Of course there is the risk — however unlikely — that this happens only in the UK and nowhere else in the world. In that case, cuts will have to be made in subscriptions. What’s new?”

Nothing new, and not much OA to show for all the time and money that will be lost because of Finch/BIS gullibility and RCUK somnambulism.

Jan Velterop:
“Open access is a means to an end, not an end in itself… Hence the call for CC-BY, or “libre” OA if you wish”

Actually, OA is an end in itself -- for research and researchers.

But so far we have not even grasped -- though it’s fully within reach -- the means to the means, which is to mandate Green OA in order to have, at long last, global (Gratis) OA instead of access denial and impact loss. The rest can come only after we have reached at least that.

Jan Velterop: “I foresee a situation where a price is being paid for publishing services and “keeping the minutes of science”, via APCs or even via subscriptions, whereas the knowledge contained in publications is freely and openly shared. Now we see keeping the record and knowledge sharing as being the same, but that need not be the case in the future.”

And I foresee researchers doing research using the full resources of the online medium (which is perfectly capable of storing and preserving its own minutes), with peer-reviewed research openly accessible to all users, and what used to be called publishing now reduced to the management of the peer-review service -- with that, and only that, being paid for via post-Green Gold OA fees.

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

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

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

Harnad, S (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer

Harnad, S (2012) Hybrid gold open access and the Chesire cat’s grin: How to repair the new open access policy of RCUK. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog September Issue

Harnad, S (2012) There's no justifying RCUK's support for [hybrid] gold open access. Guardian HE Network.

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012

Harnad, S (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012

Harnad, S (2102) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

Swan, Alma & Houghton, John (2012) Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: further economic modelling. Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group. JISC Information Environment Repository.

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Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part I:
Comments on Richard Poynder’s Overview of Velterop Interview

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Comments on "Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal"
Richard Poynder's interview of publisher Jan Velterop in Open and Shut

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Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part I:
Comments on Richard Poynder’s Overview of Velterop Interview

Richard Poynder:
“The scholarly communication system has been in serious difficulties for several decades now, a problem generally referred to as the “serials crisis”…. the price of scholarly journals has consistently risen faster than the consumer price index… the Big Deal [single or multiple institutions committing to continue to pay single or multiple publishers the asking price for site licenses to all the journals to which they already subscribe in exchange for co-bundled access to all the journals to which they do not subscribe, at no extra cost] is by its very nature monopolistic… it locks libraries into an expensive and inflexible system that they can only extricate themselves from with great difficulty. Keen to find an alternative approach, the research community began to take an interest in Open Access (OA)."

It is important to keep in mind throughout this discussion that the origin and objective of the OA movement was not the serials crisis but the research accessibility problem: making peer-reviewed research accessible to all users, not just to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published. The two problems are related, but they are not the same problem, and the solution to one is not necessarily a solution to the other.

Richard Poynder:
“The Big Deal… meant that anyone working in a higher education (HE) institution in the UK got free-at-the-point-of-use access to AP’s entire journal portfolio”

What about UK users not working at a HE institution?

Richard Poynder:
“most subsequent Big Deals were signed not with national funding bodies but with library consortia”

What about UK users other than those at consortial institutions?

Richard Poynder:
“to find an alternative approach [to the serials crisis], the research community began to take an interest in Open Access (OA). If papers were made freely available on the Internet, they reasoned, not only would researchers have access to everything they needed, but self-archiving (or green OA as it later became known) might ease the affordability problem, by enabling libraries to begin to cancel some of their journal subscriptions”

OA self-archiving was born not as an alternative approach to the serials crisis but as a natural way to use the new online medium to maximize research usage and access. (But, yes, the thought was and is that it will eventually solve the serials crisis too.)

Richard Poynder:
“bulk purchase “membership” schemes that OA publishers like BioMed Central and Springer began to offer… bought the institution’s researchers the right to publish in OA journals without having to pay on a per-article basis”

This is not the same deal when journal is pure Gold and hybrid Gold.

Pure Gold is pure “membership” (how many peer-reviewed articles per journal per institution are publishable per year, per membership deal? is acceptance guaranteed? how many journals in the deal?).

Hybrid Gold is consortial subscription membership (incoming), plus pay-to-publish membership (outgoing) (raising the same questions as above).

Richard Poynder:
“[there was the] belief that OA publishing … would impose price restraint on publishers… with author-pays-OA, the buying decision is made by researchers themselves, not by an intermediary. And since authors are able to publish in a variety of different journals, they can shop around…”

Authors pay, but journals accept/reject. Author-pays creates conflict of interest for the journal (quality standards versus revenue). And authors don’t want the cheapest journal but the highest quality journal. (There is a solution – no-fault peer review – but it can only work after publishing has been forced by global Green OA to downsize to just the peer-review service alone.)

Richard Poynder:
“Membership schemes also tend to push authors in the direction of those publishers that their library has a publishing contract with, thus limiting choice”

Correct. And this choice constraint is perhaps even worse for authors’ own outgoing articles than for their incoming reading matter.

Richard Poynder:
“[With] gold OA funds… the money does not come from the author’s own research budget, so price is unlikely to be a deciding factor when an author is looking for an OA journal in which to publish”

Why should it be? Shouldn’t quality standards be the deciding factor? And why should publication be paid out of a researcher’s (scarce) research funds? (After Green OA has become universal, the no-fault peer review service can be paid out of a fraction of the institution’s annual subscription cancelation windfall savings.)

Richard Poynder:
“as self-archiving took off, subscription publishers soon concluded that it posed a serious threat to their revenues. And… insisted on self-archiving embargoes”

Under researcher pressure for OA (e.g., PLoS petition in 2001, BOAI, Berlin Declaration), 60% of publishers (including most of the top publishers) endorsed immediate, no-embargo Green OA.

(But I don’t doubt that, unless fixed, the recent Finch/RCUK U-turn, the result of successful publisher lobbying, will motivate publishers to adopt and lengthen embargoes and accept still more UK money instead for hybrid Gold OA…)

Richard Poynder:
“hybrid OA allows publishers to “double dip” — i.e. earn revenues from both APCs and subscriptions.”

If the UK paid publishers extra fees for Gold OA to all of its research output, that would increase publishers’ total subscription revenues by about 6%, and then the UK would get back 6% of that extra 6% as a rebate on their contribution to lowering worldwide subscription fees by 6%.

But let’s suppose instead that -- in a remarkable feat of collective vendor-cartel vs. consumer-consortium bargaining -- a cartel of all the world’s publishers (now all transformed into hybrid subscription/Gold publishers + pure Gold publishers) -- faithfully converted every penny of UK Gold revenue into UK subscription reductions for a consortium of all UK HE institutions. This would be tantamount to giving UK HE subscribers the bonus of hybrid Gold OA to their own outgoing research output at the same price that they are currently paying via subscriptions for incoming research output from the UK [6%] and the rest of the world [94%].

Here are some questions to ask about the probability, desirability, sustainability and scalability of such an arrangement:

Probability: Can the UK government negotiate on behalf of all potential UK users of research journals – not just HE institutions, but industries, big and small, public and private libraries, etc. – using UK tax revenues ear-marked for research, in order to ensure that they all have not only Gold OA to UK research output, but also subscription access to non-UK output (94%)?

And once that’s settled, can and would all the world’s publishers, Gold and Hybrid, collaborate in such a cartel? (Though long urged by journal publishers, this sort of McNopolistic collective producer-cartel/consumer-consortium bargaining is not notably successful in the case of global necessities such as water, food and oil -- and those are not even hybrid – otherwise surely McDonalds and Burger King would surely get into the whopping national prepaid Big Mac licensing business too.)

Desirability: Do we really want to lock in publishers’ current revenue streams in exchange for Gold OA? Are we so sure publishers are providing anywhere near fair value for fair cost today, with their current prices and current co-bundled print-era products and services (text-production, print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving and peer review)? Do we want to lock in all those add-ons and price-tags year upon year, inescapably, with no hope of phasing out the inessentials, cost-cutting and downsizing?

As you read on, below, keep in mind that in promoting this Whopping New Deal -- Cartel/Consortial McLicense McNopoly bargaining -- Jan Velterop seems to agree (I'm not sure) that managing peer review is really all that’s left that publishers need to do in the OA era:

Is managing peer review for (say) 200,000 outgoing UK paper submissions per year (peers review for free) really worth locking in what the UK is currently paying for incoming subscriptions in perpetuo?

Because that’s what a Gold OA McNopoly would be, if peer review services were bought and sold nationally en bloc, instead of per individual paper, at a fair per-paper price for just the peer review management alone.

And the difference in price is roughly of the order of $1000-$5000+ per paper (as co-bundled today) versus $100-$200 per paper, per round of review, unbundled: in other words, a difference of the order of more than 10/1.

(An editor picks the referees; software plus an editorial assistant manage the review; the editor does the disposition once the reviews are received. -- I know how it goes: I edited a rigorously peer-reviewed journal for a quarter century.)

Does this sort of simple per-paper service transaction really warrant a national (or global) McNopoly, locking in all the obsolete co-bundled extras, and their prices?

Sustainability: Would paying a UK collective cartel/consortial McNopoly McLicense in exchange for Gold OA be stable year after year, with waxing and waning national finances? Subscriptions can be cancelled by the piece (journal), but where’s the bargaining power in a McNopoly? Lower your price or I’ll revert to subscriptions (and lose Gold OA)?

Scalability: Is it likely that other countries have the finances (or desire) to follow suit, and make similar national McNopoly arrangements too? Would little Belgium willingly lock itself into its current total national subscription outlay, in exchange for Gold OA for its outgoing (say) 20,000 papers a year? (Remember that the ratio between the print-subscription era cost and the downsized peer-review-alone cost is probably over 10/1.)

Richard Poynder:
“As a result, rather than reducing costs, Finch estimated that its proposal would require an additional £50-60 million a year, £38m of which would be needed to pay APCs”

Correct. But the worst of it is not that the UK pays more in exchange for making UK research Gold OA, instead of just mandating Green OA at no extra cost, but that the RCUK policy incentivizes publishers worldwide to offer hybrid Gold OA and increase their Green OA embargoes, thereby reducing Green Open Access to the rest of the world’s research (94%).

Richard Poynder:
“as directed by Finch, RCUK will require that authors prioritise gold over green, with institutional repositories relegated to the role of preservation and data archiving”

Not quite. Finch declared the latter (i.e., that Green is just good for preservation, not for OA), but RCUK still “allow” Green for OA if the chosen journal does not offer Gold.

(Mark Thorley’s clarification of the intended meaning of the “where a publisher does not offer Gold… journal must allow… [Green]” wording as meaning “You may choose Gold or Green”, does suggest that fundees may freely choose Gold or Green – though it is not at all clear why RCUK does not wish to fix the wording so that it says so.)

Richard Poynder:
“Nevertheless, [RCUK] has refused to change the wording of its policy, which clearly states that researchers must prefer gold over green”

And that, in itself, is a curious fact, especially if, as Mark Thorley keeps repeating, the wording actually means that researchers are free to pick either gold or green. (Ambivalence? Feeling the pinch from Finch – or rather, the bite from BIS?)

Richard Poynder:
“With Finch/RCUK, says Harnad, ‘publishers get their grotesquely inflated revenues, and the world gets gold OA in exchange’”

Gold OA to UK research, that is (6%)…

Richard Poynder:
“The question is whether at some point this could morph into Velterop’s New Big Deal and, if it did, whether such an approach would solve the affordability problem.”

Hybrid Gold can certainly morph into pure Gold, at the same total price as current subscriptions. (But the remaining 94% of the world is not going to follow the UK’s lead in double-paying for it pre-emptively – instead of mandating Green, and letting that provide OA, and perhaps eventually also forcing publishers to downsize to peer review service alone, paid, per submission, via fair and affordable Gold.)

Richard Poynder:
“…UCL’s David Price would like to see a kind of Big Deal approach used to help the transition to OA — what he calls a ‘true national licence’”

A UK national hybrid license (subscription + Gold) cannot possibly give the UK Gold OA to the UK’s own 6% output (plus subscription access to the rest of the world’s 94% output) for less than or even the same amount as the UK is paying for subscriptions today. Think it through:

If worldwide publishers’ subscription revenue were increased by 6% over what it is now, through hybrid Gold payment, and publishers were to give it all back to the UK in the form of a subscription rebate, then that would be exactly the same as saying “We will give you Gold OA for free, over and above what you are already paying us for subscriptions.” So if hybrid publishers do give back any of their 6% windfall, it is unlikely to be right back to the UK, but distributed to subscribers worldwide. The UK only gets back about 6% of that 6% (assuming the UK’s buy-in costs are about the same as its share of total research output).

So I think David Price should not be advocating a national hybrid Gold license but a national Green OA mandate (by RCUK, as well as by UK universities).

(And the mandatory deposit locus should be each institution’s repository -- where compliance can be verified by the institution, and the institution can showcase its own research assets -- not in some central institution-external repository.)

David Price (in interview with Richard Poynder):
“to help the UK transition to OA… For an agreed amount, publishers allow access to their content by all sectors in society”

Not quite. A national hybrid Gold license would mean the whole world gets OA to the UK’s 6% output, fine.

But then what about access to all the rest of publishers’ content for all sectors in UK society? How does that work? Free UK-wide online access to all content (both the UK’s 6% Gold and the rest of the world’s 94% subscription content?)?

More likely, this would just mean that UK HE institutions plus designated industrial user sites and libraries get subscription access to the rest of the world’s 94% output, at about the same cost to the UK as the cost of the UK’s current subscription costs, plus the Gold OA surcharge (say, 6% of publishers’ current worldwide subscription revenue, minus a rebate to the UK of 6% of 6%).

That’s a pricey transition for the UK in exchange for OA to its own research output – compared to just mandating Green OA at no added cost -- but it’s also an unaffordable, unscalable solution for the rest of the world (and probably not sustainable in the UK either). So it’s certainly not a transition scenario for global OA, but rather an obstacle to it (inducing publishers to offer hybrid Gold and to lengthen their Green embargoes).

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Publisher Wheeling & Dealing, Part II:
Comments on Jan Velterop's Responses to Poynder Interview

These questions are for the
Imperial College Science Communication Forum
"Open access: Going for Gold?"
Thursday, 27 September 2012
18:30 to 21:00 (BST)
London, United Kingdom

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QUESTION 1: For hybrid subscription journals that offer both Gold OA (CC-BY) for a fee and Green OA (6-12) for free, why does RCUK require authors to pick and pay for Gold? Why not leave the choice to the author?

RCUK Policy:

"…papers must be published in journals which are [RCUK]-compliant… journal [is RCUK-]compliant… if…(1)… journal offers [Gold OA, CC-BY].. Or (2) where a publisher does not offer option 1… journal must allow… [Green OA, 6-12]"

QUESTION 2: If the RCUK official policy really means "RCUK authors may choose Green or Gold" rather than "RCUK authors may choose Green where Gold is not offered", then why does it not say "RCUK authors may choose Green or Gold" rather than "RCUK authors may choose Green where Gold is not offered"? All that's needed to make this perfectly clear is is to drop the words "where a publisher does not offer option 1".

(It is not clear why the clause  "Where a publisher does not offer option 1" was ever inserted in the first place, as the logic of what is intended is perfectly clear without it, and is only obscured by inserting it. The only two conceivable reasons I can think of for that gratuitous and misleading clause's having been inserted in the first place are that either (a) the drafters half-forgot about the hybrid GREEN+GOLD possibility, or (b) they were indeed trying to push authors (and publishers!) toward the GOLD option in both choices: the between-journal choice of GOLD versus GREEN journal and the within-journal choice of the GOLD versus GREEN option -- possibly because of Gold Fever induced by BIS's Finch Folly.)

QUESTION 3: Are Finch/RCUK not bothered by the fact that the new policy that "RCUK authors may choose Green [only] where Gold is not offered" (if that's what it means) would be in direct contradiction with the recommendations of BOAI-10 to institutions (see excerpt at end of this posting)?
 
QUESTION 4: How many UK research fields urgently need CC-BY today? Have Finch/RCUK not confused the re-use needs of research data (Open Data) with the need for free online access to articles? What percentage of all research fields needs and wants CC-BY (machine data-mining and re-publication rights) for its articles today, compared to the percentage that needs and wants free online access to its articles? What is the relative urgency of these two needs today (and the price worth paying to fulfill them)?

QUESTION 5: What good does it do UK industry to have BIS subsidize Gold OA for the UK's 6% of worldwide research output (out of the UK's scarce research funds) when the rest of the world is not doing the same (and unlikely to afford or want to) for the remaining 94% of worldwide research output? Does UK industry need Open Access to the UK's own research output only, in order to "create wealth"?

QUESTION 6: Is RCUK not concerned that a policy requiring UK authors to choose Gold over Green would simply induce subscription publishers to offer a pricey hybrid Gold option and to increase their Green embargoes (for all authors worldwide) so as to ensure that all UK researchers must pay for Gold? Won't that make it tougher for other others (94%) to provide and mandate Green OA worldwide?

QUESTION 7: Has anyone troubled to do the arithmetic on the UK subsidy for Gold? The UK publishes 6% of worldwide research output. The UK presumably also pays 6% of publishers' worldwide subscription revenue. Most publishers today are subscription publishers. So, in response to the current policy that "RCUK authors may choose Green where Gold is not offered", would it not make sense for all subscription publishers worldwide simply to add a hybrid Gold option, so that their total subscription income can be increased by 6% for hybrid Gold, subsidized by the UK tax-payer and UK research funds? Has it not been noticed by Finch/RCUK that even if publishers made good on the promise to lower their subscription fees in proportion to any increase in their Gold OA revenue from the UK, the UK would only get back 6% of the 6% it double-pays for hybrid Gold?

QUESTION 8: The Finch Report (cited also by RCUK) claimed that Green OA had failed, and suggested it should be downgraded to just preservation archiving. But is it not rather the prior RCUK Green OA mandate that failed, because it adopted no compliance verification mechanisms? Green OA mandates with effective compliance mechanisms (integrated with institutional mandates) are succeeding very well elsewhere in the world. Why does the new RCUK policy again focus only on confirming compliance with Gold, rather than with Green?

ANSWER: RCUK already has a Green OA mandate. If the UK wants 100% UK OA within two years, it need only add the following simple, cost-effective compliance verification mechanism: (1) Deposit must be in the fundee's institutional repository. (This makes each UK institution responsible for monitoring and verifying timely compliance.) (2) All articles must be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication. (Publisher embargoes apply only to the date on which the deposit is made OA.) (3) Repository deposit must be designated the sole mechanism for submitting publications for UK research assessment (REF).

BOAI-10 RECOMMENDATIONS

-- 1.1. Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution’s designated repository...

-- Deposits should be made as early as possible, ideally at the time of acceptance, and no later than the date of formal publication.

-- University policies should respect faculty freedom to submit new work to the journals of their choice. [emphasis added]

-- University policies should encourage but not require publication in OA journals [emphasis added] ...

-- 1.3. Every research funding agency, public or private, should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles reporting funded research are deposited in a suitable repository and made OA as soon as practicable.

-- Deposits should be made as early as possible, ideally at the time of acceptance, and no later than the date of formal publication...

Stevan Harnad