[BOAI] RCUK & HEFCE CEOs Misinterpret Economist John Houghton's Findings on Open Access Cost/Benefits

[Stevan Harnad]

In viewing their
testimony<http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=12471>
before
the House of Lords Select Committee on UK Open Access
Policy<http://www.openscholarship.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2013-01/guidance_on_submissions.pdf>,
one is rather astonished to see just how misinformed are the three
witnesses -- Professor Rick
Rylance<http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/About-Us/Governance-structure/Senior-Management-Team/Pages/Professor-Rick-Rylance.aspx>,
Chair of RCUK; Professor Douglas
Kell<http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/organisation/structures/executive/chief-executive.aspx>,
RCUK Information Champion;David
Sweeney<http://www.hefce.ac.uk/about/staff/directorates/davidsweeney/>,
Director (Research, Innovation and Skills), Higher Education Funding
Council for England (HEFCE) -- on a number of key points.

Professor Kell's impression seems to be along the lines that "all the
worldwide OA policies are like ours [the UK's] regarding Gold, and the rest
of the world is taking its lead from us."

Unfortunately this is no longer the case at all.

And although the three witnesses extol the economist John
Houghton<http://www.cfses.com/staff/jhoughton.htm>'s
work as authoritative, they rather startlingly misunderstand his findings:

The witnesses cite Houghton's work as (1) evidence that Green OA is more
expensive than Gold and as (2) support for the UK's new policy of paying
for Gold OA in preference to providing Green OA.

Houghton's findings support neither of these conclusions, as stated rather
explicitly and unambiguously in Houghton & Swan's most recent publication:

"The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years
has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the
Finch Report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned
that there may be some misinterpretation of this work... [our] main
findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more
cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide,
the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are
not yet anywhere near having reached an OA world. *At the institutional
level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the
cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of
unilaterally adopting Gold OA *— with Green OA self-archiving costing
average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might
cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive
university. Hence, *we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective
means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted
unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at
relatively little cost*."

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden
Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for
Gold"<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january13/houghton/01houghton.html>
* D-Lib Magazine* Volume 19, Number 1/2

What Houghton and coworkers said and meant about Green as the transitional
policy concerned an eventual transition from (*1*) today's paid
subscription access to (*2*) paid subscription access + Green OA to (*3*)
post-Green Gold (with subscriptions no longer being paid).

Houghton was not at all referring to or supporting a transition from (*I*)
the current RCUK policy in which Green is "allowed" (though grudgingly and
non-preferentially) to (*II*) an RCUK policy where only Gold is allowed
(but subscriptions still need to be paid)!

Quite the contrary. *It is the added cost of subscriptions that makes
pre-Green Gold so gratuitously expensive.*

In the background, it's clear exactly what subscription publishers are
attempting to persuade the UK to do: Publishers know, better than anyone,
now, that OA is absolutely inevitable. Hence they are quite aware that
their only option is to try to delay the inevitable for as long as
possible, on the pretext that it would destroy their business and hurt the
UK economy to rush into OA without subsidizing subscription publishers by
paying extra for Gold. And this self-interested alarmism is succeeding --
in the UK.

Meanwhile, the policy-makers in the UK remain under the misapprehension
that they are still the leaders, setting the direction and pace for
worldwide OA -- whereas in reality they are being rather successfully taken
in by the publishing lobby (both subscription and Gold).

But it's not just the publishing lobby: There are two other sources of
misdirection:

(1) The Wellcome Trust, a private biomedical research-funding charity that
believes it has understood it all with its slogan "Publishing is just
another research cost, and a small one, 1.5%, so we simply have to be
prepared to pay it, and in exchange we will have OA":

What Wellcome does not reckon is that, unlike Wellcome, the UK government
is not a private charity, with only two decisions to make: "What research
shall I fund, and to whom shall I pay the 1.5% of it which is publication
fees?"

The UK, unlike Wellcome, also has to pay for university journal
subscriptions, university infrastructure, and a lot else. And the UK is
already paying for 100% of all that today -- which means 100% of UK
publication costs. Any money to pay for Gold OA is over and above that.

Nor does Wellcome -- a private funder who can dictate whatever it likes as
a condition for receiving its research grants -- seem to appreciate that
the UK and RCUK are not in the same position as Wellcome: They cannot
dictate UK researchers' journal choice, nor can they tell UK researchers to
spend money on Gold other than whatever money they give them.

Nor does Wellcome give a second thought to the fact that its ineffective OA
mandate<http://poynder.blogspot.ca/2012/05/open-access-mandates-ensuring.html>
owes
what little success it has had in nearly 10 years to publishers being paid
to provide OA, not to fundees being mandated to do it.

Yet in almost every respect, the new RCUK policy is now largely a clone of
the old Wellcome policy.

(2) The minority of fields and individuals that strongly advocate CC-BY
licenses <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/909-.html> for
all refereed research today have managed to give the impression that it is
not free online access to refereed research that matters most, but the
kinds of re-mix, text-mining, re-use, and re-publication that they need in
their own small minority of fields.

To repeat, because I believe it is incontrovertibly true and highly
relevant: CC-BY is only needed in a minority of fields -- and *in no field
is CC-BY needed more, or more urgently, than free online access is needed
in all fields.*

Yet here too, it is this CC-BY minority that has managed to persuade
Finch/RCUK (and themselves) that CC-BY is to the advantage of -- indeed
urgently needed by -- all research and researchers, in all fields, as well
as UK industry. Hence that it is preferable to use 1.5% of UK's dwindling
research funds to pay publishers still more for Gold CC-BY to UK research
output (and pressure authors to choose journals that offer it) rather than
just to mandate cost-free Green (and let authors choose journals on the
basis of their quality standards and track-records, as before, rather on
the basis of their licenses and cost-recovery models).

The obvious Achilles Heel in all this is *unilaterality*, as Houghton &
Swan point out, clearly.

None of the benefits on which the UK OA policy is predicated will
materialize if the UK does what it proposes to do unilaterally:

The Finch/RCUK policy will just purchase Gold CC-BY to the UK's own 6% of
worldwide research output by double-paying publishers (subscriptions + Gold
OA fees).

In addition, the UK must continue paying the subscriptions to access the
rest of the world's 94% -- while at the same time its OA policy makes it
needlessly harder for the rest of the world to mandate Green OA, by
incentivizing publishers to offer hybrid Gold and increase their Green
embargo lengths beyond RCUK's allowable 6-12 in order to collect the UK
Gold CC-BY bonus revenue.

As long as the UK keeps imagining that it's still leading on OA, and that
the rest of the world will follow suit -- funding and preferring Gold OA --
the UK will remain confident in the illusion that what it is doing makes
sense and things must get better.

But the reality will begin to catch up when the UK realizes that it is
doing what it is doing *unilaterally*: It has chosen the losing strategy in
a global Prisoner's Dilemma.

Let us hope that UK policy-makers can still be made to see the light by
inquiries like the
Lords'<http://www.openscholarship.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2013-01/guidance_on_submissions.pdf>
 and BIS<http://openaccess.eprints.org/Business,%20Innovation%20and%20Skills%20Committee:%20BIS%20Committee%20announces%20inquiry%20into%20Government's%20Open%20Access%20policy>'s,
and will then promptly do thesimple policy
tweaks<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september12/harnad/09harnad.html> that
it would take to put the UK back in the lead, and in the right.

(Some of the Lords in the above
video<http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=12471>
seem
to have been a good deal more sensible and better informed than the three
witnesses were!)

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a
Tweak<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september12/harnad/09harnad.html>
. *D-Lib Magazine* Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012
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