[GOAL] Re: Responses to Martin Hall on Finch on "Neither Green Nor Gold"

Thu Feb 14 08:46:23 GMT 2013

Stevan

I'm glad that you see that we agree about the ends;  I envy your certainty that you are right about the means.

The Finch Report says a good deal more about Green, and repositories, than your representation suggests but, of course, anyone can judge for themselves by looking at the report itself, and particularly Chapters 8 and 9.  But yes, I do disagree with your view that mandated "green deposit" will achieve a situation in which all publication costs are met upfront, allowing all research results to be freely available on the principle that knowledge should be a "nonrivalrous good".  The problem with your position is that it preserves, and will prolong, a status quo in which repositories contain combinations of metadata, a limited number of full-text deposits, non-searchable PDFs and (some) published-version copies which have been migrated from publishers' web sites.  This approach also encourages for-profit partnerships between publishers and some academic societies who want to preserve high margins in order to fund other activities (of course, not all learned societies take this view - witness the excellent position being taken by the Royal Society). For example, in her presentation to the symposium organized by the Academy of Social Sciences in December, Felice Levine was quite clear that the American Educational Research Association would lobby against a system of up-front APCs because it would damage the ability of the AERA to make sufficient margins to fund their business activities.  While I have nothing against the AERA and similar organizations running as businesses, their use of licencing is, in effect, a hypothecated tax on the distribution of knowledge.  This seems to me inconsistent with the principle of knowledge as a nonrivalrous good.

My argument (which is not the same as the Finch Group's position, and would probably not be shared by some on the Finch Group) is that we need to steer towards conditions in which the copy-of-record is freely and openly available because full APCs have been met upfront.  This does not necessarily mean that APCs need be high and, across the full range of Open Access journals, they are already negligible.  I believe that competition between for-profit publishers for "gold" will drive down APCs as long as cartels are avoided (but of course this has to be an assumption).  "Double dipping" through hybrid approaches remains a risk but - as the reaction against Elsevier's profit margins showed - academics can walk away from journals that maintain unacceptable combinations of licencing and gold options; without academic authors, publishers are emperors without clothes.  In my view, the true digital revolution is one of volume and interoperability;  automated data and text mining of freely searchable copy-of-record text will be essential to the "semantic intelligence" that will be the research paradigm of the near future. Institutional repositories will play a key role as digital archives.  I set this argument out in my presentation to the Westminster Forum (www.salford.ac.uk/vc<http://www.salford.ac.uk/vc>).

What I think is becoming clear, post-Finch and particularly in the debate about RCUK policies (which are not the same as the Finch recommendations) is that one approach does not suit all genres of research.  There needs to be more work on models for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, including considerations of variants to CC-BY licences (which, I've realized, cannot be met by using CC-BY-NC), and approaches to monograph publications.  The current debates are valuable in this respect.

Martin

Martin Hall
Vice-Chancellor  |  Office of the Vice-Chancellor and Registrar
The Old Fire Station, The Crescent, University of Salford, Salford  M5 4WT, United Kingdom
t: +44 (0) 161 295 5050
martin.hall at salford.ac.uk<mailto:martin.hall at salford.ac.uk>  | www.salford.ac.uk<http://www.salford.ac.uk>
www.salford.ac.uk/vc<http://www.salford.ac.uk/vc>
http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/

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From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:amsciforum at gmail.com]
Sent: 13 February 2013 12:55
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Cc: jisc-repositories; Hall Martin
Subject: Responses to Martin Hall on Finch on "Neither Green Nor Gold"

Responses to Martin Hall on Finch on "Neither Green nor Gold<http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/2013/02/neither-green-nor-gold/>"
1.     Stevan Harnad Says:
February 11th, 2013 at 9.03 pm<http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/2013/02/neither-green-nor-gold/#comment-427>

MARTIN HALL: "The "Green" versus "Gold" debate... is misleading. The imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case has been remade in a recent - excellent - posting by Stuart Shieber, Harvard's Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication."

STUART SHIEBER: "Do you have a pointer to something saying that I support the Finch approach? If so, I'm happy to answer it directly - in the negative when it comes to both their lack of support for green and poorly designed approach to gold support." (Feb 3 2013, personal communication.
2.    Martin Hall Says:
February 12th, 2013 at 11.59 am<http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/2013/02/neither-green-nor-gold/#comment-428>

Stevan - here are two quotations from Stuart Shieber's paper which make the point about the significance of moving to full Open Access to copy-of-record. The Finch Report, however imperfect, was about the transition to this. "Open-access journals don't charge for access, but that doesn't mean they eschew revenue entirely. Open-access journals are just selling a different good, and therefore participating in a different market. Instead of selling access to readers (or the readers' proxy, the libraries), they sell publisher services to the authors (or to the authors' proxy, their research funders). In fact there are now over 8,500 open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some of them have been mentioned already on this panel: Linguistic Discovery, Semantics and Pragmatics. The majority of existing open-access journals, like those journals, don't charge authorside article-processing charges (APCs). But in the end APCs seems to me the most reasonable, reliable, scalable, and efficient revenue mechanism for open-access journals. This move from reader-side subscription fees to author-side APCs has dramatic ramifications for the structure of the market that the publisher participates in". And later: "So journals compete for authors in a way they don't for readers, and this competition leads to much greater efficiency. Open-access publishers are highly motivated to provide better services at lower price to compete for authors' article submissions. We actually see evidence of this competition on both price and quality happening in the market."

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Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Stevan Harnad Says:

February 13th, 2013 at 2.41 am<http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/2013/02/neither-green-nor-gold/#comment-429>

PRIORITIES

Martin, I agree with every word you quote from Stuart above, but that's not what the Finch Report, or the criticism of the Finch Report is about.

Yes, this concerns the transition to Open Access (OA). But the disagreement is about the means, not the end.

The Finch report recommended downgrading cost-free Green OA self-archiving in repositories to just preservation archiving and instead double-paying pre-emptively for Gold OA (publisher's PDF of record, CC-BY) while worldwide journal subscriptions still need to be paid, and only allowing UK authors to publish in journals that don't offer Gold if their Green embargo does not exceed 6-12 months.

This not only wastes a great deal of scarce UK research money but it gives publishers the incentive to offer hybrid Gold (continue charging subscriptions but offer Gold for individual articles for an extra Gold OA fee), it restricts free choice of journals, antagonizing authors, and it encourages journals to adopt and extend Green OA embargoes beyond the 6-12 limit, thus making Green OA harder to mandate for other countries, none of which have any intention of following the Finch model of paying pre-emptively for Gold instead of mandating extra-cost-free Green while subscriptions are still paying for publishing: http://sparceurope.org/analysis-of-funder-open-access-policies-around-the-world/

What Finch/RCUK needs to do instead is to (1) upgrade its Green OA mandate, (2) require immediate deposit whether or not OA to the deposit is embargoed, (3) adopt an effective system for monitoring and ensuring compliance, (4) allow free choice of journals, and (5) make Gold OA completely optional.

Stuart Shieber is the architect of Harvard's Green OA policy. That policy does not constrain researchers' journal choice and it does not offer to fund hybrid Gold. There's no problem with offering to spend any spare cash you may have on Gold - after you have effectively mandated Green. But not instead.

(By the way, neither the publisher's PDF nor CC-BY is worth paying extra for today, pre-emptively, while journal subscriptions still need to be paid: Once universally mandated Green OA makes journals cancellable, publishers will cut costs, phase out the obsolete print and online editions, offload all access provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories, and convert to Fair Gold, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid for out of the institutional subscription-cancelation savings - instead of the UK double-paying pre-emptively and needlessly for the bloated price of both subscriptions and Fool's Gold out of overstretched UK research funds today, pre-Green, as Finch/RCUK are proposing to do.)

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ADDENDUM:
"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world... At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]

 Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on "Going for Gold"<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january13/houghton/01houghton.html> D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

  1.  Unilateral UK Gold is the losing choice in a Prisoner's Dilemma. If the UK unilaterally mandates Gold OA Publishing (with author publication charges) today, instead of first (effectively) mandating Green OA self-archiving (at no added cost) then the UK has made the losing choice in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma:

Unilateral Green (rest of world)

Unilateral Gold (rest of world)

Unilateral Green (UK only)

win/win

win/lose

Unilateral Gold (UK only)

lose/win

win/win

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