[BOAI] Netherlands Boycotting Elsevier to Sustain Bloat

[Stevan Harnad]

Sander Dekker
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?serendipity%5Baction%5D=search&serendipity%5BsearchTerm%5D=Dekker&serendipity%5BsearchButton%5D=%3E>,
Netherlands’ State Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture and
Science wants Open Access and has set some deadlines for how soon he wants
it for Netherlands. That’s fine.

But the Netherlands' Sander Dekker, like the UK's Finch
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1099-Dutch-Echoes-of-Finch-Fools-Gold-vs.-Fair-Gold.html>
Committee,
wants Gold Open Access.

That means Universities must pay Elsevier’s asking price for Gold OA.

Elsevier’s asking price is a price per article that will maintain
Elsevier's current total net subscription revenue.

Elsevier’s current total net subscription revenue is enormously bloated —
not only by huge profit margins (c. 40%) but by obsolete product and
service costs forcibly co-bundled into the price (print edition, online
edition, access-provision, archiving).

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU)
<https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/dutch-universities-urge-elsevier-editors-resign-open-access-row>
has
a consortial Big Deal subscription with Elsevier, and they have said they
will continue to pay it if Netherlands authors can have Gold OA for their
articles at no extra charge.

This is basically trying to transform a bloated subscription deal into a
bloated Gold OA membership deal, rather like SCOAP3
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/937-SCOAP3-Gold-OA-Membership-Unnecessary,-Unscalable-Unsustainable.html>
.

The reasons this transformation cannot work globally are many, but locally
it can be made to work, for a while, by fiat, if VSNU collaborate and
Elsevier agrees.

And on the surface it is not obvious why Elsevier would not agree, since it
looks as if the deal would give Elsevier exactly what it wants: current
revenue levels per Elsevier article will be maintained, but with the
Netherlands paying its share not as subscriptions but as memberships
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/660-OA-McMemberships,-Dismemberment-and-MC-Escher.html>,
in exchange for Gold OA for Elsevier articles by Netherlands authors.

But what about the rest of the world? They continue paying subscriptions —
not just to Elsevier, but to all other publishers. And VSNU, too, must
continue paying subscriptions to all other publishers whose journals
Netherlands users need.

Would this local Netherlands solution be stable, sustainable and scalable?

The answer is that it would be none of these -- and *Elsevier knows that
perfectly well*. And that explains why they are not eager to make this
local Gold membership deal with VSNU (even though Springer
<http://www.springeropen.com/libraries> has been trying to encourage the
consortial Gold membership model for its subscribers) -- and why VSNU is
contemplating asking Elsevier editors at Netherlands institutions (and
eventually all Elsevier authors in Netherlands) to boycott Elsevier unless
Elsevier makes this transition to Gold

A Gold consortial membership model is unstable, unsustainable and
unscalable because memberships, like subscriptions, are *locally
cancellable* -- by an institution or a country -- and because there are
other (competing) publishers in the world.

And membership would be unstable and unsustainable even if the scalability
problem could be magically surmounted by a global “flip
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/421-SCOAP3-and-the-pre-emptive-flip-model-for-Gold-OA-conversion.html>”
in which all institutions on the planet and all publishers on the planet
solemnly agree jointly to go from their current subscriptions to Gold OA
memberships for all their journals with all their publishers at their
current subscription price *all on the same day.*

The very next day the system would destabilize, with cash-strapped
institutions cancelling their “memberships” to journals that their users
needed to use but in which their authors published little, preferring
instead to pay for publishing by the piece for the few articles they
publish in them.

This would in turn destabilize the sustainability of yesterday’s
subscription revenue streams via memberships, which would mean that
membership fees would have to increase for the non-defecting institutions
to sustain all publishers' net revenue, which would in turn mean that
institutions would be paying more for memberships than they had been paying
for subscriptions.

And the Global Consortial Gold Membership Deal (which is in reality a
global producer oligopoly
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/343616/1/PoynderVelt.pdf> sustained by a global
consumer consortium) would begin unravelling the moment it was “flipped.”

Trying instead to get there more gradually, institution by institution,
publisher by publisher, journal by journal rather than via a miraculous
global “flip” instead destabilizes the scalability of the Gold membership
model rather than just its sustainability. Institutions as well as
publishers would be participating in a multi-player prisoner's dilemma,
with defection always being the optimal choice.

But this also is the relevant point to recall that there is another way to
give and get OA, namely, Green OA self-archiving:

For institutions struggling with bloated, unaffordable journal subscription
prices, the far more natural route is to reduce subscriptions to just their
users' must-have journals and to mandate Green OA for their own publication
output, rather than to lock themselves into increasingly unaffordable
subscriptions in the form of membership fees in exchange for Gold OA for
their own institutional publication output.

*This, of course, is exactly why publishers are trying so hard to embargo
Green OA*: Not because the survival of refereed journals is at stake but in
order to hold publication hostage to either current bloated subscriptions
or bloated Gold OA fees that sustain the same net revenue either way they
are paid.

That way the bloated asking price price will never go down and the costs of
the obsolete products and services can continue to be forcibly co-bundled
into the asking price.

But publishers know perfectly well that they are fighting a battle that
they will ultimately lose, and that all they are doing now is doing
whatever they can to sustain their current revenue levels as long as
possible, with the vague hope that piece-wise Gold OA fees might continue
to sustain the bloat as unstable, unscalable and unsustainable consortial
"memberships" could not.

So publishers continue conning the likes of Sander Dekker into believing
that today's bloated Fool's Gold OA is the only way to have OA, and that
Green OA would destroy journals altogether, so it must be embargoed.

And VSNU thinks it is fighting the good fight by threatening another
embargo against Elsevier unless they agree to Fool's Gold consortial OA
membership for the Netherlands.

A stable, scalable, sustainable solution, of course, is within reach,
through a transition to affordable, unbloated Fair Gold induced by first
universally mandating and providing Green OA (there is even an antidote
<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/> for publishers' embargoes on Green
OA) -- but neither Sander Dekker nor VSNU are grasping it.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition
<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/>. In: Anna Gacs. *The Culture of
Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age*. L'Harmattan.
99-106.

*______* (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need
Not Be Access Denied or Delayed
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html>. D-Lib Magazine 16
(7/8).

*______* (2013) The Postgutenberg Open Access Journal
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/353991/> (revised). In, Cope, B and Phillips, A
(eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal (2nd edition). 2nd edition of
book Chandos.

*______* (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions
unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access
<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>.
LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28

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 19 (1/2).

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open
Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button
<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/>. In: *Dynamic Fair Dealing:
Creating Canadian Culture Online* (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler,
Eds.)

Swan, Alma; Gargouri, Yassine; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open
Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/>. *Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report*.

Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière,
Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2015) Estimating Open Access Mandate
Effectiveness: I. The MELIBEA Score
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/> JASIST,
in press.
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