[GOAL] The UK's Fool's Gold Rush

[Stevan Harnad]

** Cross-Posted **

Paul Ayris's points in "Why panning for gold may be detrimental to open
access research<http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/jul/23/finch-report-open-access-research>"
are all spot on:

The UK Government recommends that the UK should phase out extra-cost-free
Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories and instead pay
publishers extra for Gold OA out of scarce UK research funds, as
recommended by the Finch Report. Fortunately, RCUK (and the
EC)<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/912-.html> think
otherwise and continue to mandate Green OA, in keeping with the UK Select
Committee's historic recommendation in
2004<http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm>
.

There is also the question of the rest of the world, as only 6% of research
journal content comes from the UK.

Paul writes:

*"If the whole world turned open access tomorrow, the evidence suggests
that the greatest savings would come from gold, rather than green, open
access."*

This is incorrect, because it omits the question of *how* the rest of the
world is imagined to turn OA tomorrow:

*1.* If tomorrow the entire world, like the UK, immediately agreed
pre-emptively to pay publishers' asking price for Gold OA, the world would
have OA, but everyone would be paying more for publishing than they are
paying now for subscriptions, because they would be paying for
subscriptions plus pre-emptive Gold OA. Publishers would, of course,
obligingly agree to cap total expenditure at what is today being paid for
subscriptions, thereby ensuring their current revenue streams.

*2. *If tomorrow the entire world instead immediately mandated
extra-cost-free Green OA, the world would have OA, and subscriptions would
continue paying for subscriptions, at no extra cost or saving.

But the reality is that the entire world cannot and will not agree to pay
publishers extra pre-emptively for Gold OA tomorrow, as the UK seems to
have agreed to do. There will be an anarchic transition period, in which
mandating extra-cost-free Green OA will be the much less expensive option.

And if Green OA nears or reaches 100% globally, institutions will finally
able to cancel their subscriptions, forcing publishers to phase out the
print and online edition, archiving and access-provision and their costs,
downsizing to the management of the peer-review service and converting to
Gold OA, whose far lower costs institutions will pay, per paper published,
out of a fraction of their annual windfall savings from having cancelled
subscriptions.

This is the contingency the publishing lobby managed to gull the gullible
Finch Committee and UK government into overlooking completely in favour of
a gratuitous rush to pan out pre-emptively for pre-Green Gold. (And this is
the reason that pre-emptive Gold is such a foolish, unrealistic and costly
option, whereas post-Green Gold will not only provide 100% OA but it will
also lower overall publishing cost and expenditure substantially.)

Swan, Alma & Houghton, John (2012) Going for Gold? The costs and benefits
of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: further economic
modelling.<http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/610/2/Modelling_Gold_Open_Access_for_institutions_-_final_draft3.pdf>
 *Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group*, June 2012.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged
Transition<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/>.
In: Anna Gacs (ed). *The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the
Electronic Age*. L'Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard
the Progress of Green Open Access
Self-Archiving<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/>
. *Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community*. 21(3-4): 86-93

>From Swan & Houghton's executive summary (as quoted by Peter Suber in
"Transition
to green OA significantly less expensive than transition to gold
OA<https://plus.google.com/109377556796183035206/posts/gSc6EpFW9tA>
"

*"Based on this analysis, the main findings are: [1] so long as research
funders commit to paying publication costs for the research they fund, and
[2] publication charges fall to the reprint author’s home institution, [3]
all universities would see savings from (worldwide) Gold OA when
article-processing charges are at the current averages, [4]
research-intensive universities would see the greatest savings, and [5] in
a transition period, providing Open Access through the Green route offers
the greatest economic benefits to individual universities, unless
additional funds are made available to cover Gold OA costs....[F]or all the
sample universities during a transition period when subscriptions are
maintained, the cost of adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of
Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing institutions around
one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as
much for the most research intensive university sampled. In a transition
period, providing OA through the Green route would have substantial
economic benefits for universities, unless additional funds were released
for Gold OA, beyond those already available through the Research Councils
and the Wellcome Trust...."*
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