[GOAL] Re: (no subject)

[Jan Velterop]

On 3 Aug 2012, at 03:08, Andrew A. Adams wrote:

> 
> 
> 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.

Apart from having sexual and magical connotations, the term 'fetishism' applies to "excessive or irrational devotion to some activity". It seems that in the discussion on how to achieve OA, the term might be more appropriate to use in relation to the advocacy of 'green' than in relation to referring to the BOAI principles. 

> 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.

It is a mistake to rely on the ability to dictate.

> 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).

10,000 research institutes means, in terms of Harnadian 'green', 10,000 repositories; 100,000 journals (if there were so many; I've only ever heard numbers in the order of 20-25,000) does not mean 100,000 publishers. Besides, there is no existential reason for institutions to have a repository and 'green' mandate. The fact that others have repositories and it doesn't have one itself does not harm a research institution in the same way that not having being 'gold' (or at least having a 'gold' option) does existentially harm journals in an environment of more and more 'gold' journals. 

As for costs, there are two things that seem to escape the attention of exclusively 'green' advocates:

1) 'Green' fully depends on the prolongation of the subscription model. Without subscription revenues no journals, hence no peer-reviewed articles, hence nothing to self-archive but manuscripts, arXiv-style. (That would be fine by me, actually, with post-publication peer review mechanisms overlaying arXiv-oids). The cost of maintaining subscriptions is completely ignored by exclusively 'green' advocates, who always talk about 'green' costing next to nothing. They are talking about the *marginal* cost of 'green', and compare it to the *integral* cost of 'gold'.

2) Exclusively 'green' advocates do not seem to understand that for 'gold' journals, publishers are not in any position to "demand money". They can only offer their services in exchange for a fee if those who would pay the fee are willing to pay it. That's known as 'competition', or as a 'functioning market'. By its very nature, it drives down prices. This in contrast to the monopoloid subscription market, where the price drivers face upwards. Sure, some APC's increased since the early beginnings of 'gold' OA publishing, when 'gold' publishers found out they couldn't do it for amounts below their costs. But generally, the average APCs per 'gold' article are lower — much lower — than the average publisher revenues per subscription article. And this average per-article subscription price will have to be coughed up in order to keep 'green' afloat.

If and when the denizens of the ivory tower were to reduce their culturalism and anglo-linguism that currently prevails, we could rapidly see science publishing emerge in places like China, India, and other countries keen on establishing their place in a global market, competing on price. APCs could tumble. Some call this 'predatory gold OA publishing'. Few realise that the 'prey' is subscription journals.

> 
>> 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).

Comparing 'green' and 'gold' is almost, to borrow a phrase from Stevan Harnad, "comparing apples and orang-utans". The Finch report is not mistaken to see 'green' as an impoverished type of open access, with embargo periods, access only to an authors’ manuscript, without links and semantic enrichment; and severe limitations on the rights of use. 

Besides, 'gold' implies also 'green' ('gold' articles can be deposited, without embargo or limits on use, anywhere), where 'green' does not imply 'gold'.

> 
> 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.

Indeed, they won't do it voluntarily. That's why the BOAI was so important and no fetish. But the tragedy is that 'green' depends on publishers' collaboration as well. In the ID/OA scheme favoured by Harnad c.s., deposited articles may be made open "if and when the publisher permits"!

> 
> 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.

If so, they are the first steps out of a very tall building. A kind of self-fenestration. Taking measures to break the fall are highly advisable. 'Gold' is such a measure.

> 
> 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.

The Finch group has come to its conclusions precisely because they *have* learnt the lessons of the last decade. There is nothing — repeat: *nothing* — that prevents academics to eschew the services of "rent-seeking" publishers. They could easily self-organise (though I realise that both the words 'could' and 'easily' are probably misplaced). To expect publishers (for-profit and not-for-profit ones alike) to refuse providing services that academics are seeking from them is silly. 

> 
> 
> -- 
> 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/
> 
> 
> 
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