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

[Heather Morrison]

hi Ross,

Since the early open access archiving mandates were adopted close to a decade now, gold open access publishing has developed from a very few pioneers such as BioMedCentral and Public Library of Science - very far from sustainable economically at that point in time - to well over 8,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals today, with the numbers growing at a rate of about 3 titles per day. BMC, PLoS, annd other open access publishers are now enjoying profits. Physics publishing has happily co-existed with archiving before publication in arXiv for well over a decade. Many subscription-based journals are voluntarily contributing all of their contents to PubMedCentral, many for immediate open access. Gowers and his group are actively engaged in developing a next generation of scholarly publishing, peer-review overlay based on repositories. Green open access mandates are helping to transform the landscape for scholarly publishing. 

The way to avoid embargo slippage is short embargoes with a commitment to shorten even further in the future. FASTR in the US calls for a 6-month maximum mandate.

Transitioning the system will require transitioning the underlying economics. I argue that this can be done at substantially lower cost than expenditures in the current system. Details of how to do this are covered in the 5th chapter of my dissertation, available for free download here:
https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7530

Government need not, and should not, mandate the means to transition to an open access scholarly publishing system. This is best left to the market.

best,

Heather Morrison

On 2013-03-07, at 1:36 AM, Ross Mounce wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> -/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
> 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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