[GOAL] "The Finch report is driving scholarly communication into an expensive cul-de-sac"

[Richard Poynder]

An interview with Keith Jeffery, Director of IT and International Strategy
at the UK Science & Technology Facilities Council, and a special “expert”
member of the research outputs committee of Research Councils UK (RCUK).

 

Some quotes below.

 

 

*** On Gold OA:

 

“My arguments against Gold relate predominantly to its cost, coverage,
access, and the way it encourages vanity publishing.”

 

 

*** On the costs of Gold OA:

 

“[F]or any reasonably productive research institution the cost of Gold is ~3
times that of Green 
 Assuming budgets are constant, this reduces the
capacity for a research institution to generate and distribute its scholarly
output. 

 

“[W]ith the transition to Gold from conventional subscription-based
scholarly publishing the commercial publishers will extract from the public
research budget twice; first from the ‘indirect’ budget that already pays
for subscriptions, second from the direct budget in order to pay the costs
of APCs. This is likely to reduce the direct budget — which funds research
activity in the universities — by something like 4%, with this money going
straight to the publishers. 4% of the UK Research Council funding of ~£3
billion is a considerable amount of money.”

 

 

*** On Hybrid OA:

 

“Hybrid is based on the principle that paying for visibility
(publisher-provided OA) for your article through a kind of APC increases its
impact, and it is postulated on the claim that publishers will reduce their
subscription costs as their revenues from Hybrid fees increase. In fact, I
believe only two publishers running this model have reduced subscription
costs. The Wellcome trust alerted the community to the danger of paying
twice with the hybrid model in 2009.”

 

 

*** On Green OA:

 

“Green offers the best route to achieve what the public, the innovators, the
scholars and the research managers (funders and universities) require
because it is most effective, least costly and has only two barriers: the
commercial aspirations of publishers, who generate FUD (fear, uncertainty,
doubt) among academics over rights, refusals to publish, litigation etc.,
and the consequent ‘Zeno’s Paralysis’ — as Stevan Harnad aptly describes it
— that afflicts researchers. This prevents authors undertaking the few
keystrokes required to achieve universal OA.

 

 

*** On the Finch Report:

 

I believe the Finch report is driving scholarly communication into an
expensive cul-de-sac without any vision of future models of scholarly
communication. From the business model point of view, it is anachronistic:
users are not charged for Facebook or Google. From the utility point of
view, it is backward looking: it leads to publisher silos instead of an
interconnected high quality retrieval environment — one that when linked to
CERIF-CRIS means that the whole context of research output is understood.
>From the value for the public purse point of view, it is also a backward
step, as I indicated when talking about the cost of Gold.”

 

 

*** On the future costs of OA:

 

(a) I believe the transition will be long and costly, with double payments
being made to publishers — first, through indirect payments for
subscriptions; second, through payments for APCs, which will come directly
from research funds; 

 

(b) I believe the costs of Gold will be greater than the current
subscription model: first, based on an extrapolation from the currently
announced APCs; and second, because the experience of publisher subscription
increases leads one to believe they will do the same with Gold once they
have obtained a near-monopoly in the new environment.

 

More here:
http://poynder.blogspot.fr/2012/07/oa-interviews-keith-jeffery-uk-science.ht
ml

 

 

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