[GOAL] Re: RCUK publishes revised guidance on Open Access

[Ross Mounce]

Hi Heather,

I'd like to expand on this point you made here:

Comment: this policy provides journals an incentive to offer an open access
> option via article processing fees which authors are forced to choose if
> the journal's embargo period is longer than what is acceptable to RCUK. The
> UK only produces about 6% of the world's scholarly literature, so OA to
> this literature will not enable UK libraries to cancel subscriptions. To
> maximize revenue, a journal can provide an OA via APF option at the price
> of their choosing and extend the embargo period to avoid having authors
> choose the self-archiving option.


I see the increase in journal embargo periods as an unavoidable consequence
of *all* OA mandates/policies, not just RCUK's. It seems to me to be one of
the in-built fatal flaws of the 'green' route to self-archiving.

All mandates for self-archiving (and there are many around the world
http://roarmap.eprints.org/) usually rely on the publisher graciously
'allowing' this to happen.

At the moment, the publishers are completely unthreatened by this because
current rates of self-archiving are very poor and even if documents are
self-archived few readers a) look for them in IRs b) are able to find them
c) get the final version of record & re-use rights the reader actually
wants/needs.

But as per discipline, or to put it more obviously per journal, the rates
of self-archiving get higher e.g. 50% or greater, this could in theory
jeopardize the subscriptions of subscription-access journals. So as soon as
they feel threatened - a journal &/or publishing company can just increase
the length of the embargo they 'allow'. In fact what's stopping a journal
from having a 20 year embargo length? (extreme & absurd I know, but really
is there anything preventing them from doing this?)

Extending journal embargo periods therefore would seem to me to be a
natural consequence of *any* push for expanded access, not just RCUK's. At
least by supporting a gold-route during the transition there will be
good-quality, acceptable journals for authors to choose in the future once
the available compliant green-routes 'dry-up' from embargo lengthening.

I do wish 'hybrid' gold options were disallowed though, here I think we
would hopefully agree. These options tend to be the most expensive and help
maintain the traditional subscription access journals. They take articles
away from the pure, immediate OA journals (i.e. the future mode of
publishing) which isn't particularly helpful for the transition to OA. But
that's another matter.

Any thoughts or comments on ways in which embargo lengthening can be
prevented?




Ross



-- 
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Ross Mounce
PhD Student & Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow
Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group
University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07
http://about.me/rossmounce
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