[GOAL] Re: On Trying to Hold Green OA and Fair-Gold OA Hostage to Subscriptions and Fools-Gold

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Graham Triggs <grahamtriggs at gmail.com>
 wrote:

how many peer-reviewed Gold OA journals are there that do not charge APCs.
>

You will have to ask Lars Bjornshauge how he classifies DOAJ journals. (The
original objective was to register only peer-reviewed ones.) If you trust
Ulrich's, maybe the DOAJ list could be checked against Ulrich's
peer-reviewed list.


> Firstly, the total yearly revenue includes APCs (for the Gold articles).
>

I said calculate total subscription revenue.


> Secondly, you are dividing the total number of articles - including Gold -
> into the subscription revenue (why?)
>

You want the figure for total yearly subscription revenue per article,
total yearly revenue per article, and total yearly Gold OA revenue (not per
article: total) in order to see whether Gold revenue is being double-dipped
or faithfully rebated.


>
> http://www.slideshare.net/Wellcome/mandating-open-access-wellcome-trust-presentation
>
> See slide 11. OUP had much lower subscription rises in journals that
> provided a hybrid option, and other publishers have lower than average
> price rises. Whilst subscription costs may still be substantial, there is
> evidence that the hybrid gold options are helping to keep those costs from
> being even higher.
>

If hybrids faithfully rebate their Gold income to subscribers in full,
rather than double-dip, then the Gold payments are subsidizing the
subscriptions, whether or not the result is a lower subscription increase
from year to year, or with increasing volume. That's a tiny bit better for
subscribers, but a lot worse for the Gold OA payers, who are subsidizing it
(instead of just making their articles Green OA, at no extra cost).


>  According to Wellcome estimates, about 1-2%. On the other side, there has
> only ever been up to 55% compliance for their green OA mandates (albeit 85%
> at their own Sanger institute).
>

1-2% what? Gold? Hybrid Gold? (I believe the Wellcome Gold spend is a lot
higher than that.)

55% is a low compliance rate for a Green OA mandate. Wellcome could do a
lot better if they mandated (1) immediate deposit (irrespective of whether
the OA is immediate or embargoed), (2) institutional deposit (so
institutions can monitor compliance) and (3) no preference (or free funds)
for Gold.


> But more importantly, these are policies that stand behind the research,
> and ensure that it can be open access by funding the author-pays option
> that is almost always available.


You bet Fools-Gold is always available -- and especially hybrid Fools-Gold
-- as long as Wellcome makes the extra cash available.

The only other alternatives are:
> 1) Accept a low compliance rate
> 2) "Punish" non-compliance - which means delaying or denying future
> research funding.


How about just implementing an effective compliance-monitoring system, by
mandating institutional deposit, making institution's responsible for
ensuring compliance, and making funding and renewal contingent on
compliance?

Punishment? Or grant-fifillment conditions?

embargoes... will happen whenever it is in the publisher's interest for an
> article to use the authors-pay model, for whatever reason.


Reasons such as: making the cash available, preferentially mandating Gold,
over-ruling author journal choice toward Gold, treating Green as
embargoed-Green, etc.

But, yes, some publishers will try to embargo Green OA anyway, and some
authors will comply. For those cases, implement the institutional
repository's request-copy Button.

You provided one speculated transition scenario. Here's another.

1. Everyone adopts deposit mandates
>

What kind? Some kinds of mandate work (see above), other don't.

2. Compliance rates start low, and rise slowly (as funders start to
> withhold funding in order to force compliance, etc.)
> 3. Before green OA makes any significant impact on subscriptions,
> publishers increase restrictions on depositing reader-pays articles,
> offering author-pays as an alternative to comply with mandates


Meaning Green OA embargoes? See above for the kluge (the Button).

4. Eventually, increasing take up of author-pays options will start to
> cause subscription revenue to decline


Why? Libraries can't cancel must-have journals because some of their
articles are OA.

And why would author-pays uptake (Fools Gold) increase beyond the UK's cash
hand-out? The UK publishes only 6% of the world's research annually (and it
can't even afford Gold for all of that). Institutions are going to cancel
Must-Have journals because 6% of their content is available free?

5. Before subscription revenue disappears entirely, hybrid journals convert
> to gold only - still providing full set of publisher services


At Fools-Gold prices, that would be the journals kissing goodbye to their
authors (not the institutions kissing goodbye to their subscriptions).

Universal green is not achieved before universal gold
> Immediate green is not achieved without immediate gold
> Green mandates make no difference to the services that publishers provide


Except you haven't given any evidence or reasons why any of it would go the
way you conjecture. All the pragmatic cause-effect factors are in fact
going against what you are speculating.

And now, you end up in exactly the same position as having Gold mandates -
> except it's taken longer, been more expensive, and more painful for
> research and researchers.


Gold mandates are even more unlikely, since there's neither the cash nor
the journals to back them up (except maybe in Willetts' UK)  and authors
would revolt (even in Willetts's UK, for journal choice and any Gold cash
shortfall).

Of course, that is just speculation. But these are plausible steps, and
> compliance rates, funder sanctions and introduced / lengthened green
> embargoes have already been evidenced,


The steps you described are anything but plausible, for the reasons I've
given.

And effective Green OA mandates (funding as well as REF made conditional on
immediate-deposit in the institutional repository, monitored and verified
by the institution) has been implemented and demonstrated to generate over
85% deposit rates of immediate-Green plus Button-mediated almost-OA during
any embargo.

Now it just needs to to be adopted and implemented globally -- not on the
basis of counterfactual speculation, but on the basis of the objective
evidence of effectiveness.
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