[GOAL] Re: Public awareness of the OA movement

Fri Aug 24 20:50:04 BST 2012

Stevan -

1.       My fault; I should have typed THAT rather than THE research community

2.       I agree the RCUK policy favours gold (with immediate CC-BY) over green

3.       I disagree that the RCUK policy will encourage publishers to withdraw green permissions; explicitly it demands green permission (else the publisher is deprecated) whether or not the publisher offers gold CC-BY

Note the policy also supports where applicable 'green' e-preprints.

For convenience I include the key paragraphs of the RCUK policy here

The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access.  The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if:

1.                   The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher's final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on re-use.  This may involve payment of an 'Article Processing Charge' (APC) to the publisher. The CC-BY license should be used in this case.

Or

2.                  Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above, the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher's formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period.  In this option no 'Article Processing Charge' will be payable to the publisher. Research Councils will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access, except in the case of research papers arising from research funded by the AHRC and the ESRC where the maximum embargo period is 12 months.

Some Research Councils, such as MRC and ESRC, have a requirement that research papers must be deposited in specific repositories, such as UKPMC[1] and ESRC Research Catalogue[2].  This is detailed in the policies of individual Research Councils.

RCUK recognises the historical right and tradition of authors to publish online manuscript versions of their papers even before submission, and that this will continue.

This means if no publisher offered gold then everything funded by RCUK would be green with 6 month maximum embargo.  Not a bad result (recall the ePrints button).  However it also allows gold dominantly because a segment of the community demands it.

Stevan's argument turns on the question of whether or not publishers move en masse to gold.  There has been no evidence of this to date and I see no reason why they should - especially with what they see as deterrence in CC-BY (which allows all sorts of re-use and re-publishing).

I repeat I am in favour of total green and no gold but if a segment of the community demands that (gold) mechanism I do not believe I can stop it.

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 Stevan Harnad
Sent: 24 August 2012 17:22
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Cc: SPARC Open Access Forum; BOAI Forum; jisc-repositories
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Public awareness of the OA movement

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
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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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[1] UK PubMed Central - see http://ukpmc.ac.uk.

[2] ESRC Research Catalogue - see http://www.esrc.ac.uk/impacts-and-findings/research-catalogue/

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