[GOAL] Harnad Recommendations to House of Lords Select Committee on Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

*Written evidence to House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee
on Open Access*

Stevan Harnad

*I. Overview of OA*

*1.*   Open Access (OA) means free online
access<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/08/greengold-oa-and-gratislibre-oa.html>
to
peer-reviewed research journal articles. (There areabout
28,000<http://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com/login> such
journals, in all fields and languages.)

*2.*   Most research journals recover their publication costs through
institutional subscriptions.

*3.*   No institution can afford to subscribe to all or most or even many
of the 28,000 journals, only to a small
fraction<http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupstats>
of
them, a fraction shrinking because of rising journal costs.

*4.*   As a result, all researchers today, at all institutions, are denied
access to articles published in those journals whose subscriptions are
unaffordable to their institutions.

*5.*   As a result, the research that is funded by public tax revenue, and
conducted by researchers employed by publicly funded institutions
(universities and research institutes) is not accessible to all of its
primary intended users – the researchers who can use, apply and build upon
it <http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html>, to the benefit of the
public that funded it.

*6.*   The Internet and the Web have made it possible to
remedy<http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/> this
access-denial problem, which had been a legacy of the Gutenberg era of
print on paper, and its associated costs.

*7.*   Researchers can continue to publish their research in subscription
journals, but they can
self-archive<http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/> their
final, peer-reviewed drafts in their institutional repositories, as a
supplement, for all users whose institutions cannot afford subscription
access to the journal in which the article was published.

*8.*   Author self-archiving is called “Green
OA<http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html>
.”

*9.*   Sixty percent <http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php> of
journals (including most of the top journals in most fields) already
endorse Green OA self-archiving by authors, immediately upon publication
(no embargo).

*10.*   The remaining 40% of journals request an embargo or delay on
providing OA for 6-12 months or more. (The publisher rationale for the
embargo is that it protects journal subscription revenues that Green OA
might otherwise make unsustainable.)

*11.*   There is as yet no evidence <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/261006/> at
all that immediate, un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving reduces
subscriptions, even in fields, such as physics, where it has been practiced
for over 20 years and has long reached close to 100%.

*12.*   The second way to provide OA is for the journal rather than the
author to make all of its articles freely accessible online immediately
upon publication.

*13.*   OA journal publishing is called “Gold OA <http://www.doaj.org/>.”

*14.*   About 20% of the world’s 28,000 journals are Gold OA journals, but
very few of them are among the top journals in each field.

*15.*   Most Gold OA journals continue to cover their costs from
subscriptions (to the print edition) but the top Gold OA journals have no
print edition and instead of charging the user-institution for access,
through subscription fees, they charge the author-institution for
publishing, through publication fees.

*16.*   There are also hybrid subscription/Gold
journals<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_open-access_journal>,
who publish non-OA articles and continue to charge institutional
subscription fees, but offer authors the option of paying to make their
individual article OA if they pay a Gold OA fee.

*17.*   Paying Gold OA fees is a problem for authors and their institutions
because as long as most journals are still subscription journals,
institutions have to continue subscribing to whatever journals they can
afford that their users need.

*18.*   Hence paying for Gold OA today increases the financial burden on
institutions at a time when subscription costs are already barely
affordable.

*19.*   Paying for Gold OA while subscriptions still need to be paid is not
only an extra financial burden, but it is also unnecessary, because *Green
OA can be provided for free while worldwide subscriptions are still paying
the cost of publication*.

*20.*   If and when Green OA becomes universal (i.e., at or near 100%, in
all fields, worldwide), and if and when that, in turn, makes subscriptions
unsustainable (with institutions cancelling subscriptions because the free
Green OA versions are sufficient for their needs), then all journals
can convert
to Gold <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html> and
institutions will have the money to pay the Gold OA costs out of their
annual windfall subscription cancelation savings.

*21.*   There is every reason to believe that Gold OA costs after universal
Green OA will be much
lower<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january13/houghton/01houghton.html>
than
they are today: the print edition and its costs as well as the online
edition will be gone, the worldwide network of Green OA Institutional
Repositories <http://roar.eprints.org/> will provide access and archiving,
and journals will only need to manage peer review (all peers already review
for free) and perhaps provide some copy-editing.

*22.*   It remains to explain how to achieve universal Green OA, so as (1)
to provide universal OA, first and foremost, and then (2) to induce a
transition to universal Gold OA at an affordable price if and when Green OA
makes subscription publishing unsustainable, and (3) to release the
institutional subscription funds in which the potential money to pay for
Gold OA is currently locked.

*23.*   The way to achieve universal Green OA is for institutions
(universities and research institutes) and research funders to
mandate<http://roarmap.eprints.org/>(require)
that all research that they fund, and that they employ researchers to
conduct, must not only be published, as now (“publish or perish”), but the
peer-reviewed final drafts must also be deposited in the researcher’s
institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication.

*24.*   Optimally, access to the deposit should be made OA immediately; in
any case any OA embargo should be as short as possible.

*25.*   However, if necessary, an embargo of 6 months or even 12 months or
longer can be tolerated in the case of the 40% of articles published in
journals that do not yet endorse immediate Green OA.

*26.*   The repositories make it possible for authors to provide
“Almost-OA<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268511/>”
to the deposits that are under OA embargo by automatically forwarding
reprint requests from would-be users to the author, who can then decide,
with one click, whether or not hey wish to email the deposited reprint to
the requester.

*27.*   Researchers have been fulfilling reprint requests from
fellow-researchers for over a half century, but in the online era this can
be greatly facilitated and accelerated through universally mandated
repository deposit.

*II. UK OA Policy*

*28.*   In 2004 <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm>, the
UK Parliamentary Select Committee recommended that UK universities and UK
funding councils mandate Green OA self-archiving.

*29.*   With this, the UK became the world leader in OA and OA policy.

*30.*   Green OA self-archiving has since been mandated by both funding
councils and universities in the EU, Canada, and Australia, including
the National
Institutes of Health <http://roarmap.eprints.org/26/>,
Harvard<http://roarmap.eprints.org/75/>,
and MIT <http://roarmap.eprints.org/122/> in the US (over 250 Green OA
mandates <http://roarmap.eprints.org/> worldwide to date).

*31.*   Green OA mandates have been growing
worldwide<http://roarmap.eprints.org/images/index_content_quarterly.png>,
guided by the UK model; to accelerate mandate adoption all that is needed
is a few practical
upgrades<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september12/harnad/09harnad.html> to
the UK model (such as upgraded compliance mechanisms and fuller integration
of institutional and funder mandates).

*32.*   But in 2012, instead of building on its 8-year success in worldwide
OA leadership, the UK took an abrupt U-turn on OA, with the recommendations
of the Finch Committee<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/>
.

*33.*   The Finch Committee declared Green OA a failure, and recommended
downgrading it to just preservation archiving.

*34.*   In place of mandating Green OA (which is almost cost-free, while
publishing is still being paid for worldwide via institutional
subscriptions) the Finch Committee recommended paying even more for
publishing, by redirecting scarce UK research funds to paying for Gold OA,
over and above what the UK is already paying for subscriptions.

*35.*   One can only conjecture as to the causes underlying this
inexplicable about-face when Green OA mandates are growing worldwide:

*36.*   The cause may have been subscription-publisher lobbying of BIS
against Green OA or Gold-OA-publisher lobbying for Gold OA.

*37.*   There was perhaps also some pressure from a vocal minority of OA
advocates arguing that there is an urgent immediate need for something
stronger than the free online access mandated by Green OA (the additional
re-use rights conferred by a CC-BY
license<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/909-.html>)
for which this minority claimed that it is worth paying Gold OA fees.

*38.*   The outcome has been significantly to weaken instead of strengthen
the RCUK OA policy <http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/Pages/outputs.aspx>:

*39.*   RCUK researchers may still choose between paying for Gold OA or
providing cost-free Green OA, but RCUK expresses apreference for
Gold<http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/2012/10/24/rcuk-open-access-policy-our-preference-for-gold/>
and
does not permit researchers to choose Green if their chosen journal’s OA
embargo exceeds 6-12 months.

*40.*   This policy has the perverse
consequence<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/09/03/hybrid-open-access-repair-rcuk/>
of
giving subscription publishers a strong incentive (1) to add a hybrid Gold
option just in order to collect the extra UK revenue, and (2) to adopt and
extend Green OA embargoes beyond the UK’s allowable 6-12 months, to make
sure that UK researchers must choose the paid Gold option rather than the
cost-free Green one.

*41.*   The rest of the world cannot, need not, and will not follow suit
with this profligate. perverse, and completely unnecessary UK policy change.

*42.*   In Europe, the Americas and Asia, low-cost Green OA mandates will
continue to grow, while the UK loses its leadership role in worldwide OA,
needlessly squandering increasingly scarce research funds, paying
publishers even more in order to make UK research output (*and UK research
output alone* -- 6% of worldwide research output) OA, while the rest of the
world makes its (94%) research output OA at next to no extra cost.

The Australian economist, John Houghton, has analyzed OA policy in country
after country. The House of Lords Select Committee is urged to look at the
outcome of those analyses, which is that it is far cheaper to mandate Green
OA first, rather than to pay pre-emptively for Gold unilaterally. That not
only provides OA, but it paves the way to affordable, sustainable Gold OA:

Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (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* Volume 19, Number 1/2


*Conclusion:* Instead of following the Finch Committee’s counterproductive
recommendation to require and subsidise Gold OA, RCUK should adopt two
important practical upgrades to strengthen the prior RCUK Green OA mandate:
(1) integrate institutional and funder Green OA
mandates<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html>
so
they can mutually reinforce one another and (2) implement an effective
Green OA compliance
mechanism<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/967-.html>,
making institutions responsible for monitoring and ensuring compliance with
both institutional and funder deposit mandates.

*Appendix:*

Comments on the Committee's specific topics:*

support for Universities in the form of funds to cover article processing
charges, and the response of universities and other HEIs to these efforts

*

If there are UK funds to spare to subsidise Gold OA, fine, make them
available -- but mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving in all cases (
ID/OA <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html>) and
do not require researchers to choose a Gold OA journal unless they wish to.*

embargo periods for articles published under the green model

*The shorter the better, but always require immediate deposit
(ID/OA<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html>)
in the author’s institutional repository, even for embargoed articles, and
implement the “Almost OA” Button during the embargo.*

engagement with publishers, universities, learned societies and other
stakeholders in the development of research council open access policies
and guidance

*Publishers should endorse immediate Green OA, but ID/OA mandates are
compatible with embargoes.

Universities should mandate Green OA too.

Funder and university mandates should be convergent, requiring deposit in
the institutional repository, with the institution monitoring and ensuring
compliance.

Deposits or their metadata can then be harvested to any desired central
repositories.

Repository deposit should be designated the sole mechanism for submitting
publications for institutional performance review or national research
assessment.

Learned Society publishers, like all publishers, should endorse immediate
Green OA, but ID/OA mandates are compatible with embargoes.

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscription publishing
unsustainable, publishers can convert to Gold OA and institutions can pay
for it out of the windfall subscription cancelation savings freed by the
Green-OA-induced cancelations.*

challenges and concerns raised by the scientific and publishing
communities, and how these have been addressed.

*The UK scientific community has rightly expressed considerable concern
about (1) not being allowed to publish in their journals of choice, and
about (2) having to pay for Gold OA.

The solution is to mandate Green OA and not to require Gold OA except if
the author wishes it.

The UK subscription publishing community is being paid in full for
publication, via worldwide subscriptions today.

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscription publishing
unsustainable, publishers can convert to Gold OA and institutions can pay
for it out of the windfall subscription cancelation savings freed by the
Green-OA-induced cancelations.

*international issues*

The rest of the world need not, cannot, and will not follow the Finch
Committee’s recommendation to pay pre-emptively for Gold instead of
mandating Green OA.

It would be best if the UK returned to the direction it set in 2004;
otherwise it is simply using UK research funds to provide (Gold) OA for the
UK and the world at a much higher cost than necessary, and at the cost of
inducing perverse effects in publishers (such as subscription publishers
offering hybrid Gold in order to attract double payment for UK’s Gold
subsidy, and adopting and increasing OA embargoes in order to ensure that
UK researchers must pay extra for Gold OA).
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