[GOAL] SCOAP3 Gold OA "Membership": Unnecessary, Unscalable & Unsustainable

[Stevan Harnad]

1. High Energy Physics (HEP) already has close to 100% Open Access (OA):
Authors have been self-archiving their articles in
Arxiv<http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions> (both
before and after peer review) since 1991 ("Green OA").

2. Hence SCOAP3 <http://scoap3.org/> is just substituting the payment of
consortial "membership" <http://bit.ly/sc3memb> fees for publishing
outgoing articles in place of the payment of individual institutional
subscription fees for accessing incoming articles in exchange for an OA
from its publisher ("Gold OA") that HEP already had from self-archiving
(Green OA).

3. As such, SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription price agreement,
except that it is inherently unstable, because once all journal content is
Gold OA, non-members are free-riders, and members can cancel if they feel a
budget crunch.

4. Nor does membership scale to other disciplines.

5. High Energy Physics would have done global Open Access a better service
if it had put its full weight behind promoting (Green OA) mandates to
self-archive by institutions and research funders in all other disciplines.

6. The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails
globally across all disciplines and institutions.

7. Institutions can then cancel subscriptions and pay for peer review
service alone <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271348/>, per individual paper,
out of a portion of their windfall cancelation savings, instead of en bloc,
in an unstable (and overpriced) consortial "membership."
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