[GOAL] Re: Public awareness of the OA movement

Fri Aug 24 16:14:34 BST 2012

All –

We need some balance here.  Although I am a fervent advocate of green libre (for datasets and software as well as scholarly publications)  history tells us we have not (yet) succeeded even with publications.  Meantime in UK (and US) a bandwagon in biomedical sciences is rolling namely Gold OA and there is nothing green OA advocates can do to stop it – the research community has chosen that route.  We may think they are misguided but we have to work with reality.

The RCUK mandate is not perfect and not what I personally would wish.  However what it says is:

If publisher provides immediate CC-BY in exchange for author institution pays use that, else green (institutional repository or subject repository) with maximum 6-month embargo.  Publishers who provide neither are deprecated (with the threat that publication costs will not be funded in that case).

This means that all RCUK-funded output will be OA in some form.  Institutions may download from publisher databases those publications that are gold if they wish to maintain a complete parallel green repository (of their intellectual property) alongside publications to subscription channels deposited in the repository (within 6 months – and there is always the EPRINTS button).  There is an interesting question about what one could download (and mine / process) from the gold publisher’s repository – the metadata, the full text, the citations…..  Note the CC-BY licence allows libre above gratis.  This is important in some disciplines (think transformation / visualisation of chemical structures or detection of chemical experimental ‘recipes’).

This may be a route to achieve universal OA for RCUK outputs faster than any other mechanism.  It comes at a cost.  However, the cost depends critically on the amount of provision of - and takeup of - gold OA and the relationship between increased author institution pays and any reduction in subscriptions.

I do not share Stevan’s view that publishers will all provide hybrid gold immediately to ‘cash in’.  Firstly it requires technology development and secondly I am sure they are wary of the academic opinion of publishers and their business models (and profits).    Also some publishers may choose not to go for gold because of the CC-BY and remain with subscription publishing allowing some kind of green.  Some publishers – because of CC-BY – may revert from gold OA to subscription and permitted green OA.  Recall the ‘backstop’ is green (implied gratis not libre but maybe that is negotiable) with 6 month embargo as the ‘worst case’ for users (consumers) of scholarly output from RCUK-funded projects.

I repeat, the RCUK mandate is not what I personally would wish but – given all the pressures and the realities – it may turn out to give us OA faster than any other mechanism.

Best
Keith
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Keith G Jeffery      Director International Relations       STFC
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From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon
Sent: 24 August 2012 15:12
To: goal at eprints.org
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Public awareness of the OA movement

While I generally agree with Stevan Harnad's message below, I do believe it is important to say "some open-access journals" and "some gold open-access advocates".

Simply not to reduce the entire "gold OA"  to some, potentially harmful, OA practices.

Jean-Claude Guédon

Le jeudi 23 août 2012 à 22:49 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit :

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 9:31 PM, Subbiah Arunachalam <subbiah_a at yahoo.com<mailto:subbiah_a at yahoo.com>> wrote:

Please see the Economist debate on academic journals [http://www.economist.com/economist-asks/do-fee-charging-academic-journals-offer-value-added-0?sort=2#sort-comments.
It has not attracted many comments from readers - a clear indication that the general public (at least the segment that reads high quality news channels like The Economist) is least interested in, if not indifferent to, what we consider is of paramount importance. All our advocacy has not reached them. I think, instead of spending our time talking about refining and redefining the most appropriate way to bring about universal open access amongst ourselves (and that too with some amount of rancour) we should devote our attention now to take the message to the citizenry at large. We should promote Students for OA, Alliance of Taxpayers for OA and similar initiatives in a large scale. In the end, public awareness and taxpayer acceptance are the keys to the success of the OA movement.

CONFLATING SUBSCRIPTION FEES AND (GOLD) OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATION FEES - AND MISSING THE POINT

The Economist is mixing up two kinds of fees: subscription fees, charged by journals to users' institutions in exchange for access and publication fees, charged by (some) journal to authors' institutions in exchange for providing free online access ("open access") to all users.

Yes, subscriptions overcharge enormously; so do open-access journals ("gold open access"). But there is another way for authors to provide free online access to their journal articles for all users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access: authors can self-archive the final, peer-reviewed draft in their open-access institutional repositories as soon as they are accepted for publication ("green open access").

Researchers' funders and institutions have begun mandating (requiring) green open access self-archiving, but publishers have been lobbying vehemently that they should instead be paid even more for "hybrid gold open access," which is when a journal continues to collect subscriptions but, in addition, sells gold open access to individual authors who agree to pay a publication fee (which can be from $1500 to $3000 or more per paper published).

But now the UK research funder (RCUK), which used to be the worldwide leader in open access policy has been persuaded by the publisher lobby (as well as gold open access advocates) to mandate Gold OA payment, paid for out of scarce research funds, in place of RCUK's historic green cost-free Green OA self-archiving.

The UK and global research community must now send RCUK a very powerful and concerted signal that this needless and wasteful new policy must be revised.

See:

Urgent Need to Revise the New RCUK Open Access Policy
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/927-.html

How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised
(Digital Research 2012 Keynote, Oxford, September 11)
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/926-.html

How to Repair the New RCUK OA Policy

http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/923-.html

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