[GOAL] Re: Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal

Sun Oct 7 13:29:24 BST 2012

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Sally Morris <
sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:

**
> Stevan overlooks the difference between 'publishing' an article in a
> repository and in a journal.   As long as researchers prefer the latter
> (and there are lots of reasons why they seem to, in addition to peer
> review) then there will be a demand for journals in which to publish:
> selection and collecting together of articles of particular relevance to a
> given audience, and of a certain range of quality;  'findability';  kudos
> of the journal's title (and impact factor);  copy-editing;  linking;
> quality of presentation;  etc etc...
>
> And peer review is in any case not a contextless operation.  The selection
> of articles for publication in journal X is a relative matter;  not just
> 'is the research soundly conducted and honestly reported?' but 'is it of
> sufficient relevance, interest and value to our readers in particular?'
>

I completely agree with Sally about peer review (it is a decision by
qualified specialists about whether a paper meets a journal's established
standards for quality *as well as subject matter, *as certified by the
journal's title and track-record), and I explicitly say so in the longer
commentaries of which I only posted an excerpt.

But that, of course, does not change a thing about the fact that peer
review is merely a service, that can be unbundled from the many other
products and services with which it is currently co-bundled. It certainly
does not imply that in order for referees or editors to make a decision
about journal subject matter, there has to exist a set of articles
co-bundled in a monthly or quarterly collection, sold together as a
product, online or on-paper!

As to the rest of the co-bundled products and services Sally mentions: If
she's right, then journals have nothing to fear from Green OA mandates,
since those only apply to the author's peer-reviewed, revised, accepted
final draft. That's what's self-archived in the author's institutional
repository. If all those other products and services are so important, then
reaching 100% Green OA globally will not make subscriptions unsustainable,
because the need, and hence the market, for all those other co-bundled
products and services Sally mentioned will still be there.

The only difference will be that all users -- not just subscribers -- will
have access to all peer-reviewed, revised, accepted final drafts. (That's
Green OA, and once we are there, I can stop wasting my time and energy
trying to get us there, as I have been doing for nearly 20 years now!)

But then can I ask Sally, please, to call off her fellow publishers who
have been relentlessly (and successfully) lobbying BIS not to mandate Green
OA, and have been imposing embargoes on Green OA, on the (rather
incoherent) argument that (1) Green OA is inadequate for researchers' needs
and has already proved to be a failure and (2) that if Green OA succeeded
it would destroy publishing, peer review, and research quality?

Otherwise this (incoherent) argument becomes something of a self-fulfilling
prophecy, and we have the Finch/RCUK fiasco to show for it.

Stevan Harnad

> Sally
>
> Sally Morris
> South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
> Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286
> Email:  sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Stevan Harnad
> *Sent:* 06 October 2012 23:12
> *To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> *Cc:* JISC-REPOSITORIES at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> *Subject:* [GOAL] Re: Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal
>
>  *Publisher Wheeling and Dealing: Open Access Via National and Global
> McNopoly?*
>
> Excerpted from more extensive comments on the Poynder/Velterop Interview
> here <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/942-.html> and
> here <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/943-.html>.
>
>  *Jan Velterop:** “a shift to an author-side payment for the service of
> arranging peer review and publication is a logical one”*
>
>
> The service of arranging peer review I understand.
>
> But what’s the rest? What’s “Arranging publication”? Once a paper has been
> peer-reviewed, revised and accepted, what’s left for publishers to do (for
> a fee) that authors can’t do for free (by depositing the peer-reviewed,
> revised, accepted paper in their institutional repository)?
>
> And how to get *there*, from *here* -- and at a fair price for just peer
> review alone? Publishers won’t unbundle, downsize and renounce revenue
> until there’s no more market for the extras and their costs – and Green OA
> is what will put paid to that market. Pre-emptive Gold payment, while
> subscriptions are still being paid, will not – and especially not hybrid
> Gold.
>
>  *JV:** “‘Hybrid OA’ doesn’t exist. It is just “gold” OA. OA in a hybrid
> journal is the same as OA in a fully OA journal for any given article.”*
>
>
> Gold OA is indeed Gold OA whether the journal is hybrid or pure (and
> whether the Gold is Gratis or CC-BY)
>
> But “hybrid” does not refer to a kind of OA, it refers to a kind of
> journal: the kind that charges both subscriptions and (optionally) Gold OA
> fees.
>
> That kind of journal certainly exists; and they certainly can and do
> double-dip. And that’s certainly an expensive way to get (Gratis) Gold OA.
>
> And the Finch/RCUK policy will certainly encourage many if not all
> journals to go hybrid Gold, and publishers, to maximize their chances of
> making an extra 6% revenue from the UK, will in turn jack up their Green
> embargoes past RCUK’s permissible limits.
>
>  *JV:** “The “double-dipping” argument is a red herring. There's… a
> notion that subscription prices should be proportional to the number of
> articles in a journal. How would that work? There are journals with 100
> subscribers… and… with thousands of subscribers [and] & 25 articles a year
> & 25 or more articles a week.”*
>
>
> Double-dipping is not about the number articles or subscribers a journal
> has, but about charging subscriptions and, in addition, charging, per
> article, for Gold OA. That has nothing to do with number of articles,
> journals or subscribers: It’s simply double-charging.
>
>  *JV:** “The cost, and… revenue, of an individual article can only
> usefully… be expressed as an average, and then probably company-wide. What
> would otherwise be the situation for a loss-making hybrid journal that
> receives in one year 10% of its articles as gold, and the next year only
> 2%? Impossible to work out. A subscription system is inherently lacking in
> transparency”*
>
>
> Nothing of the sort, and extremely simple, for a publisher who really does
> not want to double-dip, but to give all excess back as a rebate:
>
> Count the total number of articles, N, and the total subscription revenue,
> S.
>
> From that you get the revenue per article: S/N.
>
> Hybrid Gold OA income is than added to that total revenue (say, at a fee
> of S/N per article).
>
> That means that for k Gold OA articles, total hybrid journal revenue is S
> + kS/N.
>
> And if the journal really wants to reduce subscriptions proportionately,
> at the end of the year, it simply sends a rebate to each subscribing
> institution:
>
> Suppose there are U subscribing institutions. Each one gets a year-end
> rebate of kS/UN (regardless of the yearly value of k, S, U or N).
>
> (Alternatively, if the journal wants to give back all of the rebate only
> to the institutions that actually paid for the extra Gold, don’t charge
> subscribing institutions for Gold OA at all: But that approach shows most
> clearly why and how this pre-emptive morphing scheme for a transition from
> subscriptions to hybrid Gold to pure Gold is unscaleable and unsustainable,
> hence incoherent. It is an Escher impossible figure, either way, because
> collective subscriptions/“memberships” – including McNopolies -- only make
> sense for co-bundled incoming content; for individual pieces of outgoing
> content the peer-review service costs must be paid by the individual piece.
> There are at least 20,000 research-active institutions on the planet and at
> least 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, publishing several million individual
> articles per year. No basis – or need --for a pre-emptive cartel/consortium
> McNopoly.)
>
>  *JV:** “If journals should reduce their subscription price when they get
> a percentage of papers paid for as gold, what should happen if they lose
> the same percentage (for completely different reasons) of subscriptions?”*
>
>
> Less Gold – the value of the year-end institutional rebate -- kS/UN – is
> less that year.
>
>  *JV:** “What if a journal which decided to go hybrid has published a
> steady amount of 50 articles a year for ages and all of a sudden attracts
> an extra 10 gold OA articles? By how much should it reduce its subscription
> price?”*
>
>
> By exactly10S/50U per subscribing institution U.
>
>  *JV:** “If an article is worth £2,000 to have published with OA in a
> full-OA journal, why is it not worth the same £2,000 if published in a
> hybrid journal?”*
>
>
> Simple answer: it’s not worth the price either way. Both prices are
> grotesquely inflated. No-fault peer review should cost about $100-200 per
> round…
>
> *Stevan Harnad*
>
> *Excerpted from more extensive comments on the Poynder/Velterop Interview
> **here* <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/942-.html>*and
> **here* <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/943-.html>*.*
>
>  On 2012-10-02, at 5:00 AM, Richard Poynder wrote:
>
>   Love it or loathe it, the recently announced Open Access policy from
> Research Councils UK has certainly divided the OA movement. Despite
> considerable criticism, however, RCUK has refused to amend its policy.****
> ****
> So what will be its long-term impact?****
> ****
> Critics fear that RCUK has opened the door to the reinvention of the Big
> Deal. Pioneered by Academic Press in 1996, the Big Deal involves publishers
> selling large bundles of electronic journals on multi-year contracts.
> Initially embraced with enthusiasm, the Big Deal is widely loathed today.*
> ***
> ****
> However, currently drowned out by the hubbub of criticism, there are
> voices that support the RCUK policy. Jan Velterop, for instance, believes
> it will be good for Open Access.****
> ****
> Velterop also believes that the time is ripe for the creation of a New Big
> Deal (NBD). The NBD would consist of “a national licensing agreement” that
> provided researchers with free-at-the-point-of-use access to all the papers
> sitting behind subscription paywalls, *plus* a “national procurement
> service” that provided free-at-the-point-of-use OA publishing services for
> researchers, allowing them to publish in OA journals without having to foot
> the bill themselves. ****
> ****
> Velterop’s views are not to be dismissed lightly. Former employee of
> Elsevier, Springer and Nature, Velterop was one of the small group of
> people who attended the 2001 Budapest meeting that saw the birth of the
> Open Access movement, and he was instrumental in the early success of OA
> publisher BioMed Central.****
> ****
> Moreover, during his time at Academic Press, Velterop was a co-architect
> of the original Big Deal.****
> ****
> More on this, and a Q&A with Velterop, can be read here:****
> ****
>
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/open-access-in-uk-reinventing-big-deal.html
> ****
> ****
>
>
>
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