[GOAL] Big Deals, Big Macs and Consortial Licensing

[Stevan Harnad]

Ann Okerson (as
interviewed<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.html>
by
Richard Poynder) is committed to licensing. I am not sure whether the
commitment is ideological or pragmatic, but it's clearly a lifelong
("asymptotic") commitment by now.

I was surprised to see the direction Ann ultimately took because -- as I
have admitted many times -- it was Ann who first opened my eyes to (what
eventually came to be called) "Open Access."

In the mid and late 80's I was still just in the thrall of the scholarly
and scientific potential of the revolutionarily new online medium
itself ("Scholarly
Skywriting"<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/sky-writing-or-when-man-first-met-troll/239420/>),
eager to get everything to be put online. It was Ann's work on the serials
crisis that made me realize that it was not enough just to get it all
online: it also had to be made accessible (online) to all of its potential
users, toll-free -- not just to those whose institutions could afford the
access-tolls (licenses).

And even that much I came to understand, sluggishly, only after I had first
realized that what set apart the writings in question was not that they
were (as I had first naively dubbed them)
"esoteric<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal>"
(i.e., they had few users) but that they were *peer-reviewed research
journal articles*, written by researchers solely for impact, not for
income<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1>
.

But I don't think the differences between Ann and me can be set down to
ideology vs. pragmatics. I too am far too often busy trying to free the
growth of open access from the ideologues (publishing reformers, rights
reformers (Ann's "open use" zealots), peer review reformers, freedom of
information reformers) who are slowing the progress of access to
peer-reviewed journal articles (from "now" to "better") by insisting only
and immediately on what they believe is the "best." Like Ann, I, too, am
all pragmatics (repository software, analyses of the OA impact advantage,
mandates, analyses of mandate effeciveness).

So Ann just seems to have a different sense of what can (hence should) be
done, now, to maximize access, and how (as well as how fast). And after her
initial, infectious inclination toward toll-free access (which I and others
caught from her) she has apparently concluded that what is needed is to
modify the terms of the tolls (i.e., licensing).

This is well-illustrated by Ann's view on SCOAP3: "All it takes is for
libraries to agree that what they’ve now paid as subscription fees for
those journals will be paid instead to CERN, who will in turn pay to the
publishers as subsidy for APCs."

I must alas disagree with this view, on entirely pragmatic -- indeed
logical -- grounds<https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=scoap+OR+scoap3+blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbas=0&tbm=blg>:
the transition from annual institutional subscription fees to annual
consortial OA publication fees is an incoherent, unscalable, unsustainable
Escherian scheme that contains the seeds of its own dissolution, rather
than a pragmatic means of reaching a stable "asymptote": Worldwide, across
all disciplines, there are P institutions, Q journals, and R authors,
publishing S articles per year. The only relevant item is the article. The
annual consortial licensing model -- reminiscent of the Big Deal -- is
tantamount to a global oligopoly and does not scale (beyond CERN!).

So if SCOAP3 is the pragmatic basis for Ann's "predict[ion that] we’ll see
such journals evolve into something more like 'full traditional OA' before
too much longer" then one has some practical basis for scepticism -- a
scepticism Ann shares when it comes to "hybrid Gold" OA journals -- unless
of course such a transition to Fool's Gold is both mandated and funded by
governments, as the UK and Netherlands governments have lately
proposed<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1073-The-Journal-Publisher-Lobby-in-the-UK-Netherlands-Part-I.html>,
under the influence of their publishing lobbies! But the globalization of
such profligate folly seems unlikely on the most pragmatic grounds of all:
affordability. (The scope for remedying world hunger, disease or injustice
that way are marginally better -- and McDonalds would no doubt be
interested in such a yearly global consortial pre-payment
deal<https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=oI6LUpG8LPLCyAHT5IHQDg#q=McNopoly+harnad>
for
their Big Macs too…)

I also disagree (pragmatically) with Ann's apparent conflation of the
access problem for journal articles with the access problem for books.
(It's the inadequacy of the "esoteric" criterion again. Many book authors
-- hardly pragmatists -- still dream of sales & riches, and fear that free
online access would thwart these dreams, driving away the prestigious
publishers whose imprimaturs distinguish their work from vanity press.)

Pragmatically speaking, OA to articles has already proved slow enough in
coming, and has turned out to require mandates to induce and embolden
authors to make their articles OA. But for articles, at least, there is
author consensus that OA is desirable, hence there is the motivation to
comply with OA mandates from authors' institutions and funders. Books,
still a mixed bag, will have to wait. Meanwhile, no one is stopping those
book authors who want to make their books free online from picking
publishers who agree…

And there are plenty of pragmatic reasons why the librarian-obsession --
perhaps not ideological, but something along the same lines -- with the
Version-of-Record is misplaced when it comes to access to journal articles:
The author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft means the difference
between night and day for would-be users whose institutions cannot afford
toll-access to the publisher's proprietary VoR.

And for the time being the toll-access VoR is safe [modulo the general
digital-preservation problem, which is not an OA problem], while
subscription licenses are being paid by those who can afford them. CHORUS
and SHARE have plenty of pragmatic advantages for publishers (and
ideological ones for librarians), but they are vastly outweighed by their
practical disadvantages for research and researchers -- of which the
biggest is that they leave access-provision in the hands of publishers (and
their licensing conditions).

About the Marie-Antoinette option for the developing world -- R4L -- the
less said, the better. The pragmatics really boil down to time: the access
needs of both the developing and the developed world are pressing. Partial
and makeshift solutions are better than nothing, now. But it's been "now"
for an awfully long time; and time is not an ideological but a pragmatic
matter; so is lost research usage and impact.

Ann says: "Here’s the fondest hope of the pragmatic OA advocate: that we
settle on a series of business practices that truly make the greatest
possible collection of high-value material accessible to the broadest
possible audience at the lowest possible cost — not just lowest cost to end
users, but lowest cost to all of us."

Here's a slight variant, by another pragmatic OA advocate: "that we settle
on a series of research community policies that truly make the greatest
possible collection of peer-reviewed journal articles accessible online
free for all users, to the practical benefit of all of us."

The online medium has made this practically possible. The publishing
industry -- pragmatists rather than ideologists -- will adapt to this new
practical reality. Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

Let me close by suggesting that perhaps something Richard Poynder wrote is
not quite correct either: He wrote "It was [the] affordability problem that
created the accessibility problem that OA was intended to solve."

No, it was the creation of the online medium that made OA not only
practically feasible (and optimal) for research and researchers, but
inevitable.

*Stevan Harnad*
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