[GOAL] Re: Agreement on Green OA not needed from publishers but from institutions and funders

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2012-06-20, at 10:30 AM, Jan Velterop wrote:

> The mistake authors make is to 'pay' publishers for their services
> by transferring copyright.

Publishers are paid, in full, by institutional subscriptions. 

> They should pay with money and get open access.

Publication is being paid for already. All that's needed for 
OA (Green) is mandates (and keystrokes).

> Full open access, CC-BY. 

Green, Gratis OA (free online access) is full OA.

Insisting on CC-BY today is premature, and a red herring now, 
when we are still so far from just plain vanilla free online access.

> The reason why they pay is that they want services.
> Let's call those services 'formal publishing'.
> They don't need those services for the sake of distributing their papers.
> They can do that for free, in a repository, say, and with open access
> without any cost or hindrance. It's the way ArXiv works. 

It's the way Green OA works.

And the only service authors need is peer review, which
peers provide for free, and publishers manage for a fee.
And that fee is being paid in full by subscriptions today.

> But authors want/need more. They want formal publications, in a journal.
> So they 'buy' the services of a publisher to formalise their papers, with
> peer review and a journal 'badge'. The value of the 'badge' is often expressed
> as impact factor. 

See above. The rest is just formal verbiage. Authors want peer review, and
that's being fully paid for today by subscriptions.

So what is missing today is Green OA. And that's what mandates are for.

> Once the copyright has been transferred to the publisher, that publisher
> *is* a legitimate party in the discussion. 

Along with premature insistence on CC-BY, redirecting the agenda from
Green OA to copyright reform is again a red herring -- one that has been
a very successful distractor and retardant for years now.

But that's behind us. We are discussing immediate deposit mandates
here, not the length of embargo periods.

No publisher agreement is needed by an institution or a funder either for 
adopting an immediate-deposit (ID/OA) mandate or for adopting a maximum 
allowable OA embargo-length.

> So the solution is: don't ask a publisher (or anyone) for a service if you don't want to pay.

To repeat, the service of managing peer review is paid for, many times over, by
subscriptions today.

If and when Green OA makes subscriptions unsustainable, we can discuss
paying for peer review as a Gold OA fee, out of the subscription cancelation
savings -- but not before, or instead.

> And if you want a service and are prepared to pay, don't pay by transferring
> copyright, but just with plain old money. 

Subscriptions are money, and copyright is a red herring.

Stevan Harnad