Open Access Archivangelism

Another university has committed some of its (scarce) resources to subsidizing costly Gold OA publishing of some of its refereed research output without first mandating cost-free Green OA self-archiving of all of its refereed research output.

University of Michigan is the 9th university to commit to COPE. Only two (Harvard and MIT) of the nine COPE signatories to date are among the 170 institutions, departments and funders that have already mandated Green OA self-archiving for all of their refereed research output. The other seven COPE signatories should first emulate Harvard and MIT on providing Green, before provisioning Gold.

For the record: An institution or funder committing to COPE (or SCOAP3 or pre-emptive Gold OA "Membership" deals) is fine after the institution or funder has already mandated Green OA self-archiving of all of its refereed research output; but it is both wasteful and counterproductive before (or instead):

Please Commit To Providing Green OA Before Committing... 15 Sep 2009

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

In "How much does a COPE-compliant open-access fund cost?", Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard's historic faculty consensus on mandating Green Open Access Self-Archiving, has explained that the purpose of the "Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity" (COPE) commitment of funds to pay Gold OA publishing costs is (1) to provide a "safety net" for publishers, that (2) COPE does not fund hybrid Gold or (3) double-dipping, and that (4) the amount of money involved is trivial. Stuart accordingly asks that "harangues [in particular from me!] about open-access funds amounting to throwing away large quantities of valuable dollars [should] please stop now."

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For what it’s worth, my objections to COPE are not based on double-dipping, nor on the amount committed; they are not even based on COPE per se. They are based on committing to COPE without first committing to mandating Green OA.

It is good that COPE does not propose to fund hybrid Gold (where the journal continues to get paid for subscriptions, and also gets paid for those articles that pay extra to be made OA). That’s double-dipping — though the publishers can (and some do) reply (in words to the effect) that:

“No, it’s not double-dipping, it’s just a safety net, in case the market ever swings toward Gold: For now, we will reduce our subscriptions proportionately, to reflect any Gold OA revenues. If and when the transition is complete, it’s complete: all revenues come from Gold OA fees, zero from subscriptions. Never any double-dipping.” [not a real quote]

A safety net to preserve current revenue streams, regardless of their source.

No, the ones who are double-dripping (sic) are the institutions, who are spending money on buying in subscriptions, and -- whether they pay for hybrid Gold or pure-gold COPE journals (e.g., in the Springer/BMC “Membership" Deal) -- also spending money on Gold (scarce money, reputedly, given the years of agonizing over the serials crisis and journal price inflation).

But even that would not matter, if the institutions were just to mandate Green OA first.

But committing to paying for Gold OA of any description without first mandating Green OA strikes me as a real head-shaker. (Of the eight universities Stuart lists as having committed to pay [something] for Gold OA, only two -- Harvard and MIT -- have mandated Green OA.)

What we need today is OA, not safety nets for publishers. Green OA mandates will bring us OA: 100% OA. Instead fiddling pre-emptively with the future of publishing will not.

Stuart has made such a brilliant, unique contribution to OA in orchestrating Harvard’s historic Green OA mandate. I continue to feel perplexed as to to why he is squandering any of his considerable expertise and influence at this critical juncture on persuading universities to squander their scarce resources (no matter how minimally) on pre-emptive Gold (as a publishers’ safety net) without first persuading them to follow his own gloriously Green example first (which was to mandate Green OA first, and then commit to spending some money on Gold OA).

Upon reflection, I remember that Stuart has actually given a hint of why he has become so preoccupied with Gold: Because one of the obstacles he had encountered in convincing faculty to vote-in a Green OA mandate by consensus, as Harvard FAS did, was (some) authors’ worries about publishers’ future.

So maybe the preoccupation with creating a safety net for publishers is really for the (sense of) safety of authors, so they are more likely to vote-in a Green OA mandate by consensus?

But the Harvard FAS’s historic consensus on Green OA came before any commitment to a Gold safety net. And the same is true of the over 150 other Green OA mandates worldwide to date (though most were adopted by presidential or provostial wisdom, rather than waiting for faculty to come to any consensus).

Wouldn’t a less costly and circuitous way of calming individuals’ concerns about the safety of publishers under Green OA mandates be to point out that if subscription publishing were ever caused to become unsustainable because of the availability of Green OA, the vast sums of money that institutions are now spending on subscriptions would then by the very same token be released as the “safety net” to pay for the conversion to Gold OA?

Does the first step really have to be pre-emptive payment, even token payment, rather than just going ahead and mandating the Green and letting the future of publishing take care of itself -- while the research community takes care of getting its research into the hands of all its intended users at long last, instead of just those whose institutions can afford a subscription?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Professor Robert Darnton of Harvard University has given a splendid (if a trifle US-centric, indeed Harvard-centric!) talk at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University.

Caveat 1: Journal Articles Versus Books. Professor Darnton's three jeremiads (one on journal articles, two on books) are all spot-on -- but best kept separate, partly because only journal articles are, strictly speaking, Open Access (OA) issues, but mostly because the journal article access problem already has a straightforward solution -- and Harvard was the first university in the US (though only the 16th worldwide!) to adopt it: Mandating "Green" OA self-archiving of all journal articles published by its authors.

In contrast, book OA cannot be mandated, for the simple reason that all journal article authors already wish to give away their articles free for all users online, rather than leaving them accessible only to users at universities that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which they were published; this is far from being true of the authors of all or even most books. Hence trying to treat or even conceptualize journal article access and book access as the same problem would handicap the journal article access problem -- which already has a simple, immediate, and complete solution (OA mandates) -- with the complications of the book access problem, which does not.

Caveat 2: The "Give-Away/Buy-Back" Argument. Nor does it diminish the importance and effectiveness of the mandate solution to the journal article access problem which Harvard has so successfully championed that one of the arguments many (including Professor Darnton) have invoked in its favour happens to be specious. The need and wish on the part of the authors of refereed journal articles (for the sake of both research progress and the progress of their own careers) to make them accessible to all would-be users -- rather then leaving them accessible only to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe -- is already decisive. There is no need to add to it the "we give it to publishers for free and then we have to buy it back" argument, because it's just not valid:

When a university subscribes to a journal, it does not do so in order to buy back its own published research articles: It does so in order to buy in the research articles published by other universities! In that respect, the transaction is the same as it is with books -- except that book authors may be seeking royalties whereas journal articles are not.

So this specious argument -- though it does well express the frustrations of university libraries because of the way their swelling annual serials budgets keep cannibalizing their book budgets -- is not needed in order to make the case for mandating journal article OA: The fact that mandating journal article OA is feasible and effective, that it maximizes article usage and impact, and that it is beneficial and desirable to all journal article authors is already argument enough, and decisive.

Caveat 3: Funding Gold OA Without Mandating Green OA. Similarly unnecessary is continued worry about university journal budgets -- once universities universally follow Harvard's example and mandate Green OA self-archiving. For once all journal articles are freely accessible online, whether and when to cancel unaffordable journals is no longer the agonizing problem it is now: The inelastic need is satisfied by the Green OA version, hence the subscription demand (and the resultant cannibalization of book budgets by journal budgets) is no longer inelastic.

In addition to its Green OA self-archiving mandate, Harvard has also launched the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), a commitment to provide some money to pay the costs of Harvard authors who wish to publish in "Gold" OA journals (journals that make their articles OA). The purpose of funding COPE is to encourage publishers to make a transition to Gold Open Access publishing. This is commendable, but it needs to be noted that it is not really urgent or necessary at this time, when journal publication is still being abundantly funded by universities' annual subscriptions -- which cannot be cancelled until and unless Green OA first prevails!

So committing spare funds that Harvard may have available to pay for Gold OA for some of Harvard's article output is of course welcome, given that Harvard has already mandated Green OA for all of its article output. But alas COPE has now inspired membership by other universities that are emulating Harvard only in committing funds to pay for Gold OA, not in mandating Green OA, thinking that they are thereby doing their bit for OA! The Harvard model would be much more useful for the universities worldwide that are keen to emulate it if it were made clear that COPE should only be committed as a supplement for a Green OA mandate, not as a substitute for it. (See some of my own jeremiads on this matter.)

Fortunately, Concordia University, the host for this Congress, has adopted a Green OA mandate before even thinking about whether or not it has any extra cash to commit to COPE!

(If and when universal Green OA frees universities to cancel journals, it will by the same token free that windfall cancellation cash to pay for Gold OA.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Historians will look back on our planet's glacially slow transition to the optimal and inevitable outcome for refereed research dissemination in the online era -- free online access webwide -- and will point out the irony of the fact that we were so much quicker to commit scarce money to trying to reform publishing ("Gold OA") through projects like SCOAP3 and COPE than we were to commit to providing free online access ("Green OA") to our own research output (by depositing it in our institutional repositories, and mandating that it be deposited) at no extra cost at all.

Here is just the latest instance:

"SCOAP3 support in the United States almost complete!… So far, over 150 U.S. libraries and library consortia have pledged a total of over 3.2 Million dollars to the SCOAP3 initiative. This is almost the entire contribution expected from partners in the United States. Worldwide, SCOAP3 partners in 24 countries collectively pledged around 7 Million Euros. These pledges represent about 70% of the SCOAP3 funding envelope, and the initiative is getting close to its next steps to convert to Open Access the entire literature of the field of High-Energy Physics."

Yet (mark my words) it will be Green OA self-archiving -- and Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders -- that actually bring us universal OA at long last, and not the limited and ineffectual "gold fever" that is "freeing" (already-free) high energy physics (SCOAP3) -- climbing toward 100% OA since 1991 and effectively there since about a decade now! -- nor the COPE commitment on the part of universities to pay to make a small portion of their own research output Gold OA -- without first committing to make all of it Green OA, cost-free.

[University presidents and provosts especially seem to be quite quick to sign open letters in support of their government's adopting an open access mandate, yet much slower to adopt an open access mandate for their own institutions!]

"Never Pay Pre-Emptively For Gold OA Before First Mandating Green OA"

"On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse"

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

"Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity [COPE]: Mistaking intent for action?"

"Putting Principled Support Into Practice: What Provosts Need to Mandate"

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

My gratitude to Iryna Kuchma for having pointed out my error, and my sincere apologies to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for having thought otherwise, even for a moment! (I ought to have known, for I had registered the CAS mandate and announced it on 19 August 2009!)

Unlike the Netherlands, U California, U. Goettingen, Max-Planck Institutes, the COPE members, and indeed SCOAP3, the Chinese Academy of Sciences did indeed first mandate Green OA, before committing to pay for Gold OA.

This policy is exemplary and unexceptionable. Let's hope the rest of the world will follow it. (And shame on me for having imagined otherwise!)

Commentary on "Why did OASPA admit the BMJ Group and OUP? and other questions about membership" (Caroline Sutton, Director, OASPA):

From the bylaws of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA):

"To be considered an OA scholarly publisher and eligible for full membership... the Publisher must... Publish at least one OA journal that regularly publishes original research or scholarship, all of which is OA... [which] includes... Copyright holders allow users to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship..." [i.e., "libre" OA]

Now let us look at what these criteria imply: Full OASPA membership for BMJ, for example, is perhaps arguable, because all refereed research articles in the flagship BMJ are OA and hybrid OA is available as an option for all 27 BMJ journals, but all BMJ authors are also free to provide immediate Green OA by self-archiving. In contrast, Oxford University Press (OUP) publishes 246 journals, only 6 of them full Gold OA; the rest of the OUP journals embargo Green OA self-archiving by authors for a year (90 of them offering authors the generous "option" of paying to do it immediately, if they pay OUP's hybrid Gold OA fee). (In contrast, Cambridge University Press (CUP) offers paid hybrid Gold OA for 15 journals, but endorses immediate Green OA self-archiving for every single one of its 283 journals. In other words, CUP hybrid Gold is a noncoercive OA option for authors who want to pay for hybrid Gold OA; OUP's is not. All CUP authors are free to provide immediate Green OA to their articles by self-archiving them; OUP authors are not. Yet OUP is a "full member" of OASPA and CUP is not.)

It is exceedingly difficult to see the value to OA itself of the following: 

(1) OASTP officially includes, as "full members" of its "OA Scholarly Publishers Association," publishers that oppose immediate OA Self-Archiving by their authors. (Such publishers can now even proudly advertise themselves as "full OA" journal publishers in good standing if they publish one single libre Gold OA journal while forbidding Green OA self-archiving for their other 999 journals.)

(2) OASTP officially excludes from full membership in its "OA Scholarly Publishers Association" publishers every one of whose 999 journals are "gratis" Gold OA, perhaps not even charging a penny for it, as not being "full OA" journal publishers in good standing, because they are not "libre" Gold OA.

Richard Poynder seems to have been right (again): "officially" sanctioning this perverse play on words will not only: 

(a) allow being an "OA publisher," "Gold OA publisher" and "full OA" publisher in good standing to be touted and promoted in a self-interested, word-bending way by publishers that are just about as far from being OA as a publisher can be,

(b) prevent publishers that are genuinely "full OA" publishers -- fully gratis OA, hence fully Gold, and hence fully Green, for all their journals, hence fully OA on any rational construal of "full OA publisher" -- from calling themselves "full OA publishers" in good standing, and

(c) add yet another unwelcome layer to the confusion about the meaning of "OA" as well as of being an "OA publisher" that we owe to the premature, persistent and counterproductive profusion of gold dust and publishing-economics in place of OA.

Full members should only be publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA (and all of whose journals are Green OA); otherwise just "Associate" members. (And gratis OA journal publishers should either be full OASPA members or we should stop repeating the slogan that "most OA journals do not charge for publication.")

Of course it is the publisher that represents the journal.  But reserving full OASPA membership for publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA would rule out the obvious abuse of "full OA" status by a publisher that publishes a fleet of 1000 journals, only one of them OA, yet is currently entitled to call itself an official "OA publisher" in virtue of full membership in good standing in OASPA. Such a publisher would then simply be an Associate Member of OASPA. (An independent journal, by the way, not associated with a "publishing house,"  is simply its own publisher.) That would remedy abuse of full membership status by non-OA and anti-OA publishers.

But to remedy the very meaning of OA and OA journal, it would be just as important to admit as full members the publishers of (all or mostly) gratis OA journals (including gratis OA journals that do not charge either authors or their institutions/funders for publication, but make ends meet from subscriptions or subsidy). Yes, fee-free gratis OA journals represent a different "business model," but nevertheless they are "fully" OA in every OA-relevant respect.

(It also seems fine to accept hybrid Gold OA publishers as Associate Members, given that the Association's interest seems to be primarily in OA publishing business models rather than OA itself.) 

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Gold OA institutional "membership" is incoherent and does not scale. It only gives the illusion of making sense if you think of it locally, and myopically. Annual institutional subscriptions to journals containing the annual outgoing refereed research of all other institutions do not morph into annual institutional memberships for publishing each institution's own outgoing refereed research. There are 25,000 journals and 10,000 institutions! Is every single institution to commit and contract in advance to pay for its authors' (potential) fraction of annual submissions to every single journal? Is that a "membership" or a distributed dismemberment? And is every journal to commit and contract in advance to accept every institution's annual fraction of submissions? (Is that peer review?) This is a global oligopolistic illusion that would fit publishers just about as well as it would fit McDonalds, except there are at least 25,000 different journals to "join", and institutions each have thousands of author-consumers with diverse dietary needs, varying day to day and year to year.

Part of the illusion of coherence comes from thinking in terms of journal-fleet publishers instead of individual journal article submissions. But this is merely another variant of the "Big Deal" strategy that has done nothing to solve either the accessibility or the affordability problem. The reality is that (Gold) OA publishing is premature today, except as a proof of principle. What is needed first is for universal (Green) OA self-archiving mandates to be adopted by institutions and funders. That will provide universal (Green) OA, which may eventually generate cancellation pressure that will induce journals to cut obsolete costs and products/services by downsizing to just providing peer review, paid for by individual institutions on an individual outgoing article basis out of a fraction of their annual windfall savings from their institutional subscription cancellations. To buy into "memberships" with fleet publishers now, pre-emptively, and at current prices, while the money is still tied up in subscriptions (which cannot, of course, be cancelled in advance, before OA) is both penny- and pound-foolish -- and downright absurd if a "member" institution has not even first mandated Green OA self-archiving for all of its own refereed research output...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

Professor Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard has done a JISC podcast interview about Harvard's historic success in achieving faculty consensus on the adoption of an Open Access (OA) mandate in a number of Harvard's faculties.

Professor Darnton's podcast is highly recommended. Just a few (minor) points of clarification:

1. Public Access. Although worldwide public access to universities' refereed research output is a desirable and welcome side-benefit of OA and OA mandates, a lot of research is, as Prof. Darnton points out, "esoteric," intended for and of direct interest only to specialists. It is the scholarly and scientific research progress that this maximized peer-to-peer access makes possible that confers the primary public benefit of OA. Pubic access and student/teacher access are secondary bonuses.

2. NIH Compliance Rate. Prof. Darnton referred to the very low (4%) rate of compliance with the NIH public access policy: That figure refers to the compliance rate during the first two years, when the NIH policy was merely a request and not a requirement. Once the NIH policy was upgraded to a mandate, similar to Harvard's, the compliance rate rose to 60% and is still climbing. (Achieving consensus on mandate adoption and achieving compliance with mandate requirements are not the same issue; nor is the question of which mandate to adopt.)

3. Covering Gold OA Publication Fees. As Prof. Darnton notes, the Harvard mandate (a "Green OA" mandate for Harvard authors to deposit -- in Harvard's OA Institutional Repository -- all their peer-reviewed final drafts of articles, published in any journal, whether a conventional subscription journal or a "Gold OA" journal) is about providing OA to Harvard's research output today, not about converting journals to Gold OA -- although Prof. Darnton anticipates that in perhaps a decade this may happen too. He and Professor Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard's successful consensus on adoption, both feel that it helps win author consensus and compliance -- to reassure those authors who may be worried about the future viability of their preferred journals -- to make some funds available to pay for Gold OA publication fees, should that be necessary. (This policy is just fine for a university, like Harvard, that has already mandated Green OA, but if Harvard's example is to be followed, universities should make sure first to mandate Green, rather than only offering to subsidize Gold pre-emptively.)

4. Journal Article Output vs. Book Output. The Harvard OA mandate covers journal article output, not book output. It would of course be a welcome outcome if eventually OA mandates made it possible for universities to save money on journal subscriptions, which could then be used to purchase books. But it must be clearly understood that not only does the OA mandate not touch books, but the economics of book publication are very different from the economics of journal publication, so even an eventual universal transition to Gold OA journal publication does not entail a transition to Gold OA book publication.

5. Compliance Rate With Opt-Out Mandates. It is important to understand also that the compliance rate for OA mandates with opt-out options, like Harvard's, compared to no-opt-out mandates is not yet known (or reported). (My own suggestion would still be that the best model for an OA mandate is the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access [ID/OA] mandate, which allows opt-out from OA, as the Harvard mandate does, but not from immediate deposit itself; ID/OA allows the institutional repository's "email eprint request" button to tide over user access needs during any publisher embargo period by providing "Almost OA" to Closed-Access deposits [what Prof. Darnton called "dark" deposits] during any publisher embargo.)

6. Proxy Deposit By Publishers. It is splendid that Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication is providing help and support for Harvard authors in understanding and complying with Harvard's mandate, including proxy depositing of papers on authors' behalf. I am not so sure it is a good idea, though, to encourage the option of having the publisher do the Harvard author's deposit by proxy on the author's behalf (after an embargo of the publisher's choosing) as a means of complying with the mandate. Best to keep that in the hands of the author and his own institutional assigns...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 8:07 PM, Elizabeth E. Kirk, Dartmouth College Library, on liblicense-l, wrote:

    "Stevan, it is, as you say, about content. But it's not only about the content of Dartmouth's research output, or that of our peers. It's also about the value of the content provided through publishers, and the willingness of readers and institutions to look for that value."

Elizabeth, I am not quite sure what you have in mind with the "it" that it "is... about." But if it's OA (Open Access), then the issue is not the value of the content or the contribution of the publisher or the willingness of readers and institutions to "look for" that value.

The value of peer-reviewed publication is already very explicitly enshrined in the fact that OA's specific target content is peer-reviewed content. What OA is equally explicitly seeking -- now that the advent of the online era has at last made it possible -- is free (online) access to that valued content, so it is no longer accessible only to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published, but to all would-be users, web-wide, in order to maximize research usage, impact and progress.

The cost of the portion of that value that is added by publishers is being paid in full by institutional subscriptions today. Hence what is missing is not a recognition of that value, but open access to that valued content.

That is why it is so urgent and important that each institution should first adopt a Green OA self-archiving mandate -- to make its own valued content openly accessible to all users web-wide and not just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journals in which that content appears. This institutional self-help thereby also encourages reciprocal mandates by other institutions, to open the access to their own content as well.

Having thus seen to it that all its own peer-reviewed output is made (Green) OA, an institution is of course free to spend any spare cash it may have on paying for Gold OA publication, over and above what it already spends on subscriptions.

But an institution's committing pre-emptively to Gold OA funding compacts like COPE before or instead of mandating Green OA self-archiving is not only a waste of a lot of scarce money in exchange for very little OA value: it is also a failure to add OA value to all of the institution's research output at no extra cost (by mandating Green OA self-archiving).

"We both agree that the peer review process is a critical step in creating the finished work of scholarship, as well as "certifying" the work."

Yes indeed; but peer review is already being paid for -- in full, many times over -- for most journals today (including most of the journals users want and need most) through multi-institutional subscription fees, paid by those institutions that can afford to subscribe to any given journal. (There are about 10,000 universities and research institutions in all, worldwide, and 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, publishing about 2.5 million articles per year. No institution can afford to subscribe to more than a small fraction of those journals.)

To repeat: The value of peer review is not at issue. What is at issue is access -- access to paid-up, published, peer-reviewed articles.

"Currently, open access journals--as you rightly put it--are a very small subset of the publishing pie."

And committing to fund that small subset of an institution's own contribution to the "publishing pie" today, before or instead of committing to mandate OA for the vast supra-set of that institution's total journal article output, is committing to spend a lot of extra money for little OA while failing to provide a lot of OA for no extra money at all.

"Without a predictable financial stream, there are few avenues of growing an OA sector that can furnish peer review, copy editing, DOIs, and all of the other parts of publishing that have costs involved."

What is missing and urgently needed today -- for research and researchers -- is not "predictable financial streams" but online access to every piece of peer-reviewed research for every researcher whose institution cannot afford subscription access to it today. The "peer review, copy editing, DOIs, and all of the other parts of publishing that have costs involved" for those articles are already being paid in full today -- by the subscription fees of those institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journals in which they are published.

"Open Access" is about Access, not about "financial streams." The wide-open "avenue" that urgently needs to be taken today (for the sake of research and researchers today) is the already-constructed, and immediately traversable (green) toll-road to accessing the vast paid-up subscription stream that already exists today, not the uncertain and still-to-be-constructed (golden) road of "growing" a future "OA sector," by paying still more, over and above the tolls already being paid, for a new "stream" of Gold OA journals.

Institutions first need to provide immediate access to the peer-reviewed content they already produce today (its peer review already paid in full by subscriptions from all the institutions that can afford subscriptions to the journals in which that content already appears, today). Having done that, there's no harm at all in an institution's going on to invest its spare cash in growing new Gold OA "sectors."

But there's plenty of harm in doing so instead, pre-emptively, instead of providing the Green OA all institutions are already in the position to provide, cost-free, today.

"Trying to grow that kind of OA sector by supporting those costs, and overcoming the misconception that OA means "not peer reviewed" (which many people said about 10-15 years ago about all electronic journals, if you remember) is a honking good reason to join the compact."

Misconceptions about OA certainly abound. But the fact that OA means OA to peer-reviewed content has been stated explicitly from the very outset by the OA movement (BOAI), loud and clear for all those with ears to hear the honking. Committing to funding Gold OA for a small subset of an institution's peer-reviewed output instead of first mandating Green OA for the vast supra-set of an institution's peer-reviewed output is a rather pricey way to drive home the home-truth that OA's target content is indeed, and always has been, peer-reviewed content...

"That kind of OA sector, which of course can only be built when more institutions join us, is one that may create actual competition in journal publishing over time, by which I mean competition that results in lower prices, more players, and multiple models. It could include, as well, any current publisher who might wish to move to producer-pays from reader-pays."

"Prices, players, models, competition, payment, sectors": What has become of access -- access today, to today's peer-reviewed research -- in all this Gold Fever and "sector-growth" fervor, which seems to have left the pressing immediate needs of research and researchers by the wayside in favor of speculative future economics?

"We care very much about the stability of and access to our research."

Then why doesn't Dartmouth mandate Green OA self-archiving, today?

"We are working on that from a number of fronts and in multiple conversations. The compact is not our answer to everything. But we certainly won't step back from an opportunity to help create a more vibrant publishing landscape."

But why is committing to provide a little extra Gold OA for a small part of Dartmouth's peer-reviewed research output, at extra cost, being acted upon today, whereas committing to provide Green OA to all the rest of Dartmouth's peer-reviewed research output at no extra cost (by mandating Green OA) is still idling in "conversation" mode? -- especially since the cost of the value-added peer review for all the rest is already being paid in full by existing institutional subscriptions?

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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RICHARD POYNDER:
Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity: Mistaking intent for action?
Open and Shut, 26 September 2009

"The recent launch of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) has attracted both plaudits (e.g. here and here) and criticism (e. g. here and here). -- What is COPE? It is..." (click here to continue).

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