[BOAI] Re: Springer and Helmholtz Association sign agreement for open access membership

Mon Aug 23 14:12:21 BST 2010

I wonder if it is a good idea for Open Access forums to become the publicity vehicles for commercial deals?

Stevan Harnad

Scaling to Global OA: Parallel Local Green/Gold Is OK, But Gold Alone First, No Way

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.

The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now
ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et al’s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (“Open Access,” OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et al’s modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing industry. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research.
OA McMemberships, Dismemberment and MC Escher

SUMMARY:
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.

Gold Conversion: A Prisoners' Dilemma?

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.)

On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse
SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the university's potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees are currently committed to paying their annual journal subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will only provide OA for a small fraction of a university's total research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals' contents are otherwise accessible to a university's users. (In addition, the very same scarcity of funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable.) Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay the publishing costs of Gold OA.
Springer's Already on the Side of the Angels: What's the Big Deal?
SUMMARY: The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has made a deal with Springer that articles by VSNU authors will be made OA. But Springer is already on the side of the angels on OA, being completely Green on immediate, unembargoed author OA self-archiving. Hence all VSNU authors are already free to deposit their refereed final drafts of their Springer articles in their institutional repositories, without requiring any further permission or payment. So what in addition is meant by the VSNU deal with Springer? that the Springer PDF rather than the author's final draft can be deposited? That Springer does the deposit on VSNU authors' behalf? Or is this a deal for prepaid hybrid Gold OA? In the case of Springer articles, it seems that what the Netherlands lacked was not the right to make them OA, but the mandate (from the VSNU universities and Netherlands' research funders like NWO) to make them OA. There are some signs, however, that this too might be on the way...
University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without Mandating Green OA

On 2010-08-23, at 8:22 AM, Peter Suber wrote:

> [Forwarding from Renate Bayaz at Springer.  --Peter Suber.]
> 
> PRESS RELEASE
> 
> Springer and Helmholtz Association sign agreement for open access membership
> 
>  
> 
> Cooperation makes open access publishing easier for scientists
> 
> Berlin / New York / London, 23 August 2010
> 
> Following the launch of SpringerOpen (www.springeropen.com), the Helmholtz Association has signed a new agreement for an open access membership. This agreement covers article processing charges for authors from the participating Helmholtz research centres for articles published in SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals.
> 
>  
> SpringerOpen journals are peer-reviewed open access journals in emerging and interdisciplinary fields that complement both the established Springer journal portfolios and BioMed Central’s growing list of over 200 life science and biomedicine journal titles. SpringerOpen journals are e-only and publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution license. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights.
> 
>  
> Both SpringerOpen as well as Biomed Central journals charge article processing fees to the author which make the journals’ content immediately and freely available. The membership offering, introduced by BioMed Central, allows institutions to directly support the payment of these fees and facilitate the uptake of open access across their authors. Currently, authors from more than 340 institutions in 39 countries benefit from these memberships taking on full or partial payment of article processing fees.
> 
>  
> “We feel that the Springer open access journal portfolio is a good match for the spectrum of the six main Helmholtz research areas (Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure of Matter, and Aeronautics, Space and Transport). We are pleased to enter into this partnership opening new chances to develop an open access forum for research results of our scientists. The agreement is part of our mission to establish long-term mechanisms securing reasonable publication charges for open access journals,” says Dr. Bernhard Mittermaier, Head of the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich.
> 
>  
> “We are delighted to see that the Helmholtz Association expresses its support for SpringerOpen. SpringerOpen expands the option to publish in fully open access journals to all scientific areas and it is encouraging to see the scientific community reacting so quickly,” says Bettina Goerner, Manager Open Access at Springer.
> 
>  
> The Helmholtz Association (www.helmholtz.de) contributes to solving major challenges facing society, science and industry with top scientific achievements in six research areas: Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure of Matter, and Aeronautics, Space and Transport. With 30,000 employees in 16 research centres and an annual budget of approximately 3 billion euros, the Helmholtz Association is Germany’s largest scientific organisation. The Helmholtz Association was one of the initial signatories of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in 2003.
> 
>  
> 
> Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) is a leading global scientific publisher, delivering quality content through innovative information products and services. The company is also a trusted provider of local-language professional publications in Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. In the science, technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around 2,000 journals and more than 6,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,000 employees. 
> 
> BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) has been part of Springer Science+Business Media since 2008. Founded in 1999, the STM publisher has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is the largest open access publisher in the world.
> 
> 
> Contact: Renate Bayaz, Tel +49-6221-487-8531, renate.bayaz at springer.com
> 
>  
>  
>  

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/boai-forum/attachments/20100823/e10be045/attachment-0001.html 