[GOAL] (no subject)

[Andrew A. Adams]

Jan Velterop wrote (on the liblicense list):

> Indeed, we signed up to the BOAI, as did Stevan Harnad, and the
> Initiative talked about two routes to OA, which have become known as
> 'gold' and 'green'. The BOAI doesn't talk about keeping a 'balance'
> between the two, if memory serves. (I tried to look it up to make
> sure, but the BOAI page at soros.org is not available anymore, perhaps
> temporarily, in any case this morning).

This fetishism with the first formal statemet of OA principles and practice 
is, I think, counterproductive. Our understanding has improved in the more 
than a decade since, in particular driven by over ten years of experience in 
trying and failing to achieve (even near-)universal open access.

> If one thinks that the verb "rubbish" is appropriate to describe
> Finch's treatment of 'green', then one must surely conclude that
> "rubbish" is the term to be used 'a forteriori' for Harnad's treatment
> of 'gold', constantly calling people who even contemplate 'gold'
> alongside of 'green'  foolish or worse. The point of my previous post
> was that there are many roads leading to Rome. To insist on waiting
> until the OA world is 'green' before doing anything with 'gold' is
> putting dogma before pragma; waiting to open the parachute until a
> split second before hitting the ground and calling that a 'good
> thing'. Or even believing that.

I do not care which route we achieve open access by. I care that we achieve 
it. In the seven years that I have been involved in this debate I have been 
persuaded that the Gold route is slow, costly, highly uncertain, depends on 
actors with different interests and incentives to the authors and readers of 
the scholarly literature. That is why I am persuaded that the way to achieve 
open access most quickly and most certainly is via the Green Road. 
Governments, research funders, research institutions and researchers cannot 
dictate a shift to Gold. They can dictate and adopt a shift to Green. THere 
are on the order of 10,000 research instutitions and more than ten times as 
many journals. Persudaing 10,000 institutions to adopt OA deposit mandates 
seems to me a quicker and more certain route to obtain OA than persuading 
100,000 journals to go Gold (and finding more money to bribe them into it, it 
would appear - money which is going to continue to be demanded by them in 
perpetuity, not accepted as a transitional fee - there's nothing so permanent 
as a temporary measure).

> Since the BOAI, 'green' has evolved somewhat. And so has the need for
> full access and re-use (delivered by what is now sometimes called
> 'libre OA', though the definition of OA in the BOAI already included
> the properties of 'libre'). Originally, 'green' was the deposit (by
> authors) of their final, accepted manuscript in an open repository,
> before or at the time of publication of its formal version in a
> journal. That has been watered down, not in terms of deposit, but in
> terms of openness and 'libre-ness', by the idea of ID/OA (in which OA
> means 'optional access', to make any confusion about OA worse).
> Delayed OA (which 'green' with embargoes is) and not being able to
> re-use the literature would have been anathema at the original BOAI.

> The way I read it, the Finch Report expresses a preference for
> immediate, 'libre', open access, and sees 'gold' as more likely to be
> able to deliver that than 'green'. Meanwhile, 'green' is a way to
> deliver OA (albeit delayed and not libre) where 'gold' is not feasible
> yet. That is an entirely sensible viewpoint, completely compatible
> with the letter ' and I think also the spirit ' of the BOAI.

The Finch report is at the same time an idealistic piece of pie in the sky by 
and by and a cynical derailment of the most successful (but still far from 
successful enough) move towards OA (the UK's lead on Green OA mandates which 
outstrips any other approach except for HE Physics and the ArXiv which has 
been shown not to be scalable to other disciplines, while the UK's lead in 
mandates show that the Green route is possible to achieve by focussed 
consistent work at multiple levels; funder, institution, researcher - and 
could be accelerated by the government joining forces instead of diverting 
the stream).

I, too, would like full CC-BY open access provided by the journals 
themselves, today. That's not going to happen. Attempting to bribe the big 
publishers by swelling their coffers even more and diverting research 
resources to pay them extra (when they're alrady making obscene profits as 
parasites on the scholarly communication process) is not only obscedne itself 
at a time of financial austerity, but is not going to work. If publishers 
were going to transition to Gold OA on any non-glacial timescale, they'd have 
done so by now. They will not do so voluntarily, only when dragged kicking 
and screaming into it, just as all the other content industries are being 
dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet Age.

Green OA mandates are only the first step, but without us taking that first 
step first, as a body, focussing on getting everyone (by everyone I mean all 
researchers, research instutitions, funders and governments) to take that 
first step, we will continue to fall flat on our faces.

Finch is a diversion from taking that first step, driven by idealists who 
have failed to learn the lessons of the decade since the BOAI and by the 
those with their own rent-seeking profits in mind.


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/