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

Sun Oct 7 14:26:05 BST 2012

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 9:12 AM, leo waaijers <leowaa at xs4all.nl> wrote:

 Yes, if all publishers (both subscription based and open access
> publishers) would operate a two-stage publication process the whole
> Green-Gold dichotomy would disappear. The first stage is organising the
> peer review. This is not an easy task and it certainly has a price, the
> submission fee. The second stage is the circulation of the peer reviewed
> article. Authors may choose to have that done via a repository as a stand
> alone article or have it done via a publisher in a branded package. The
> choice is a matter of a balancing price against added value. I see no need
> to force an author either way. Leo.
>

Almost, but not quite: The "brand" (the journal's title and track-record)
is accorded when the outcome of the peer review is "accept." Green OA is
the *accepted* final draft. The journal name is merely a tag.

So the author's "choice" (if the two were unbundled) would be whether he
wishes only the peer review -- its outcome tag-certified by the journal
whose peer review standards the paper has successfully met -- or the rest
of the products and services currently co-bundled with it.

(I have no view on the latter. I just want the former to be Green OA, at
long last.)

That's what Green OA mandates from institutions and funders are for.

Stevan Harnad

>
>  Op 7-10-2012 14:29, Stevan Harnad schreef:
>
> 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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>
>
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