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

[Stevan Harnad]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 3:46 AM, Hall Martin <Martin.Hall at salford.ac.uk>wrote:

>  Stevan****
>
> ** **
>
> I’m glad that you see that we agree about the ends;  I envy your certainty
> that you are right about the means.
>

Martin

I envy your success in getting the means that you think are right
implemented (on the Finch Committee, and by RCUK).

All I can do is provide the evidence and reasons, for whoever will listen,
in support of the alternative means that I think are right.

I do want to clarify, though, that the most urgent and fundamental end for
me is OA -- 100% OA. Universal Green OA mandates provide that (if
effectively implemented).

The transition to Gold OA is only a secondary end (for me), definitely not
the primary one. I think there are plenty of reasons to expect that 100%
Green OA will in turn induce a transition to Gold OA -- at a fair,
affordable, sustainable price -- because 100% Green OA will make
subscriptions cancellable, hence unsustainable. Hence it will also release
the subscription funds to pay for the Post-Green Fair-Gold OA.

But double-paying pre-emptively (and unilaterally) for Gold OA today, at
today's asking prices, and while institutional subscriptions still cannot
be cancelled (because the articles are not accessible to users in another
way) is, I think, not only a waste of money, but a needless retardant on
reaching OA's most urgent and fundamental end -- 100% OA -- which is
already fully within reach of cost-free Green OA mandates, today, if only
we grasp it, instead of needlessly over-reaching for publisher-PDF/XML,
CC-BY and Gold OA, as the Finch Committee and RCUK are trying to impel us
to do, thereby foregoing the goal of 100% OA almost without even noticing
it.

Best wishes,

Stevan

****
>
> ** **
>
> 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). **
> **
>
> ** **
>
> 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  *|* www.salford.ac.uk**
>
> *www.salford.ac.uk/vc*
>
> *
> http://www.corporate.salford.ac.uk/leadership-management/martin-hall/blog/
> *
>
> ** **
>
> [image: MASTER_Salford logo.jpg]****
>
> *[image: ZA102637857.GIF][image: ZA102637858.GIF][image: ZA102637861.GIF]*
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> *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.”****
>
> *----*****
>
> *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.)****
>
> *---*****
>
> *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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