[GOAL] Re: Does Green OA have a negative effect on journal revenues?

[Stevan Harnad]

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 4:34 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Mike Taylor has asked about Green OA and revenues and I have forwarded his
> mail here for an authoritative reply.
>
> P.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Mike Taylor <mike at indexdata.com>
> Date: Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 9:25 AM
> Subject: [Open-access] Does Green OA has a negative effect on journal
> revenues?
> To: open-access at lists.okfn.org
>
> Dear all,
>
> I've often seen it said that there's no evidence that allowing Green
> OA has a negative effect on journal revenues. Is there any evidence
> that it does NOT have a negative effect, or is it just that no-one's
> done a good study that shows there IS a negative effect?
>
> Does anyone have references, either way?
>

Alma Swan has published the response of both the American Physical Society
and the Institute of Physics -- from the discipline with the most and the
longest-standing Green OA, near 100% in high energy physics and
astrophysics for almost 2 decades: Both publishers report that there is no
correlation between Green OA growth and subscriptions:
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/261006/

However, in view of the recent, unaccountably publisher-dominated and
counterproductive Finch Report
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/907-.html
I think it is time for the research community (researchers, universities,
funders) to stop this needless and self-damaging preoccupation with the
protection of publishers' current subscription revenue streams, which are
flowing amply in many cases opulently.

It is not the duty or responsibility of the research community -- which
provides publishers with its papers for free and provides peer review for
free -- to sacrifice the maximized research access, usage and impact that
had been made possible by the online era in order to protect the interests
of publishers from natural evolutionary adaptation, at the expense of the
interests of research. (I have many times pointed out that this amounts to
allowing the publishing tail to wag the research dog: in fact, it is more
like letting the flea on the tail of the research dog wag the dog!)

Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates grow
anarchically, paper by paper, institution by institution, not
systematically, journal by journal. The most likely reason why journals are
not yet feeling any cancelation pressure from Green OA despite the hard
economic times globally is that Green OA is still only at about 20%
globally, for all disciplines except high energy physics and astrophysics,
and in those disciplines the APS and IOP journals are reasonably enough
priced that almost all research-active users worldwide are at institutions
that can still afford subscription access.

(Nevertheless, high energy physics is precisely the area where a number of
of subscribing institutions are currently experimenting with a joint
agreement to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA with a kind of collective
"membership" in the SCOAP3  consortium: http://scoap3.org/ -- a process
that there are strong reasons to believe will prove unstable, unscalable
and unsustainable:  http://bit.ly/SCOAP3gold ).

But now that the publishing lobby has successfully persuaded the Finch
Committee to subordinate the interests of research to the interests of
publishers, with the risk that its recommendations will slow or halt the
growth of Green OA and Green OA mandates, and instead put OA on the slow,
expensive and uncertain track of pre-emptive Gold OA payment, it would seem
to be the time for the research community to stop thinking of itself as
beholden to do or not do whatever it takes to guarantee the current revenue
streams and modus operandi of research journal publishers, come what may:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/

The research community needs to remind itself that research is not funded
by the public and conducted by researchers and their institutions as a
service to the publishing industry. It is the publishing industry that is
selling a service -- the management of peer review -- to the research
community. Green OA mandates will ensure that that service is no longer
inescapably co-bundled with obsolete products and services (print edition,
publisher's PDF, publisher archiving, publisher access-provision) and
accessible only to those researchers whose institutions can afford to pay
for the whole co-bundled package, in the form of a subscription.

The first step in this healthy realization that the powerful new potential
of the online medium to maximize research access, usage and impact is in
the research community's own hands is stop obsessing about whether Green OA
will have a negative effect on journal revenues: It will, and it should,
and journal publishers will adapt to the new downsized reality, when the
time comes. And what is needed in order to hasten and ensure this optimal
and inevitable transition is Green OA.

What research institutions and funders need to do now is to press on at
full speed toward universally mandating Green OA, ignoring completely the
perverse and self-destructive recommendations of the Finch Committee,
echoing as they do, the familiar self-interested recommendations of the
publishing lobby.

And dropping the gratuitous obsession with whether Green OA will have a
negative effect on journal revenues: Let's hope it will, as lower journal
costs and prices mean less of the research communities scarce funds
needlessly diverted from paying for research to for paying publication.

Stevan Harnad
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