[GOAL] Re: Further Finch Folly - Swets: "Let Us Manage the RCUK Gold For You!"

[Stevan Harnad]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 4:22 AM, David Prosser <david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>wrote:

In the subscription world agents found a niche as a solution to the
> many-to-many problem - each publisher had to deal with many institutions
> (primarily libraries) and each institution (primarily libraries) had to
> deal with many publishers.  Both parties found that the agents added value
> in reducing overheads.
>
> In an APC world there will still be a many-to-many problem - each
> publisher will have to deal with many institutions for payment (not
> necessarily directly with the authors, despite Stevan's insistence) and
> each institution will have to deal with many publishers.  This is the case
> today and will still be the case if Stevan's preferred future of 100% Green
> followed by reduced-price Gold comes true.
>
> As far as I can see, all Swets are doing is saying that they can add value
> by providing a solution that helps with this second many-to-many problem.
>  It will be up to institutions and publishers to decide if the price is
> worth the savings in overheads.
>

I'm not terribly interested in how today's pre-Green Gold is paid for, one
way or the other, since I think it is a mistake to pay for pre-Green Gold
at all.

But I would like to point out -- as an outsider -- that a prominent
argument of the library community during the (ongoing) serials crisis had
been that one of the reasons why publication -- and hence subscription --
prices are so high is that *they are not felt by the "consumers": the
authors (and readers). They are bundled and mediated by librarians and
subscription agents.*

Now Gold OA (whether pre-Green or post-Green) makes it possible to unbundle
them, and let the "consumers" pay (and judge value for money) per article
they publish.

Is it now the library community that is arguing that it should instead be
bundled and mediated yet again, keeping the "consumer"  out of the loop?

I say I don't much care about this, because -- pre-Green -- not only is
Gold OA unnecessary, over-priced, double-paid (and potentially also
double-dipped, if hybrid Gold), but, most important of all (since people
are free to waste their money as they see fit): pre-emptive Gold OA is
getting in the way of the effective mandating and provision of cost-free
Green OA (while publication costs are still fully paid by subscriptions).

viz, all this fussing (in the UK only, mind you) about how to distribute
the UK government subsidies to pay for the Gold, to the neglect of the far
more important question of how to monitor and ensure the provision of
cost-free Green.

And with a Finch/RCUK preference for paying Gold over providing cost-free
Green, the UK has given publishers (and other "value-adders" such as
aggregators and agents) still more incentive to tilt things toward pricey
Gold payment rather than cost-free Green provision (viz, Green OA
embargoes).

Let me just close by suggesting that David may not have be envisioning my
"preferred future" realistically in his "many-to-many" picture: There is no
many many-to-many with post-Green Gold:

All institutions host, archive and provide access to their own
peer-reviewed journal article output, in their own Green OA repositories
(imported and harvested by multiple global subject-based search engines).

The journals only provide the service of peer review, per article. And the
costs of peer review (like the costs of research equipment, conference
travel, postgraduate students, etc.) are paid by researchers through their
research grants (not through mediating "agencies").

There will be one other source of funds to pay for peer review, however,
post-Green, and that is *the annual institutional windfall savings from the
journal cancellations made possible by universal Green OA*. For an
institution, these windfall savings will be more than enough to pay for all
of its researchers' peer review costs many times over, with the rest of the
windfall savings available for other uses (such as buying or licensing
access to books).

It's entirely up to individual institutions, however -- assuming they
choose to set up an institution-internal mechanism whereby its researchers
can draw upon a part of the annual windfall savings to pay for their Gold
OA peer-review service costs -- whether the institution prefers to have a
global pre-paid annual plan with every potential journal on the planet that
their researchers might choose to submit an article to in any given year.

(How the institution figures out which journals each researcher will choose
to submit articles to -- how many, and whether or not those articles are
accepted for publication -- we can safely leave to a "mediating agency"
like Swets, if institutions do not think it's simpler [and cheaper] for
authors to take care of that for themselves. just as they take care of
their conference expenses, research equipment and student funding...)

Moral: annual subscriptions, memberships and aggregators are obsolete
Gutenberg memorabilia in a post-Green Gold OA world: Journals become
peer-review service providers, per individual round of peer review, per
article, per author. No co-bundled institutional products to buy in,
annually. The peer-reviewed publication process is completely
disaggregated, with the institutional Green OA repositories doing the
archiving and access-provision, and the author choosing (and paying) the
journal, per article, for the peer review.

None of this is even faintly possible with today's over-priced,
double-paid, double-dipped, premature and hence unnecessary pre-Green
subscriptions + Gold.

Yet it's precisely on this pre-emptive, pre-Green Gold that all these
(incoherent) notions of aggregated, mediated library agency "value-adders"
are predicated.

Caveat Pre-Emptor...

Stevan Harnad


> On 17 Jul 2013, at 14:07, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Robert Jacobs <rjacobs at uk.swets.com>wrote:
>
>> I find your message here a little confusing, as you seem to be railing
>> against a number of different parties. The simple fact is that the RCUK,
>> and increasingly other funding bodies, are channelling funds specifically
>> to pay for the APCs under Gold Open Access via the institution, and most
>> Universities in the UK who have this funding are channelling it via the
>> library, not the individual authors. Each library is currently developing
>> their own processes and systems to support the efficient management of
>> these APC payments, as there is significant cost involved in managing any
>> process developed on an individual organisation scale.
>>
>> The benefit of a shared service and the economies of scale which
>> intermediaries can offer are significant, and in the real world we all have
>> to live by the value we deliver. If we don’t deliver value, then we don’t
>> have a role to play in this.
>>
>> You seem to have missed the fact that there is now, in the UK, funding in
>> place to encourage the processing of many thousands of APCs, and this is
>> hugely inefficient if done at an individual institution level, let alone at
>> individual author level as you seem to suggest is the case.
>>
>> As Gold is the current model of choice for RCUK there is a real need to
>> help streamline processes, to save money and to improve service. If
>> companies like Swets can support this then that is not parasitic, it’s what
>> drives best practice and scales efficiency. Our service has been developed
>> independently of any philosophical arguments for or against gold/green open
>> access publishing, and after much dialogue with UK university libraries.
>>
>
> No confusion:
>
> A. Yes, I am "railing" against (i) Finch/RCUK, for its foolish policy of
> wasting scarce research money on Gold OA instead of effectively mandating
> cost-free Green OA, (ii) against institutions who unthinkingly treat Gold
> OA fees as if they were a library matter (!), and (iii) against third party
> businesses, eager to cash in on Finch/RCUK's folly and institutional
> confusion.
>
> B. The RCUK Gold policy is an ill-thought-out, incoherent,
> counterproductive policy, for reasons that have by now been described many
> times by many authors.
>
> C. Consigning the process of (double) paying publishers for Gold OA --
> over and above already paying for subscriptions -- to a 3rd party "service"
> would simply be a way of sweeping the defects of the Finch/RCUK policy
> under the rug.
>
> To repeat: It's authors who publish, and authors who pay to publish (if
> they wish, or must). Author payment is not a subscription matter, not a
> library matter, and not a library aggregator matter.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
>
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