[GOAL] Re: Some discussion points for the UK OA initiative

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2012-05-07, at 12:43 PM, <keith.jeffery at stfc.ac.uk> wrote:

> I do not believe Global Green would lead to Global Gold.  
> The motivations and business models behind each are
> too dissimilar - as are the likely end-games.

The motivations need not be similar (and Green OA is not
a business model).

Here's the end-game:

What the research community needs, urgently, today, is free
online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed
research output. 

Researchers can provide that in two ways:
by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or
by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and
self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their
own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). 

OA self-archiving (Green OA), once it is mandated by research
institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green
OA. 

Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing
(which is not in the hands of the research community) and
it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA
publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research
community's access and impact problems are already solved.

If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant
cancellation pressure the cancellation pressure will cause 
cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition 
to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. 

As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall 
savings from cancellations grow. 

If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable,
per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and
institutional savings will be high enough to cover them,
because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review
service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto
authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global
network of OA Institutional Repositories. 

Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.

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