[GOAL] Hybrid Gold Offer by Royal Society of Chemistry: A Trojan Horse

[Stevan Harnad]

SWAPPING SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR HYBRID GOLD "MEMBERSHIPS": 
A TROJAN HORSE

The seemingly selfless offer from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
 to pay £1 million in hybrid Gold OA fees for its authors at institutions 
that subscribe to all the RSC's 72 journals is in reality a totally self-interested 
strategy for locking in RSC's current publishing revenue streams should 
the research community prove foolish enough to seek OA via the slow 
and costly route of paying pre-emptively for Gold OA instead of providing 
cost-free Green OA by self-archiving their refereed final drafts free for all online.

This hybrid Gold "membership/transition" strategy is not new: It has been 
offered by Springer (but with little uptake) for a few years now, with a 
promise to lower subscription fees "proportionately" as hybrid Gold 
uptake rises: http://bit.ly/HybGold

The irony is doubled (and along with it the foolishness of researchers 
who fall for this option) by the fact that both RSC and Springer have 
already formally recognized their authors' right to provide immediate, 
unembargoed Green OA. 
See: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ 

Stevan Harnad

On 2012-07-23, at 4:19 AM, CHARLES OPPENHEIM wrote:

> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=420640#.UA0GGbst_KE.twitter states:
> 
> The Royal Society of Chemistry is to waive its open-access publication fees for researchers from universities that subscribe to all its journals.
> 
> Institutions that subscribe to the learned society’s “RSC Gold” collection will be given credit equal to the cost of their subscription, valid until the end of 2013. They will be able to use the credit to pay the society’s £1,600 open-access article fees for any paper whose corresponding author is affiliated to them.
> 
> The initiative follows the government’s endorsement of the recommendations of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Dame Janet Finch, the former vice-chancellor of Keele University.
> 
> The Finch group said that the UK should move towards making all publicly funded research freely available via the “gold” open-access model, which involves authors paying article fees.
> 
> In their new open-access policies, also published in the past week, the UK research councils and the European Commission both commit themselves to meeting the cost of article charges.
> 
> But James Milne, managing director of publishing at the Royal Society of Chemistry, said the “Gold for Gold” scheme would “help researchers make their articles open access during a period when funding to support this model is still relatively unclear”.
> 
> Under the initiative, he said, the society was likely to waive more than £1 million in article fees by the end of 2013.
> 
> If feedback about the scheme is positive, more vouchers will be issued when subscriptions are renewed next year, Dr Milne said.
> 
> The offer will initially apply only to UK institutions, but the society said that it would consider extending it to the rest of the world “should it prove beneficial to the community”.
> 
> Asked whether the society would lower subscription prices as more researchers chose open-access options, as is envisaged in the Finch report, a spokesman said: “Having only this week heard the government’s response to Finch, we’re looking at various scenarios as we begin the lengthy transition to open access.”
> 
> The source is the Times Higher Education
> 
> 
> 
> Charles
> 
> 
> Professor Charles Oppenheim
> 
> 
> 
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