Open Access Archivangelism

It is beyond my powers of comprehension to fathom why Cornell University would want to throw $50K of scarce library funds at funding Gold OA publication (for at most 1% of Cornell's annual journal article output) without first mandating Green OA (for the remaining 99% of Cornell's annual journal article output) at no cost at all.

Yes, $50K is a pittance compared to Cornell's $18M library budget (of which about half is for journal subscriptions, based on ARL statistics for 2006). But wasn't this supposed to be about providing OA to Cornell's research output?

If and when all of Cornell's annual journal article output -- about 7.5K articles per year, according to Web of Science -- is made Green OA by a self-archiving mandate, and all other universities do likewise, the planet will have 100% Green OA to all journal articles. If and when the availability of universal green OA induces institutions to cancel all their journal subscriptions, then Cornell's $9M annual windfall cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay the peer review costs for Gold OA for its annual 7.5K articles. Paying a much higher price per article pre-emptively now, when the relevant funds are still tied up in subscriptions, while not even providing Green OA to 100% of Cornell's own research output, is a real head-shaker.

The only advice I can give is that if Cornell as a whole cannot yet achieve consensus on adopting a university-wide Green OA mandate -- as MIT and other universities have done -- then the wiser of Cornell's Colleges, Schools and Departments could just go ahead and adopt "patchwork mandates" of their own (as Arthur Sale already recommended, presciently, in 2006, and as subsets of Harvard, Stanford, and other universities have recently done).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Against Squandering Scarce Research Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA... 15 May 2009  

Pre-Emptive Gold Fever Strikes Again... 23 Apr 2009  

On Throwing Money At Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA 28 Mar 2009

University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without 8 Mar 2009  

Conflicts of Interest in Open Access... 1 May 2009  

Green OA is no threat to grants: Pre-emptive Gold OA, today, might 24 Jan 2007

More OA Somnambulism: Conflating the Journal Affordability and... 5 Mar 2009  

SCOAP3 and the pre-emptive "flip" model for Gold OA conversion 23 Jun 2008

Harvard's Stuart Shieber on Open Access at CalTech and Berkeley... 17 Apr 2009

Publisher anti-OA Lobby Triumphs in European Commission... 13 Jul 2007

Physics World: The CERN Gold OA Initiative 8 Mar 2007  

On "Open Access" Publishers Who Oppose Open Access Self-Archiving 3 Mar 2007  

Gold and Green Keynotes at IATUL 2007 11 Jun 2007  

Cliff Lynch on Open Access 12 Jan 2007 

Journal Affordability, Research Accessibility, and Open Access 14 Jun 2008  

Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice: I (of 2) 23 Mar 2007  

OA Primer for the Perplexed: I 25 May 2008  

Critique of EPS/RIN/RCUK/DTI "Evidence-Based Analysis of Data..." 8 Oct 2006

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SUMMARY: Trying to morph incoming institutional non-OA journal-fleet subscriptions into outgoing institutional Gold OA journal-fleet "memberships" is incoherent and cannot scale across journals and institutions; alongside an institutional Green OA mandate, however, it is innocuous: The Green mandates will ensure the real, leveraged, scalable, unstoppable progress toward global OA. Without an institutional Green OA mandate, pursuing local Gold OA "memberships" is not only futile but a retardant on real progress toward global OA, creating instead an illusory local sense of progress that further distracts from and obscures what really needs to be done locally to generate global OA.

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On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Ivy Anderson (UCoP) (IA) wrote (about University of California’s (UC’s) arrangement with Springer to renew Springer journals on condition that all UC authors’ articles published in Springer journals are made Gold OA and deposited in UC’s Institutional Repository (eScholarship) by Springer):

IA: “Researchers’ apathy toward voluntary self-deposit (except in narrow disciplines) has begun to be viewed by some as an indicator of indifference – if scholars truly cared (the argument goes), the game should be changing much more rapidly, since they themselves are the true owners of the system.”

It is not quite accurate to say that researchers are apathetic about self-deposits. Rather, most universities and funders (with the exception of the 68 that have already done so) seem to be apathetic (or, more accurately, narcoleptic) about mandating self-deposit (Green OA).

The attitude of researchers themselves has been surveyed in several international, interdisciplinary studies, and their expressed view is consistent:

"The vast majority of authors (81%)...[in a Key Perspectives] international, cross-disciplinary author study on open access [with] 1296 respondents... would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate." (Swan 2005)

These author attitude-survey outcomes have since been confirmed in actual author behavior by Arthur Sale, whose studies have shown that, if (and only if) deposit is actually mandated, authors do indeed self-deposit, and their deposit rates rise from the global spontaneous (i.e., unmandated) rate of c. 15% to approach 100% within about 2 years of the adoption of the Green OA mandate. The 68 university and funder mandates to date are further confirming this (including NIH’s delayed upgrade to a mandate, with deposits up from <5% before the mandate to 60% within the first year of adoption).



The three main reasons researchers are not self-archiving until it is mandated are (1) worries that it might be illegal, (2) worries that it might put acceptance by their preferred journal at risk, and (3) worries that it might take a lot of time. They need Green OA mandates from their institutions and funders not in order to coerce them to self-archive but in order to embolden them to self-archive, making it official policy that it is not only okay for them to deposit their research article output in their institution's repository, but that it is expected of them, and well worth the few minutes worth of extra keystrokes per paper.

UC renewing Springer’s fleet of 2000 journals may have merits of its own, but apart from that it seems a pricey way to spare UC authors’ a few minutes’ worth of (Green OA) keystrokes.

IA: “The same can be said of author-sponsored gold OA (it is not that hard for an editorial board to resign and take its journal elsewhere – at least it should not be, if there were an obvious somewhere else to go).”

But a rather crucial difference is that universities and funders can mandate that their employees and fundees self-deposit, but they cannot mandate that their employees and fundees resign from editiorial boards, nor can they mandate that publishers provide Gold OA, as publishers are neither their employees nor their fundees.

Universities and funders can pay publishers to provide OA, evidently, but it is the wisdom as well as the scalability of that strategy that is at issue here! What looks as if it will work locally for one university, dealing with one publisher, does not scale up to 10,000 universities doing it with the publishers of 25,000 journals, not even for the subset of those journals that each university currently subscribes to: Annual university subscriptions to incoming journals or journal-fleets are fundamentally different from annual university “memberships” in exchange for the publication of outgoing articles: Articles are not published on the basis of an annual journal/publisher quota but on the basis of the individual peer-review outcome, per article, per journal.

IA: “Gold OA journals that require a one-to-one correspondence between ‘membership’ fees and author uptake are beginning to lose library support”

Exactly. (And "memberships" would never have had library support in the first place, if their incoherent scaling scenario had been thought through in advance, as above.)

Librarians have been at the vanguard of the Open Access movement from the beginning, often trying heroically, but in vain, to convince the faculty in other disciplines university-wide to deposit, as well as to convince the university itself to mandate deposit. There is now something the Library Faculty can do on its own, to provide an example for the rest of the university, along the lines of Arthur's Sale's suggestion that rather than just waiting for university-wide mandates, "patchwork mandates" should be adopted at the laboratory, department or faculty level. The Library Faculty at Oregon State University has just shown the way, adopting the planet's first Green OA Mandate by a Library Faculty.

IA: “My own conversations and observations lead me to believe that for most authors, the difficulties and uncertainties, rather than the desirability of the outcome, are the main obstacle. But if academic administrators believe that researchers don’t care, then support for institutional repositories, which entail their own costs, will wither in difficult times. Large acts are needed, ones which place a significant amount of research output on an open access footing in ways that capture people’s interest and imagination. Harvard’s mandate is certainly one such act.”

You seem to have answered your own question: Mandate Green OA, as Harvard did.

And as to difficult times: We're in them! And there are few lower-cost investments for a university today -- a linux server, a piece of free software, a few days sysad set-up time, and a few days a year sysad maintenance time... plus the adoption of a (free of charge) Green OA self-archiving mandate -- that can generate benefits anywhere near the order of magnitude of the benefits of OA.

IA: “UC’s largescale arrangement with a major publisher is another...”

Not unless you can explain how it is to scale from just an ad hoc local arrangement between one university (even one as big as UC) and one (big) fleet-publisher to something that can work for all universities and all journals without dissolving into Escher-drawing incoherence.

IA: “In UC’s arrangement with Springer, UC-authored articles will be deposited in our eScholarship repository. If enough other institutions followed suit (and 3 other European organizations have already preceded us), a large number of papers in those journals will be available in institutional repositories. Some of my librarian colleagues (the ones most skeptical of this experiment) have told me that if that happens, their institutions will cancel, and the system will convulse.”

Please explain to me how paying for Gold OA for a university’s own article output, in a particular journal or journal-fleet, via a university subscription/membership for that journal or journal fleet, will induce cancellations of that journal or journal-fleet: Who will cancel? The nonsubscribing institutions? (They have nothing to cancel.) The subscribing institutions? But then what happens to their own authors’ Gold OA output to that journal or journal-fleet? And what happens to their own users’ need for access to that journal or journal-fleet, if the Gold OA is no longer being paid for? And how do you cancel journals when they are still part Gold OA and part not?

My guess is that not even a small fraction of these awkward contingencies has even been considered by UC, let alone thought-through, in this somnambulistic plunge into institutional gilded OA deals. Nor is it in any publisher’s interest, in negotiating a Big Deal like this, to awaken their client to any of these troublesome complications (since complications concern how that client is to deal with that publisher's competitors, further down the road, once this particular “Big Deal” is no longer the only deal in town...).

Just to clarify: My beef is not at all with Springer, for trying to make the best deal they can. Springer is fully Green on immediate, unembargoed self-archiving by their authors. That means Springer is squarely on the Side of the Angels, insofar as OA is concerned. My beef is with the naivete of the universities who keep somnambulating toward the Escherian glitter without first grasping the green that is within their reach: Mandate Green OA and then make whatever subscription/membership deal you like and can afford. Just don't go for the Gold without first grasping the Green!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

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

First, the important and unproblematic points of agreement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Ian Russell (CEO of ALPSP) is an alumnus of U. Southampton, the institution that designed and adopted the world's first Green OA self-archiving mandate (first as a departmental mandate, then university-wide).
    Ian suggests that his alma mater's mandate is "parasitic" because it is "unfunded." By unfunded, Ian does not mean that Southampton isn't funding its own Institutional Repositories (IRs) (it is); he means that Southampton does not provide funds to pay the costs of publication.
    But of course Southampton (like all other research universities) is already funding the costs of publication: through its journal subscriptions. Subscriptions buy in the research output of other universities; this has nothing to do with mandating the self-archiving of Southampton's own research output.
    If and when all universities mandate self-archiving, and if and when the resultant universal Green OA causes subscriptions to become unsustainable as the means of covering publishing costs, then journals will convert to Gold OA publishing and universities will pay the publication costs for their own research output out of a portion of their windfall subscription cancellation savings. This is already guaranteed by universities' longstanding mandate to "Publish or Perish." (No risk of "parasitism," because otherwise the "parasite" would perish.)
    But for publishers to ask universities to pay publication costs now -- at current asking prices, and while the potential funds are still tied up paying for it via subscriptions -- is either to seek double-dipping or to seek an indefensible hedge against any downsizing and cost-cutting that might be induced by mandated OA.
    OA is optimal and inevitable for research, and feasible right now, through Green OA self-archiving mandates. Both universities and publishers will adapt quite naturally to its sequelae.

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The view of Ian Russell (who is Chief Executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers [ALPSP] and also an alumnus of the University of Southampton) on the subject of the University of Southampton's Green Open Access (OA) Self-Archiving Mandate is presented in a series of exchanges on liblicense.

Ian criticizes the University of Southampton's mandate as "parasitic" because it is "unfunded." By "unfunded," he does not mean that the University of Southampton does not fund its own Institutional Repository (which it of course does -- although it does not cost much); he means that the University of Southampton does not fund the cost of publishing its own research output.

But universities do not fund the cost of publishing their own research output: What universities fund is the cost of publishing other universities' research output. And they fund that through subscriptions, which buy in access to the peer-reviewed research output of other universities. That is called the subscription model for publication cost-recovery, and until recently, it was the universal model.

Recently, a small but growing minority (c. 10%) of journals have made their contents freely accessible online to all users. These are called Open Access (OA) journals, and publishing in them is called the "golden road" to OA -- the self-archiving of non-OA journal articles being the "green road" to OA (and that, not Gold OA, is what Southampton, Harvard and the other universities are mandating).

Moreover, as Peter Suber frequently points out, the majority of this minority of Gold OA journals still recovers costs on the subscription (or subsidy) model too. Fewer than half of them levy publication fees, which are then paid for either by the author's research funder or the author -- or, in the case of special "membership" agreements with BioMed Central journals or consortial agreements with SCOAP3 journals, the author's university.

Ian Russell is looking for an advance guarantee from universities that mandate Green OA self-archiving that they will pay Gold OA publishing costs. It is not clear whether he means that they should guarantee to pay publishing costs right now, or that they should guarantee to pay publishing costs if and when subscriptions were ever to collapse. By way of support, Ian cites the Wellcome Trust, which makes such a guarantee to pay, right now.

Either way, such a guarantee certainly is not forthcoming from universities now, nor should it be.

Wellcome, as a research funder, has mandated self-archiving of the research that it funds and has also offered to pay Gold OA publishing costs out of some of those research funds, under current conditions, at current asking prices (when subscriptions certainly have not collapsed).

Universities, however, are not, like Wellcome, research funders. Universities are research fundees and research providers. They also subscribe to journals. As such, they are currently paying for publication costs via journal subscriptions, which have not collapsed.

As noted, when universities mandate self-archiving, they are mandating the self-archiving of their own (refereed) research output. When they pay journal subscriptions, they are buying in the refereed research output of other universities.

If and when journal subscriptions ever do collapse, what that means is that universities will no longer be paying them, and hence that those annual windfall savings will become available to universities to pay the publication costs of their own refereed research output. And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.

(I say "only a portion of those windfall savings," because "publication" will then [i.e., "post-collapse"] mean only peer review implementation costs, not all of the other products and services that subscriptions are paying for today: producing and distributing the print edition, producing and licensing the online PDF edition, fulfillment, archiving, advertising. The post-collapse costs of publication -- peer review alone -- will be much lower.)

In other words, there is nothing for universities to guarantee to pay today, when subscriptions are still sustainable, and still covering all publishing costs, including peer review. And they certainly don't yet have any extra loose change from cancellations to pay the current asking price for Gold OA.

So let's wait for the hypothesized subscription collapse -- if and when it comes -- to free up the universities' funds to pay the cost of having their own research output peer-reviewed and certified as such by the journal's title and track record. Until then, those costs are being covered by existing subscriptions, and the only thing missing is not fee-guarantees but open access -- which is exactly what university self-archiving mandates (like that of Ian Russell's alma mater, Southampton) are intended to ensure (but Harvard's mandate is not one to sneeze at either!)

[To repeat: What it is that urgently needs to be ensured today is open access -- certainly not publishers' revenues, based on the current cost-recovery model and at current asking prices. Publishing is a service to research, not vice versa.]

I close with some quote/comments. (All quotes are from Ian Russell [IR]):

IR: "If we can agree that wide-spread archiving will mean that established subscription income will decline, then surely funds have to be unambiguously made available for the only other show in town: author-side payment."

Funds have to be made available now? while they are still tied up in paying subscriptions? If you are not talking about double-dipping, Ian, then you need to explain where this double-funding is meant to come from -- and why -- in advance of the decline. (For the decline itself will be what releases the requisite funds, if and when it happens.)

And is it "decline" we were talking about, or collapse? (I.e., the subscription model becoming no longer sustainable to cover the true cost of publishing in the OA era.)

For if we are only talking about demand declining here, rather than (as I had thought) about its becoming unsustainable, then the natural response would seem to be publisher cost-cutting, by downsizing to the essentials that are still in demand, rather than guaranteed props for sustaining all the products and services that are currently co-bundled into the published journal subscription, at current prices. Demand-decline is a signal that some products and services are becoming superfluous in the OA era, rather than a signal that they must continue to be provided and paid for at all costs.

IR: "We can't have it both ways and say that subscriptions will still pay the bills AND that cancellations (and hence cost savings) are inevitable."

But we can say that if and when subscriptions are cancelled, universities will have the windfall savings out of which to pay the bills in the new way. (And the cost-cutting and downsizing are just as likely as the cancellations; indeed, they are the flip side of the very same coin.)

If you don't mind my saying so, Ian, you do seem to be more inclined to herald only the bleak side of this prophecy (subscription collapse) rather than its bright side (windfall savings out of which to pay for peer review). And you seem all too ready to see daily research usage and impact continue to be lost as a consequence, unless universities somehow ante up extra funds today to cover everything being supplied at today's asking prices, regardless of demand (while you continue to disavow advocating double-dipping)...

That sounds like a hedge against whatever might turn out to be the real needs of research and researchers in the OA era.

IR: "As regards "double-dipping", it is important not to conflate the issues for an individual journal or research institution with those of the system as a whole."

Agreed. But am I doing the conflating, Ian, or are you? An individual university's Green OA self-archiving mandate (like Southampton's, or Harvard's) has nothing to do with either any individual journal (whether subscription or Gold OA) or the system as a whole.

If and when all universities mandate self-archiving (as I hope they all soon will), that in turn may or may not eventually make subscriptions unsustainable. If it does, then it will also (eo ipso and pari passu) have released the funds to pay for publication on the Gold OA model, subscriptions having become unsustainable -- but not before. There is still plenty of room for some PostGutenberg downsizing, cost-cutting and adaptation before that.

What we will have before any of that hypothetical adaptation, however, is OA itself (which is already long, long overdue), in the form of universal (because mandated) Green OA.

IR: "I don't believe that the PLoS journals could be accused of double-dipping..."

Certainly not. But what do Gold OA journals have to do with university Green OA self-archiving mandates?

IR: "...nor journals that reduce their subscription prices in line with the number of articles published under an author-side payment system."

Ian, I regret that not only would I never recommend buying-in to such a hedged price lock-in system, but I do not for a moment believe that any journal is sincerely putting it into practice. It is just a notion. McDonald's could make the same offer, that if their clients' employers agree to buy into Gold Open Access burgers, free for all, they'll reduce the burger selling price for their remaining direct clients proportionately.

No, if there's going to be a conversion from institutional subscriptions to institutional publication fees, let those fees be shaped by cost-cutting pressure from the PostGutenberg Green OA economies: That pressure will arise from the university mandates to self-archive their own published research, and to provide their own institutional repositories to take over the load and cost of distribution, access-provision and archiving in the OA era -- rather than publishers continuing to co-bundle those goods and services into their current product at their current asking price.

IR: "Why should PLoS lose out because Southampton University (for example) refuses to cover author-side payment fees?"

With respect, I cannot see at all how a Gold OA journal like PLoS is losing out because Southampton is mandating Green OA self-archiving for its own research output! Those researchers who can afford to publish in PLoS journals today, and wish to, can and will.

(Moreover, as far as I know, PLoS is a supporter of self-archiving mandates -- and not just those by funders who offer to pay for today's Gold OA publication fees. And after the "Fall," PLoS too will be able to downsize to the reduced cost of just providing the service of peer review and no more.)

IR: "I am asking institutions not to mandate deposit of research that has been peer-reviewed by a journal, yes, because it is parasitic on the journals system (irrespective of business model) and I do not see how they can claim the right to do so."

And the obvious reply is that it will only be parasitic if and when subscriptions collapse, should institutions then still refuse to pay for publication. (But then of course the parasite will perish, because it will not be able to publish, unless it is ready to use some of its windfall subscription savings to pay for it.)

Until then, institutions have every right to mandate providing open access to their own peer-reviewed research output, whose peer-review costs are all being fully covered by subscriptions today. Nothing in the least bit parasitic about that.

IR: "As I have said repeatedly in this exchange so long as the system is paying for the certification elements of scholarly exchange I have no problem."

Well, the system is indeed still paying for it, Ian, so I have no choice but to conclude that you have no problem!

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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SUMMARY: Jan Velterop (of Springer Open Choice) argues that the money being spent today on journal subscriptions needs to be "re-routed" to paying for Open Access journal publishing instead. If that is indeed a desirable outcome, then supporting the many actual and proposed Open Access self-archiving mandates worldwide today is the best way to facilitate that outcome. Meanwhile, it will also generate 100% Open Access, a desirable outcome in and of itself.

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Jan Velterop [JV] (Springer Open Choice), wrote, in "Open access, quo vadis?":

JV: "Now that alternatives for the term 'self-archiving' are being suggested -- presumably in an attempt to increase the number of self-archivers --"

Actually, alternative terms are not needed, and will not be adopted, and the reason alternatives were even being mentioned was because of the distracting and irrelevant associations with preservation-archiving of originals, rather than access-archiving of supplementary copies (authors' final refereed drafts) of journal articles.

JV: "it may be time to face up to some uncomfortable truths. Let's be honest, open access is just not all that attractive to individual researchers when they publish their articles."

If that were indeed true, it would of course be just as uncomfortable a truth for Open Access journals as for Open Access self-archiving. But I think it is very far from being true! (Isn't OA what 34,000 researchers, for example, signed the PLoS Open Letter to demand in 2001?)

Jan is conflating two separate things here, both of which researchers indeed do find unattractive, but neither of which is Open Access (OA) itself: (1) paying OA journal publication charges and (2) doing the keystrokes to OA self-archive.

In reality, researchers find it no more nor less attractive to provide OA to their publications than they find it attractive to publish at all: For let us not forget that without "publish or perish" mandates, Springer's journals would be a lot thinner in content!

Fortunately, the publish-or-perish mandate can be naturally extended, in the online age, to "publish and self-archive" -- in order to maximize each article's usage and citation impact. Both publications and citations are already being counted and rewarded by researchers' employers and funders today, and the two JISC author surveys by Swan & Brown (plus several subsequent replications as well as concrete implementations) have confirmed that about 95% of authors will comply with self-archiving mandates (81% of them willingly, only 14% of them reluctantly).

Swan, A. (2005) Open access self-archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.

Nor (as the surveys likewise show) is it the case that OA is not attractive to researchers (and Jan too had better hope that's not the case!). It is the case that many researchers still don't know about OA, and that many of those who do know still think OA means they would have to publish in journals other than their currently preferred ones.

Researchers are mistaken, of course, on both counts. Researchers' first mistake is unawareness that with journals that offer Open Choice there is no need for them to switch journals: they are given the option to pay their chosen journal to provide OA for their article. Researchers' second mistake is that there is no need for them (or their institutions or their funders) to pay for Open Choice either, because authors can self-archive their own published articles.

It may be the combination of these truths that causes Jan's heartache:

JV: "I say that with pain in my heart, but we have, as proponents of open access, singularly failed to get enough support among researchers. Not for want of trying. The proposition is simply not strong enough."

Yes, telling researchers about OA and its benefits -- whether gold OA publishing or green OA self-archiving -- is not enough to induce more than about 5% - 25% of researchers to go ahead and provide OA, either way. That's why OA mandates from their institutions and funders are needed to induce researchers to do it, for their own (and the public) good, just as mandates were needed to induce them to publish at all, for their own (and the public) good.

But only OA self-archiving can be mandated: OA publishing cannot be mandated (1) until enough publishers offer at least the Open Choice option and (far more important) (2) until the cash that is currently tied up in paying for institutional journal subscriptions is freed so it can be "re-routed" to pay for institutional OA publishing costs.

So instead of feeling a pain in his heart, Jan should be vigorously supporting OA self-archiving mandates because (a) they are sure to provide immediate (at least 95%) OA and (b) if they ever do cause substantial subscription cancellations, they will free up the cash to be re-routed to pay for OA publishing.

JV: "That doesn't, of course, make open access any less desirable. But researchers, as we all, do live in an ego-system and the strength of a person's interest in anything seems to diminish with at least the square of the distance (metaphorical or otherwise) to his or her id."

How far are citation-counts from a researcher's ego or id?

But it is not ego that's keeping researchers from performing the few extra keystrokes it takes per article (over and above the keystrokes to write it) to self-archive it: it's ergo and igno: ergonomic inertia together with ignorance about how few keystrokes and how little time are actually involved in self-archiving:

Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.

Researchers who have never self-archived imagine that it takes a lot of time and trouble. In reality it does not. The self-archiving mandates will see to it that researchers discover for themselves how little effort it entails, for such a substantial benefit (to themselves).

JV: "The benefits of open access 'to science' are apparently pretty distant to an average researcher."

But his own citation impact is not.

JV: "Now, I know that the case has been made that there are benefits at closer proximity to researchers' ids, such as increased citations to their articles, but they seem, grosso modo, wholly underwhelmed by those."

(1) More underinformed than underwhelmed (but time is remedying that).

(2) Information about personal benefits alone, however, is not enough to induce researchers to provide OA, any more than information about the personal benefits of publishing alone is enough to induce them to publish. The carrot/stick of "publish or perish" was needed for the one, and its natural online-age extension to OA self-archiving is now needed for the other.

(3) On the other hand, researchers' institutions and funders seem to be less "underwhelmed" about the benefits of OA self-archiving than the researchers themselves, for they (RCUK, FRPAA, NIH, CURES, EC, CERN, and several individual universities) are evidently inclined to mandate it

(4) Who is opposing the mandates? Not researchers: publishers.

(5) Where does Jan (with all the pain in his heart) stand on self-archiving mandates?

JV: "So what now? Mandates, it appears. From the funders -- organisations in charge of the scholarly super-ego, as it were. They have the power to impose OA on their grantees, and maybe the duty. And as they mostly pay the bill for library subscriptions anyway (indirectly, via overhead charges of institutions, but they pay nonetheless), they could simply re-route that money to OA article processing charges and reform publishing in the process. They may still, and follow the excellent leadership of the Wellcome Trust in this regard."

But dear Jan, the message does not seem to be sinking in: It is not OA publishing that funders are proposing to mandate, it is OA self-archiving. And there is no money (nor need) to "re-route" while it is all tied up in paying the bills for publication via subscriptions!

JV: "There seems to be one thing standing in the way. Conflation of financial concerns with open access is, unfortunately, a major barrier to open access."

Whose financial concerns? Whose conflation? Research funders and institutions are proposing to mandate OA self-archiving, and publishers are opposing it, claiming it puts their finances at risk. So what, exactly, is the "major barrier" to OA at this moment?

JV: "If open access were a real priority, in other words, if the starting point would not so much be cost evasion, but the principle that for the amounts now spent on scholarly literature one could, and should, have open access, and if a widespread willingness were displayed on the part of funders and librarians to help flip the model, then I'm thoroughly convinced we would be much, much further with open access."

"Cost evasion"? When, as you say, correctly, "the amounts now spent on scholarly literature" are tied up in subscriptions? Isn't it closer to reality to say that this is, if anything, "re-routing evasion," since the costs are all being paid?

Let me translate what you are saying, Jan: If all publishers converted to Open Choice, and if all institutions cancelled all their subscriptions, then there would be plenty of cash to pay for taking the paid-OA option. But this is evidently not happening, and it cannot be mandated. "Re-routing" cannot be mandated.

Self-archiving, however, can be mandated. And perhaps it will eventually lead to the same outcome ("re-routing"). But before that it will certainly lead to the OA that is already long overdue.

It is not a matter of springing still more cash, in advance, to pay for OA, at a time when journals are already making ends meet via subscriptions. The available cash is all tied up; moreover, there's no need for further cash: There's need for further OA. And that's what OA self-archiving mandates will deliver, now.

Moreover, re-routing is not the goal of OA or the OA movement: OA is!

JV: "And as for financial concerns, inherent in an author-side payment model is a much clearer scope for real competition, and that will put downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on efficiencies as any economist will tell us. Putting the horse before the cart might be a good idea, for a change."

Fine, but first we would have to get from here to there. And there -- i.e., OA publishing -- is not the pressing goal: OA is. And that is what OA self-archiving mandates will provide. The horse is OA, which can be mandated through self-archiving mandates. The cart (publishing reform) is hypothetical, but if the cart ever does get re-routed in that direction, surely it will be driven by the horse (the self-archiving mandate) not by a re-routing mandate!

JV: "There is of course the hypothesis, consistently put forward by Stevan Harnad (and Stevan is nothing if not consistent, you have to give him that), that we can have OA without reforming publishing and without damaging journals."

Jan, you are (knowingly or unknowingly) misrepresenting what I have been saying all along, despite the frequency (and consistency) with which I have been pointing out this published set of conditional probabilities, over and over, for years and years now:

What I have been consistently saying is that we can have immediate (and long-overdue) OA (e.g., by mandating self-archiving), right now, without having to first reform publishing. What subsequent effect that will in turn have on publishing is an empirical question, to which no one has a sure answer, so all we can do is speculate (see above link). I personally think 100% OA self-archiving will eventually lead to subscription cancellations and a transition (your "flip") to OA publishing.

So what is your point, Jan?

JV: "Consistent, but unfortunately, that doesn't make it right. In his world of self-archiving, all peer-reviewed and formally published articles would be freely available with open access -- although perhaps in an informal version, but still -- and librarians would continue to pay for subscriptions to keep journals afloat."

That is again an incorrect statement of my view. What I have said is:

(1) All evidence to date indicates that mandated self-archiving will generate 100% OA (1a) and will increase research usage and impact (1b).

(2) There is no evidence to date that it will decrease subscriptions, but it may or may not eventually do that.

(3) If mandated self-archiving ever does decrease subscriptions sufficiently to make it impossible to make ends meet via institutional subscriptions, it will then also have increased the institutional subscription cancellation savings that can be "re-routed" to pay for OA publishing.

But (2) and (3) are hypothetical speculations whereas (1) is a certainty. And (most important), a certainty whose demonstrated benefits are not outweighed by the hypothetical risk to publishers' subscription revenues.

JV: "As evidence he puts forward that having effectively had a physics archive in which published articles have been available freely for a decade and a half or so, this has not discernibly reduced the willingness of librarians to keep paying for subscriptions to the journals with the very same material. And indeed, he makes very plausible that in physics, over the last decade and a half, there has been no damage to journals. But then he extrapolates."

I do not extrapolate. I say (truly) that there is no evidence as yet of self-archiving's decreasing subscription revenues; but if and when it ever does, the system will adapt naturally, with institutional subscription cancellation savings being "re-routed" toward institutional OA publication costs.

JV: "And although Stevan may even turn out to be right -- only hindsight will tell and we have to keep an open mind on that -- for societies and other publishers just to take his word for it or even his 'evidence' that his extrapolations are valid, would be a serious dereliction of fiduciary duty, and sooo unnecessary. Because with some political will, publishing can be reformed, and reformed very quickly, without damage, or even the threat of damage, to anyone. And thus the problems could be fundamentally solved instead of treated with sticky-plasters such as OA through self-archiving (great as institutional repositories otherwise are)."

May I make a proposal? Go ahead and reform publishing! But in the meanwhile, please let OA self-archiving be mandated, so that researchers can have their long-awaited OA, ending at last their needless, cumulative research usage and impact losses, and so that any further adaptations, if there are indeed to be any, can take their natural course in the OA era.

Publishers should stop delaying and disparaging the OA self-archiving mandate and re-route their energy and attention toward publishing reform. Then everyone will be happy: Researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the public that funds them will be happy with their maximized research access, usage and impact, and publishers, with whatever they wish to do toward re-routing publishing toward another cost-recovery model.

Let one not stand in the way of the other.

PS There is perhaps also something to be said in defence of consistency (and clarity too): One cannot both affirm and deny the very same thing, no matter how one blurs it and how wishfully one thinks...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum