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

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Lars Bjørnshauge
<elbjoern0603 at gmail.com>wrote:

[SH] wrote: "The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA
> prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions".
>
> My comment/question: and this will all of a sudden happen one fine day of
> the 12th of March 2025 or 2035 or 2045 and then we can start discussing
> implementing Gold OA?
>

The time to convert to Gold OA is when subscriptions can be cancelled.
Subscriptions cannot be cancelled until/unless the peer-reviewed journal
content is otherwise available. Mandating Green OA globally makes that
content otherwise available.

Green OA can be mandated as soon as institutions and funders mandate it.
Pre-emptively paying for Gold OA merely distracts attention from the need
to mandate Green OA.

HEP already had Green OA (without the need to mandate it).

SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription license agreement, in which
(unnecessary) conversion to Gold OA transforms subscription into
"membership."

Postings like the one I react to here will not make it easier to advocate
> for Green OA, but rather make it easier to advocate for Gold OA.
>

It is alas all too easy to advocate for Gold OA (as we see with
Finch/RCUK).  Pre-emptively paying for Gold OA merely distracts attention
from the need to mandate Green OA.

(This is without even entering into the many questions about the stability
and sustainability of a consortial subscription agreement transformed into
a consortial "membership" agreement: free-riding, defection, the status of
the print edition at non-consortial institutions, scalability to
multidisciplinary institutions, inflated prices for obsolete co-bundled
products and services, funds locked into other (non-Gold) subscriptions,
etc.)

No, for the many reasons I've raised, there's good reason not to rush into
pre-emptive (i.e. pre-global-Green) Gold OA today, except as a proof of
principle (which has already been done) -- and especially in a field that
already has OA.

The priority needs to be global mandating of Green OA. That's the fastest,
surest -- and cheapest -- way to reach 100% OA in all fields.

Stevan Harnad

2012/9/26 Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com>
>
>> 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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>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Lars Bjørnshauge
>
> SPARC´s Director of European Library Relations
>
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>
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>
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>
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