[GOAL] Re: Public awareness of the OA movement

[Stevan Harnad]

Dear all,

I think Keith is profoundly mistaken on his two central points:

(1) That the new RCUK policy is something that "the research community has
chosen" and hence "there is nothing green OA advocates can do to stop it"

(2) That "publishers will [not] all [offer] hybrid gold immediately to
‘cash in’ [on the RCUK's requirement that if their chosen publisher offers
hybrid Gold, UK authors must pick and pay for Gold, rather than provide
Green]"


Keith also forgets to mention the other perverse consequence of the RCUK
mandate, which is (3) to *give publishers an irresistible reason to crank
up Green embargoes to unallowable lengths*, again to force UK authors to
pick and pay for Gold rather than provide cost-free Green.

The UK research community most definitely has *not* chosen this dreadful
policy: a handful of policy makers (under the influence of various other
"stake-holders," but not representatives of the UK research community) have
chose it. .

Many OA advocates will be working in the next few weeks to try to persuade
RCUK to repair the policy to prevent these perverse consequences, once they
have been pointed out.

If rational discussion is not sufficient to awaken the policy-makers to the
need to correct these fatal flaws in the RCUK policy, then I and others
will launch a petition which UK researchers will then be able to sign,
along the following lines:

I. We UK researchers do not want RCUK to force us to choose where to
publish our research on the basis of the journal's business model, rather
than exclusively on the basis of its quality;

II. We UK researchers do not want RCUK to force us to pay publishers extra
for Gold OA instead of providing cost-free Green OA.

And because the RCUK policy's perverse consequences can have worldwide
implications too (if RCUK induces publishers to adopt or lengthen embargoes
on Green OA, which affects Green OA mandates worldwide), worldwide
researchers will be invited to sign the petition too, identifying
themselves as non-UK.

Keith tried his best for Green with RCUK, but his lone voice was
unsuccessful. Let us hope that a chorus of OA advocates -- augmented if
necessary by a chorus of UK and international researchers as well as the
public -- will succeed in fixing the fatal flaws of the RCUK policy in
advance, rather than leaving that task to years of confusion, resistance
and noncompliance by UK researchers, while setting worldwide OA back yet
another decade.

Stevan Harnad



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
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Keith G Jeffery      Director International Relations       STFC
> Le jeudi 23 août 2012 à 22:49 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> 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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