[GOAL] Hybrid Open Access

[Peter Murray-Rust]

Moving the discussion to a new title...




On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 9:16 AM, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>wrote:

>
> What my paper missed and what may have been obvious at the time, but which
> I only saw with hindsight, were the biggest problems with the model:
>
> 1. There is little incentive for the publisher to set a competitive APC.
>  It is clear that in most cases APCs for hybrids are higher than APCs for
> born-OA journals.  But as the hybrid is gaining the majority of its revenue
> from subscriptions why set a lower APC - if any author wants to pay it then
> it is just a bonus.  Of course, this helps explains the low take-up rate
> for OA in most hybrid journals - why pay a hight fee when you can get
> published in that journal for free?  And if you really want OA then best go
> to a born-OA journal which is cheaper and may well be of comparable quality.
>
> 2. There is little pressure on the publisher to reduce subscription
> prices.  Of course, everybody says 'we don't double dip', but this is
> almost impossible to verify and  from a subscriber's point of view very
> difficult to police.  I don't know of any institution, for example, in a
> multi-year big deal who has received a rebate based on OA hybrid content.
>
>
> There are several other concerns about "hybrid":

* the unacceptable labelling and licensing of many TA publishers. Many
hybrid papers are not identified as OA of any sort, others are labelled
with confusing words "Free content". Many do not have licences, some have
incompatible rights.
* many are linked to RightsLink which demand payment (often huge) for Open
Access reuse
* many deliberately use Non-BOAI compliant licences. One editor mailed me
today and said the the publisher was urging them to use NC-ND as it
protected authors from exploitation.
* they are not easily discoverable. I mailed the Director of Universal
Access at Elsevier asking for a complete list of OA articles and she
couldn't give it to me. I had to use some complex database query - I have
no idea how reliable that was.

Leaving aside the costing of hybrid, if someone has paid for Open Access
then it should be:

* clearly licensed on splash page, HTML, and PDFs.
* the XML should be available
* there should be a complete list of all OA articles from that publisher.

Currently I am indexing and extracting facts from PLoSONE and BMC on a
daily basis. Each of these does exactly what I need:
* lists all new articles every day
* has a complete list of all articles ever published
* collaborates with scientists like me to make it easy to iterate over all
the content.

It is easy to get the impression that TA publishers don't care about these
issues. BMC and PLoS (and the OASPAs) do it properly - an honest product.

Any publisher who wishes to be respected for their OA offerings has to do
the minimum of what I list here:
* CC-BY
* list of all articles
* easy machine iteration and retrieval.

Anything else is holding back progress

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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