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

[keith.jeffery at stfc.ac.uk]

Stevan -

Yes, I know your view on green leveraging gold - we have discussed it before.  I accept your view is logical.  

But - and it is a big but - we are dealing with commercial publishers and commercial imperatives.  Why should the publishers reduce gold author pays charges if the academic community (especially the funders) are willing to pay?  The evidence to date is that the academic community is willing to pay (although I accept the sample of gold channels is relatively small as yet).  Gold offers a seductively safe route for academics who object to high subscription charges and want maximum exposure of their work yet are unwilling to face up to the FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) raised by the publishers concerning green OA.

I suspect the majority of a new generation of academics raised on social networking and web 2.0 will demand new models of scholarly communication beyond the existing subscription/green and author pays/gold models.  Like you I hope they separate the activities done by the community (authoring, reviewing, editing) from the management of peer review and find appropriate models for the latter - but I believe this will be within a new model of communication.

However, this is some way ahead.  Meantime - as you know - I support strongly green OA as you have defined it as the best mechanism we have today.  My objections to gold are based on increased cost for high output institutions and the danger of vanity publishing - there is a potential conflict of interest.  A further problem concerns associated data: it makes no sense to ship terabytes to publisher servers - much better to leave it as close as possible to the generating source, close to the expertise and context (this is where CERIF-CRIS come in) within which it was collected. BTW a similar argument goes for the benefit of institutional repositories of scholarly publications.

The problem - as you have documented well - is persuading the community.

Best
Keith

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Keith G Jeffery      Director International Relations       STFC
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-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 07 May 2012 18:55
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Some discussion points for the UK OA initiative

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/
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