[GOAL] Don't Price Your Gold OA Harvest Till Your Green OA Seeds Are Sown (and Sprouted)

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2012-11-26, at 10:22 AM, Richard Poynder wrote:

“We estimate that a full transition to OA could lead to savings in the
> region of 10-12% of the cost base of a subscription publisher.”
> BernsteinResearch investment analyst Claudio Aspesi
> The key question: if that estimate is accurate, will those savings be
> passed on to the research community?
> http://bit.ly/QFOPeI


I  think that what Richard is worrying about here is whether the
cost-cutting that a transition from subscription publishing to Gold OA
publishing would make possible (e.g., curtailing the print edition) would
be reflected in lower Gold OA charges to the author/institution or they
would simply be absorbed by the publisher (Aspesi's (2012) test case being
Elsevier), leaving Gold OA charges higher than they need to be.

I join this speculation and counter-speculation only reluctantly, for two
reasons:

(1) I think there are significant transition factors that none of the
economic analyses has yet fully taken into account, and hence that the
potential savings are still being considerably underestimated.

(2) I also think this focus on predicting the costs of Gold OA just
reinforces the excessive preoccupation with estimating the costs and
benefits of pre-emptive Gold OA rather than *the costs and benefits of OA
itself*, and what is needed, practically, for facilitating a transition to
OA itself, rather than just a direct transition to Gold OA in particular.

*Post-Green Gold will cost far less than the pre-emptive pre-Green Gold
that the economic analyses keep estimating.*

We keep counting the "savings" from generic Gold OA publishing without
reckoning how to get there, and whether *the transition itself *might not
be a major determinant in the potential for savings (from OA as well as
from Gold OA).

I am not an economist, so I will not try to do anything more than to point
out the main factor that I believe the economic analyses are failing to
take into account:

If Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories is mandated
globally by institutions and funders, this will have two major
consequences:

I. First, not only will globally mandated Green OA provide universal OA
(and all of its benefits, scientific and economic) alongside subscription
publishing, at minimal additional cost (because (a) repositories are
relatively cheap to create and maintain, (b) most research-active
institutions have created them already, and (c) have done so for multiple
purposes, OA being only one of them).

II.  Second, mandating Green OA globally (unlike pre-emptive Gold OA) also
puts *competitive* pressure on subscription publishers to cut obsolete
costs, because *the universal availability of the Green OA version makes it
much easier for cash-strapped institutions to cancel their journal
subscriptions.*
*
*
Not only can the print edition and its costs be phased out under
cancelation pressure from global Green OA, but so can the publisher's
online edition and version of record: The worldwide network of Green OA
repositories and their many central harvesters are perfectly capable of
generating, hosting, archiving and providing access to the
version-of-record. No more PDF or XML needed from the publisher; nor
archiving; nor access provision; nor marketing; nor fulfillment. Nor any of
their associated expenses.

All that's needed from the publisher is the service of managing the peer
review (peers review for free) and the certification of its outcome with
the journal's title and track-record.

That's *post-Green* Gold OA publishing. Compared to that, all the
economical estimates of savings are under-estimates.

Nor will there be any need for mega-publishers (like Elsevier), publishing
vast fleets of unrelated journals;  nor for mega-journals (like PLoS ONE),
publishing vast flocks of unrelated articles. There are many narrow
research specialities, a few wider ones, and a few even wider,
multidisciplinary ones. They each have their own peers, and they each need
their own peer-reviewed journals, and, depending on the size of the field,
perhaps several journals, forming a pyramid of quality standards, the most
selective (hence smallest) at the top.

There may have been economies of scale for multiple journal production, in
the Gutenberg days. But in the PostGutenberg era, with post-Green Gold OA
journals, providing only the service of peer review, there will be no need
for generic refereeing being mass-marketed by generic editorial assistants
for mega-publishers or mega-journals, where no one other than the referee
(if well-selected) knows anything about the subject matter.

So besides scaling down to the post-Green OA essentials, post-Green Gold OA
journals will also revert to the independent, peer-based titles that they
were before being bought up for by the post-Maxwellian publisher
megalopolies. The online-era economies will come from restoring journals'
own natural speciality scale rather than from agglomerating them into
generic multiple money-makers.

Aspesi, C (2012) Reed Elsevier: Transitioning to Open Access - Are the Cost
Savings Sufficient to Protect
Margins?<http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk/OAcosts.pdf>BernsteinResearch
November 26

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

(2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access
Journal<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15617/>.
In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) *The Future of the Academic Journal*.
Chandos.

(2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be
Access Denied or Delayed <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/>. *D-Lib
Magazine* 16 (7/8).

(2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide
Green Open Access Now <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514>. *Prometheus*,
28 (1). pp. 55-59.

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012)  Planting the green seeds for a
golden harvest<http://www.cfses.com/projects/Going%20for%20Gold%20-%20Comment%20and%20Clarification%20%28Houghton%20and%20Swan%29.pdf>.
Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold”
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