[BOAI] Responses to Martin Hall on Finch on "Neither Green Nor Gold"

[Stevan Harnad]

Responses to Martin Hall on Finch on “Neither Green nor
Gold<http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/2013/02/neither-green-nor-gold/>
”

   1. Stevan Harnad Says:
   February 11th, 2013 at 9.03
pm<http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/2013/02/neither-green-nor-gold/#comment-427>

   MARTIN HALL: “The “Green” versus “Gold” debate... is misleading. The
   imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether
   negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing
   Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made
   freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC
   licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case
   has been remade in a recent – excellent – posting by Stuart Shieber,
   Harvard’s Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication.”

   STUART SHIEBER: “Do you have a pointer to something saying that I
   support the Finch approach? If so, I’m happy to answer it directly — in the
   negative when it comes to both their lack of support for green and poorly
   designed approach to gold support.” (Feb 3 2013, personal communication.
   2. Martin Hall Says:
   February 12th, 2013 at 11.59
am<http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/2013/02/neither-green-nor-gold/#comment-428>

   Stevan – here are two quotations from Stuart Shieber’s paper which make
   the point about the significance of moving to full Open Access to
   copy-of-record. The Finch Report, however imperfect, was about the
   transition to this. “Open-access journals don’t charge for access, but that
   doesn’t mean they eschew revenue entirely. Open-access journals are just
   selling a different good, and therefore participating in a different
   market. Instead of selling access to readers (or the readers’ proxy, the
   libraries), they sell publisher services to the authors (or to the authors’
   proxy, their research funders). In fact there are now over 8,500
   open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some
   of them have been mentioned already on this panel: Linguistic Discovery,
   Semantics and Pragmatics. The majority of existing open-access journals,
   like those journals, don’t charge authorside article-processing charges
   (APCs). But in the end APCs seems to me the most reasonable, reliable,
   scalable, and efficient revenue mechanism for open-access journals. This
   move from reader-side subscription fees to author-side APCs has dramatic
   ramifications for the structure of the market that the publisher
   participates in”. And later: “So journals compete for authors in a way they
   don’t for readers, and this competition leads to much greater efficiency.
   Open-access publishers are highly motivated to provide better services at
   lower price to compete for authors’ article submissions. We actually see
   evidence of this competition on both price and quality happening in the
   market.”

   *----*

   *Your comment is awaiting moderation.*

   Stevan Harnad Says:

   February 13th, 2013 at 2.41
am<http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/2013/02/neither-green-nor-gold/#comment-429>

   *PRIORITIES*

   Martin, I agree with every word you quote from Stuart above, but *that’s
   not what the Finch Report, or the criticism of the Finch Report is about*
   .

   Yes, this concerns the transition to Open Access (OA). But the
   disagreement is about the means, not the end.

   The Finch report recommended downgrading cost-free Green OA
   self-archiving in repositories to just preservation archiving and instead
   double-paying pre-emptively for Gold OA (publisher’s PDF of record, CC-BY)
   while worldwide journal subscriptions still need to be paid, and only
   allowing UK authors to publish in journals that don’t offer Gold if their
   Green embargo does not exceed 6-12 months.

   This not only wastes a great deal of scarce UK research money but it
   gives publishers the incentive to offer hybrid Gold (continue charging
   subscriptions but offer Gold for individual articles for an extra Gold OA
   fee), it restricts free choice of journals, antagonizing authors, and it
   encourages journals to adopt and extend Green OA embargoes beyond the 6-12
   limit, thus making Green OA harder to mandate for other countries, *none
   of which have any intention of following the Finch model of paying
   pre-emptively for Gold instead of mandating extra-cost-free Green while
   subscriptions are still paying for publishing: *
   http://sparceurope.org/analysis-of-funder-open-access-policies-around-the-world/

   What Finch/RCUK needs to do instead is to (1) upgrade its Green OA
   mandate, (2) require immediate deposit whether or not OA to the deposit is
   embargoed, (3) adopt an effective system for monitoring and ensuring
   compliance, (4) allow free choice of journals, and (5) make Gold OA
   completely optional.

   Stuart Shieber is the architect of Harvard’s Green OA policy. That
   policy does not constrain researchers' journal choice and it does not offer
   to fund hybrid Gold. There’s no problem with offering to spend any spare
   cash you may have on Gold — *after you have effectively mandated Green.
   But not instead*.

   (By the way, neither the publisher’s PDF nor CC-BY is worth paying extra
   for today, pre-emptively, while journal subscriptions still need to be
   paid: Once universally mandated Green OA makes journals cancellable,
   publishers will cut costs, phase out the obsolete print and online
   editions, offload all access provision and archiving onto the worldwide
   network of Green OA institutional repositories, and convert to *Fair Gold
   *, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid for out of the
   institutional subscription-cancelation savings — instead of the UK
   double-paying pre-emptively and needlessly for the bloated price of both
   subscriptions and *Fool’s Gold* out of overstretched UK research funds
   today, pre-Green, as Finch/RCUK are proposing to do.)

   *---*

   *ADDENDUM:*

   "If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed
   those of Green OA. However, we are not in 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 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*." [emphasis added]


    Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (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* 19(1/2)

   3.

   *Unilateral UK Gold is the losing choice in a Prisoner’s Dilemma.* If
   the UK unilaterally mandates Gold OA Publishing (with author publication
   charges) today, instead of first (effectively) mandating Green OA
   self-archiving (at no added cost) then the UK has made the losing choice in
   a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma:




   Unilateral Green (rest of world)

   Unilateral Gold (rest of world)

   *Unilateral Green (UK only)*

   *win**/*win**

   *win*/lose

   *Unilateral Gold (UK only)*

   *lose*/win

   *win**/*win**
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