[GOAL] Re: Is Green Open Access in the process of fading away?

[Stuart Shieber]

Heather --

COPE allows signatory institutions free rein in interpreting <http://www.oacompact.org/faq/#interpretation> the commitment to "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds." <http://www.oacompact.org/faq/#commitment> COPE signatories are thus free to pay or refrain from paying APCs for hybrid journals that embargo green OA like Emerald is now doing.

I expect, however, that COPE institutions would not generally pay APCs for publishers with this kind of policy, simply because they do not underwrite hybrid journals in the first place. COPE already has a statement on that issue. <http://www.oacompact.org/faq/#whichjournals> Certainly Harvard's open-access fund will not cover hybrid fees <https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/hope>, and I believe Simon Fraser won't as well. I've written in the past <http://bit.ly/aIwhAT> about why hybrid fees shouldn't be supported. 

Best,

-- Stuart

............................................
Stuart M. Shieber
Harvard University

Welch Professor of Computer Science
Director, Office for Scholarly Communication

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> Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:03:33 -0700
> From: Heather Morrison <hgmorris at sfu.ca>
> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Is Green Open Access in the process of fading
> 	away?
> To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>,
> 	SPARC Open Access Forum <SPARC-OAForum at arl.org>
> Message-ID: <4EA8FB55-B71D-4289-991F-44EDB8CA83C2 at sfu.ca>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
> 
> Thanks for the alert, Richard. 
> 
> Would the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity would consider making a statement / recommendation concerning this practice? My suggestion is that this is incompatible with COPE's commitment to establish "durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges" as it will force scholars to pay APCs where before green open access would have sufficed. For this reason, I think it would be reasonable for COPE members to refuse to pay open access APCs for any publisher implementing such a policy (extending green open access embargoes for scholarly works covered by an open access mandate).
> 
> my two bits,
> 
> Heather Morrison