[GOAL] Re: Public awareness of the OA movement

[Stevan Harnad]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 3:50 PM, <keith.jeffery at stfc.ac.uk> wrote:

>  1.       **My fault; I should have typed THAT rather than THE research
> community
>
THAT research community is the biomedical research community (44% of UK's
total annual research, as indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI):

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.4973.1340115026!/image/UK.jpg_gen/derivatives/fullsize/UK.jpg



RCUK covers the entire UK research community. And the UK publishes 6% of
worldwide research.

> ****
>
> **2.       **I agree the RCUK policy favours gold (with immediate CC-BY)
> over green
>
It is ambiguous whether RCUK authors are required to choose paid Gold over
cost-free Green only if the Gold is CC-BY (Libre), or even if it is just
Gratis Gold.

*(Can someone please provide a definitive answer about this?)*

But for a subscription Gold publisher who sells hybrid Gold by the
individual article, it is just as trivial to make the Gold Libre as to
offer Gold at all. It's just 6% of their articles. And if it ever reaches
100% Gold, why would the publisher care whether it was Gratis Gold or Libre
Gold? They get fully paid either way.

In any case "favouring" paid Gold over cost-free Green means providing
publishers with an irresistible incentive to offer paid Gold -- and to
crank up the embargo-length on Green to make sure that that option is ruled
out.

These are the obvious perverse effects, Keith, that you are for some reason
(known only to yourself) discounting in the hope that the RCUK policy will
not prove to be quite as horrendous as it might.

Well it is more than horrendous enough either way (whether Gold always
trumps Green or only Libre Gold trumps Green), and urgently needs fixing.

> ****
>
> **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
>

Keith, this makes no sense: If a publisher offers Libre Gold, the author
must pick Gold. That moots embargo lengths for all publishers except for
the ones foolish enough not to offer hybrid Gold under these circumstances.

It would be very helpful if someone who knows for sure could obligingly
resolve the uncertainty for all of us about whether RCUK authors may choose
cost-free Green rather than having to choose paid Gold if the Gold is just
Gratis and not Libre. If the answer is that they may, then publishers
wishing to ensure the extra Gold revenue have a choice between upgrading
the Gold to Libre or cranking up the embargo on Green to 2020. Either way,
the publisher gets the extra money if the UK author wants to publish with
them, and the UK author loses.

It does not require complex economic/psychological game-theoretic modelling
to figure this one out!

> ****
>
> ** Note the policy also supports where applicable ‘green’ e-preprints.
>

What is this supposed to mean?

If the publisher offers both paid Gold and 6-month Green "e-prints", the
author has to pick paid Gold. (Popping an e-print into the repository after
paying that is rather beside the point.)

It is only if a subscription publisher does not offer hybrid Gold (as you
imagine, Keith, that they will be foolish enough not to do) that RCUK's
largesse in "supporting" Green "e-prints" kicks in.

Right now 60% of journals offer unembargoed, immediate Green. Perhaps
another 15% offer Green after the allowable 6-month embargo. Maybe 15% more
after the 12 months allowed for AHRC and ESRC authors.

That's 90% that fall within the allowable RCUK Green range today.

But once the RCUK policy kicks in, most of the Green publishers will offer
hybrid Gold, and many of those will also crank up their embargo lengths
(especially if they only want to offer Gratis Gold rather than failsafe
Libre Gold).

So that 90% RCUK figure is going to plummet -- *and not just for the UK,
but for the entire world * -- if RCUK does not fix its policy fast.

So much for RCUK's "support" of green "e-prints."



> ** 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.
>

This is Gold OA, and *if the CC-BY clause is mandatory*, it means Libre
Gold OA.

> ****
>
> 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.
>

This is Green OA, and it sounds as if it is "supported" by RCUK if the
journal does not offer Libre OA and if the Green OA is within the allowable
embargo limits.

The sensible strategy for the publisher here is to offer hybrid Gold OA and
either make it Libre OA or crank up the embargo to unallowable limits, so
the only way the author can publish in the journal is by paying for hybrid
Gratis Gold OA. (And if the RCUK declines to pay under those conditions,
and the author needs to publish in that journal anyway, the author must
find some other means to pay.)

Simple solution: Drop the requirement to pay for Gold if it is offered,
drop the embargo limit, require immediate deposit (ID/OA) in all cases, use
the "Almost OA" Button to tide over researcher needs during any embargo,
and if the RCUK has spare cash, make it available to RCUK authors if they
wish to pay for Libre Gold OA or immediate Gratis Gold OA.

That would be a viable Green OA mandate for the UK,* and for the rest of
the world too* (especially if reinforced by requiring institutional rather
than institution-external deposit and by making institutional deposit the
sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance
evaluation and as well as national research assessment, as Liege and
Belgian funders do).

> ****
>
> 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.
>
If, given the new RCUK policy as it now reads, no publisher offered hybrid
Gold then that would only imply that publishers were asleep at the wheel!

But publishers certainly are not asleep at the wheel, because it was years
of relentless and eventually successful publisher lobbying (from
subscription, hybrid Gold and "pure" Gold publishers) that duped Finch and
RCUK into adopting this foolish policy in the first place.

(Publishers had been urging it for years: "*You want OA? Pay us extra for
it and we'll sell it to you! But whatever you do, don't mandate Green OA!
It's parasitic, it will destroy publishing, and it will destroy peer review
too!*" -- And Finch/RCUK fell for this, hook, line and sinker...)


> ** 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).
>

There has been no en masse movement toward hybrid Gold to date for the
simple and obvious reason that the voluntary author demand for hybrid Gold
has been close to zero. -- But that was before this absurd new RCUK
mandate, *requiring* authors to pick paid Gold if it's offered.

And don't imagine CC-BY will be a deterrent. It's trivial to offer CC-BY
for the 6% of your articles for which you will receive a guaranteed extra
payment (say, a per-article fee equal to 1/Nth of your annual subscription
revenue, if you publish N articles per year) over and above your
subscription revenue.

And if it starts a worldwide trend toward 100% paid Gold CC-BY, that's fine
too: Your revenue streams are guaranteed then too.

Neither outcome (neither 6% paid UK hybrid Gold CC-BY nor a global scale-up
to 100% paid Gold CC-BY) will actually occur, but not because publishers
will be too foolish to offer hybrid Gold and crank up Green OA embargoes,
but because if the new RCUK policy is adopted uncorrected, as-is, it will
be greeted by years of confusion, resentment, resistance and non-compliance
among UK researchers, till RCUK realizes it won't work.

But if RCUK policy-makers show some flexibility and insight, the policy can
still be fixed so as to ward off all its perverse consequences. (That's
what I'm still fervently hoping that RCUK will do.)

** 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.
>

The "segment of the community" that *demands* to pay for Gold can certainly
pay for it. Who's stopping them?

But have you forgotten what this is about Keith? The one doing the
demanding is not the researchers: *it's the RCUK policy-makers* (and the
"stake-holders" who have been advising them). And they're not demanding
what they're demanding from the "segment of the community" that wants it
anyway: they're demanding it from the entire UK research community.

We're talking about a *mandate* here -- a mandate that formerly only
demanded that researchers provide cost-free Green OA (and publish in
whichever journal they wished) and is now instead demanding that they only
publish in journals that either offer paid Gold Libre OA (which -- if the
journal offers it -- the RCUK author must must pick it and pay), or, if the
journal doesn't offer paid Libre Gold OA, then the journal must offer
6-month Green OA -- or else RCUK authors may not publish in that journal
(unless they pay for immediate Gratis Gold OA).

Journals know exactly what to do with these straightforward contingencies:
Offer hybrid Gold, pick your price, and crank Green embargoes up to
infinity.

If Finch/RCUK want to waste UK research funds on paying extra for Gold
CC-BY OA, let them do it. But don't demand that researchers do it if they
would rather just provide cost-free Green OA -- and even if some of that is
embargoed for a while:

The UK is an island, but it is not an island unto itself. Once
Gratis Green OA mandates (ID/OA) are adopted worldwide all the other good
things we all seek -- the end of embargoes, the end of subscriptions, the
end of unwanted re-use restrictions, the end of inflated publication
prices, and a universal transition to "pure" Gold OA and as much CC-BY as
authors need and want -- will follow as a natural matter of course.

(And the institutional subscription cancellation revenues -- instead of
scarce funds diverted from research -- will be there to pay the far lower
cost of peer review alone, which will be all that's left of peer-reviewed
journal publishing.)

But first, there's work to be done: The flaws in the RCUK policy have to be
fixed.

Stevan Harnad

** **
>
> *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
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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****
>
>   ****
>
>  ** **
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> [1] <#1395a44b949cc748_1395a3526a9f7fda__ftnref1> UK PubMed Central – see
> http://ukpmc.ac.uk.****
>
> [2] <#1395a44b949cc748_1395a3526a9f7fda__ftnref2> ESRC Research Catalogue
> – see http://www.esrc.ac.uk/impacts-and-findings/research-catalogue/****
>
> --
> Scanned by iCritical.
>
>
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