[GOAL] Re: Why should publishers agree to Green OA?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 9:13 PM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:

> Peter,
>
> There is no contractual 'green' as far as I am aware. It is just a --
> reluctant -- permission (or less, a lack of explicit prohibition). From a
> publisher's point of view it was for a long time OK to allow 'green' as the
> calculation was that it would be chaotic, and no real threat to
> subscriptions (although some were nervous about that from the start). I
> still don't think 'green' is having a serious impact on their revenues (and
> even if so, they make up a lot from sales to China), but the level of chaos
> is reduced somewhat on account of an increasing number of mandates,
> especially big ones, such as the NIH and other governmental mandates, and
> that is scary for publishers. They can, of course, at any point withdraw
> from 'green', or rather, reformulate their conditions of publication, and
> insist on an 'agreement' between author and the publisher that prohibits
> 'green'.
>

Thanks,that's what I thought.

Here's Stevan from today - with the standard green model:
*And once Green OA prevails globally, and institutional cancelations make
subscriptions unsustainable, Green OA pressure will induce publishers to
downsize -- no more "proof readers or typesetters", no more print or online
edition, all access provision and archiving offloaded onto the global
network of institutional Green OA repositories -- leaving just the service
of managing the peer review to pay for (the peers themselves have always
reviewed for free). The far lower cost of the peer review management will
be paid for out of a fraction of the institutional annual windfall savings
released by having canceled subscriptions.
*

I cannot see any sane publisher voluntarily allowing a practice which
destroyed their business. They'll just forbid Green. This has always seemed
to me an insuperable flaw in Green - it can never get beyond 30-40% or it
will be forbidden.

As far as I am aware there is no compensation for allowing 'green' and
> publishers do it in an effort not to alienate their authorship, counting on
> the fact that only a small number would self-archive anyway. That may
> change, of course, if mandates take hold.
>
> What would the 'body' be to negotiate with publishers about 'green'?
>

No idea - I thought it might be SPARC. The OA movement really suffers
because it has no coherent front.

>
> Given these difficulties and imponderables associated with 'green', I
> believe that 'gold' has a much better chance to lead to a stable open
> access.
>

It seems Green has zero chance of prevailing overall.


> And the argument that 'green' would be cheaper is not substantiated. In
> fact, 'gold' is inevitably leading to real competition on price, as authors
> have a choice, and readers haven't. They need everything that's relevant
> for them, regardless of price. They can't read one journal out of two in
> the same field on the ground that it's the cheaper one, even if they are
> equivalent in terms of perceived quality. Authors can submit to the cheaper
> one. And where there is real competition, prices have a strong tendency to
> approach real 'production' costs, of course.
>

I don't think there is real competition yet especially in hybrids. But I
think there will be. The market must be one of the most inefficient of any.

>
>
>
-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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