<div>On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 10:18 AM, David Prosser <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk" target="_blank">david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:</div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div>Is Steven saying that Gold OA articles are, on average, articles[that] couldn't have been published in subscription journals? </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>No. They're articles that could have been published in either kind of journal (at the same level of quality standards).</div>
<div><br></div><div>My point was that an article published in a Gold journal today does not reduce institutions' need to subscribe to their must-see journals.</div><div><br></div><div>Nor does it reduce the subscription price of their must-see journals.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Of course, if most must-see subscription-journal articles were published in Gold journals, the must-see subscription journals could be cancelled, ending double-payment.</div><div><br></div><div>But, as the Springer graph shows, that path means yet another decade or two of waiting for OA, at least.</div>
<div><br></div><div>In contrast, if Green OA is universally mandated now by funders and institutions, the wait will be far shorter, the OA itself will be 60% immediate ("Angels") and 40% Almost-Immediate (Button), and the price of post-Green Fair-Gold, when it comes, will be affordable and sustainable (unlike today's pre-Green, inflated, double-paid, and sometimes double-dipped, Fool's-Gold).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Stevan Harnad</div></div></div><div><br></div>On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 10:18 AM, David Prosser <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk" target="_blank">david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word">This could, of course, run and run with Stevan and I mis-understanding each other forever. I'm not sure how I can make my point any simpler than I did:<div>
<br></div><div>'Put simply, if these OA papers had been published in subscription journals then subscription prices would have been higher.'</div><div><br></div><div>Steven is arguing that the $172 million that Outsell identified as revenue for 190k OA gold articles is on top of subscription revenue for those articles - i.e., the community pays for them twice. I'm arguing that it is a substitution - an OA gold article is not paid for by subscriptions (with the possible exception of the minority of articles in hybrid journals where 'douple-dipping' may exists). I can't believe that subscription publishers would have been happy publishing extra 190k papers in 2012 without some reflection in increased pricing (perhaps time-shifted to 2013). We are not at the stage of large-scale price reductions, but there is less pressure on price increases - which is what I thought I'd said.</div>
<div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div>It is a safe bet that (apart from the hybrid Gold minority) those 190K articles are not articles from the must-see journals to which most institutions have been reduced by the un-affordability of subscriptions.</div>
</div></div></div></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>Is Steven saying that Gold OA articles are, on average, articles where the authors couldn't have been published in subscription journals? If so, I'll bet against him. How do we measure this? </div>
<div><br></div><div>On publisher double-talk, my only point was that a publisher who indulges in it cannot be described as on the side of the angels. For reasons I don't understand Steven wants to give Elsevier that title, despite all the evidence of their policy.</div>
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<br><div><div>On 5 May 2013, at 14:07, Stevan Harnad wrote:</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 5:32 AM, David Prosser <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk" target="_blank">david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><span style="border-collapse:separate;font-family:Helvetica"><span style="border-collapse:separate"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><span style="border-collapse:separate"><div style="word-wrap:break-word">
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<span style="border-collapse:separate"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><span style="border-collapse:separate"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div>Stevan makes a central assumption that is misleading.... It is certainly true that in a mixed economy institutions will pay both subscriptions and publication fees... But Stevan implies that this is for the same content. With the exception of some hybrid OA papers (which are in the minority) this is not the case.... OA is taking thousands of papers out of the subscription model and therefore reducing price pressures on subscriptions. Put simply, if these OA papers had been published in subscription journals then subscription prices would have been higher. (This is obvious if you think what would have happened if those 190k OA papers had been in subscription journals - do we think that the publishers would have just absorbed the costs and accepted reduced profits/surpluses?) So, even in a transition period it is clear that there are cost savings in OA Gold publishing....</div>
</div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></span></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Here (as in his advice to authors to worry about the double-talk hedging the publisher's statement that "Immediate posting and dissemination of accepted author manuscripts is allowed to personal websites, to institutional repositories, or to arXiv") I think David Prosser is quite simply wrong.</div>
<div><br></div><div>"190K Gold OA" articles sounds like a lot, but as we know ""These are averages across many different forms of Gold OA: (i) subsidy or subscription-based Gold OA (no author fee), (ii) hybrid subscription/Gold OA, (iii) Gold-only OA, (iv) junk Gold OA (no or next to no peer review)."</div>
<div><br></div><div>It is a safe bet that (apart from the hybrid Gold minority) those 190K articles are not articles from the must-see journals to which most institutions have been reduced by the un-affordability of subscriptions. Those are the subscription journals at the heart of the serials crisis. They are the ones that institutions must keep buying in for their users, regardless of how many papers are being published as Gold OA in other journals. They can only be cancelled when their content is accessible by other means. (And it is that other means on which I think all efforts should be focussed.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Nor is it clear why David imagines that those must-see journals would lower their subscription prices because 190K articles published in other journals happen to be Gold OA.</div><div><br></div><div>The double-payment is not to the same publisher (except in the case of hybrid Gold, in which case it is also double-dipping): The institution continues to pay, undiminished, for the must-see subscription journals it can afford to buy in, and, on top of that, the institution's authors pay for whatever Gold they are foolish enough to pay-to-publish, instead of providing cost-free Green <i>(if their motivation was just to provide OA</i>). (I hope David will not reply "but they are paying for it with RCUK funds, not subscription funds!": Payment to publishers -- not necessarily the same one -- is doubled no matter whose pocket it is being poached from, as long as subscriptions still have to be paid: that's what "double-payment" means. The payers and payees may both differ, but any Gold payment is over and what is already being paid via subscriptions.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Now what is really behind all of this? Two motivations, one innocent but naive (David's, for subscription price reductions, and a migration of authors from subscription to Gold journals), the other not so innocent, and certainly not naive (publishers', to preserve current revenue streams, come what may, via pricing strategy and embargoes). It is greatly in the interest of publishers and their current revenue streams -- whether they are subscription, pure-Gold, hybrid-Gold or junk-Gold publishers -- to have the research world waste yet another decade inching toward Gold (on publishers' terms and timetable) instead of first mandating cost-free Green universally.</div>
<div><br></div><div>And inching it is, if you look at the actual Gold OA proportions and growth rate, especially among the must-have journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters ISI. </div><div><br></div><div>An update of Gold proportions and growth rates will be published soon, but this older one from Springer is still pretty much on-target: <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Bjorkspring.png" target="_blank">http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Bjorkspring.png</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>And I've never said "we should not discuss Gold OA at all until we have 100% Green OA."</div><div><br></div><div>I have consistently been saying that "we should not discuss [or pay for] Gold OA at all <i>until we have first mandated Green OA</i>."</div>
<div><br></div><div>Apologies to those who are not interested in the details, but they are all-important, when it comes to the question of how to invest our time and money (and hopes) regarding Green and Gold.</div><div>
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</div><div>The good news is that when it comes to rights-agreements from publishers that state "<b>Immediate posting and dissemination of accepted author manuscripts is allowed to personal websites, to institutional repositories, or to arXiv</b>" we can (and should) all ignore the hedging details and go ahead and provide un-embargoed Green OA immediately.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Stevan Harnad</div><div><br></div><div>On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 4:37 AM, David Prosser <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk" target="_blank">david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word">I'm sorry Stevan, but [Elsevier] have not answered all the questions in a single sentence - they have attached a large number of conditions to that sentence. The full answer only comes from reading the entire policy. We may not like the conditions, may believe that they are gibberish and even unenforceable (although that's easy for Stevan and me to say as we will never be on the receiving end of the enforcement), but let's not try to pretend that they don't exist.</div>
</blockquote></div><div> </div></div></div></div>On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 5:32 AM, David Prosser <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk" target="_blank">david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<div>
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Stevan has been consistent over the years in his message that we should not discuss Gold OA at all until we have 100% Green OA. And yet some of us still insist on doing so!<div><br></div><div>My point was to highlight a particular data point for 2012. Are there quibbles? Of course. Does it give us the whole picture? Of course not. But for those interested in the transition mechanism it is, as I say, a data point.</div>
<div><br></div><div>But Steven makes a central assumption that is misleading - his point 6. It is certainly true that in a mixed economy institutions will pay both subscriptions and publication fees (where such fees exist). But Steven implies that this is for the same content. With the exception of some hybrid OA papers (which are in the minority) this is not the case. One paper published in an OA journal is, literally, one less paper in a subscription journal. All the librarians on the list know that one of the justifications for subscription and big deal price rises is increasing volume of content - either within current journals or through the launch of new journals. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Naturally, there is not a simple one-to-one relationship between volume increase and price increase, but there is a strong relationship. OA is taking thousands of papers out of the subscription model and therefore reducing price pressures on subscriptions. Put simply, if these OA papers had been published in subscription journals then subscription prices would have been higher. This is substitution, not addition. (This is obvious if you think what would have happened if those 190k OA papers had been in subscription journals - do we think that the publishers would have just absorbed the costs and accepted reduced profits/surpluses?)</div>
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<div>On 4 May 2013, at 14:39, Stevan Harnad wrote:</div></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></div></span></span></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>Comparing the average price per article of Gold OA today with the average s=<br>
ubscription publisher revenue per article today is uninformative and mislea=<br>ding.<br><br>1. These are averages across many different forms of Gold OA: (i) subsidy- =<br>or subscription-based Gold OA (no author fee), (ii) hybrid subscription/Gol=<br>
d OA, (iii) Gold-only OA, (iv) junk Gold OA (no or next to no peer review).<br><br>2. They are averages across all journal qualities.<br><br>3. They are averages calculated at a time when subscriptions are still in t=<br>
he vast majority, and cannot be canceled until/unless their articles are ac=<br>cessible in some other way.<br><br>4. Hence not only do the (arbitrary) asking prices for Gold vary widely, bu=<br>t they vary widely in the quality and service they deliver.<br>
<br>5. Subscription journals vary too, but it is not at all clear (and indeed v=<br>ery unlikely) that the Gold subset today matches their quality distribution=<br>.<br><br>6. While un-cancellable subscriptions still prevail, Gold OA is just a supp=<br>
lement, not a substitute, it entails double-payment by institutions (subscr=<br>iptions + Gold) and even double-dipping by publishers (for hybrid Gold).<br><br>7. The missing factor in all of this is the potential of mandatory Green OA=<br>
to first provide OA at no extra cost, and once it reaches 100% globally, t=<br>o make journals cancellable, so they are forced to cut costs by downsizing =<br>to peer-review alone.<br><br>8. Post-Green Gold OA will then be provided at a fair, sustainable price, p=<br>
aid (and not double-paid) out of a fraction of the institutional subscripti=<br>on cancellation savings.<br><br>None of this can be calculated on the basis of averaging the price per arti=<br>cle of Gold today -- but we can be sure that the post-Green cost will be su=<br>
bstantially lower than the average publisher revenue per article for subscr=<br>iptions today, pre-Green.<br><br>Stevan Harnad<br></div></blockquote></div></div></blockquote></div><br>
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