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

[Jan Velterop]

On 20 Jun 2012, at 16:21, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> 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. 

What does 'in full' mean here?

> 
>> They should pay with money and get open access.
> 
> Publication is being paid for already.

What is being paid is enough to pay for publication, I agree. But it's not paid for publication, it's paid for access. That's precisely the problem. 

> 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.

Well, the BOAI in 2000 described OA in such a way that CC-BY is the licence that best covers the intention then expressed. Plain vanilla access is solving yesterday's problem. Sometimes one has to leapfrog and anticipate the future. CC-BY allows that. OA as simply 'ocular access' doesn't. I'm referring to text mining and re-use rights, or rather the lack of it in plain vanilla, before you ask.

> 
>> 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.

As long as 'green' means manuscripts, yes. If 'green' means the published paper for which the copyright has been transferred, no. A mandate should make abundantly clear that under no circumstances copyright should be transferred to a publisher. Copyright transfer is a contract. 'Green' mandates rule out copyright transfer. Legally and practically. Researchers shouldn't be enticed into legal conflict zones with false assertions that they can transfer legal rights and then ignore the fact that they have transferred them. They should not transfer them and be advised accordingly. Admitting the problem is the first step to a solution. 

> 
> 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.

No. Subscriptions pay for access. The fee should be paid for the service rendered, which is the organisation of peer review and formal publication. Conflating the two is the main cause of misunderstanding and conflict. Mandates would be an awful lot clearer if the argument that "the publication fee is paid in full by subscriptions" were to be dropped from the equation. 'Green' mandates are about making research results open, and costs nothing; publishing, including OA publishing, is about giving those research results 'value' and 'context' in the scholarly ego-system, and carries a cost, because it involves asking people (publishers) to arrange something, professionally, and those people need to be paid.

> 
>> 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.

See above.

> 
> 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.

CC-BY is not copyright reform. It's using existing copyright effectively, and not as a proxy for payment to publishers, that subsequently makes it possible - and necessary - to sell subscriptions.

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

I'm not discussing the length of embargo periods, either. In fact, I don't like them at all. 'Gold' OA doesn't need them.

> 
> 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.

See above.

> 
> 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.

Indeed, nobody should even have been thinking about the concept of a car until all the horses had died. 

Jan

> 
>> 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
> 
> 
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