[GOAL] Re: Disruption vs. Protection

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Arthur Sale <ahjs at ozemail.com.au> wrote:

At a severe risk of offending Stevan, I write to say that my University has
> practised an almost-OA policy for at least 15 years that falls into neither
> the Green nor Gold category.... we offer a free (to the researcher)
> automated document delivery service to any researcher... for an article we
> do not subscribe to.
>

No offence at all!

But individual article access via
pay-to-view<https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=q9A3UsyqMcjgyQHitICAAw#q=amsci+(subscription+license+pay-per-view)+harnad>(e.g.,
interlibrary loan) -- like subscription access and license access --
are simply variants of the *toll access,* in contrast with which "open
access" was coined and to remedy which the OA movement was launched. It's
toll access no matter who is paying the access tolls. And OA means
toll-free online access.

There's nothing "almost-OA" about any kind of toll access. The button is
almost-OA because although it may not be immediate, and although it may not
be certain, it is certainly toll-free.

But none of this has anything to do with the Green/Gold distinction, which
is about whether the toll-free access is provided by the author (Green) or
the journal (Gold).

(I'm sure Arthur won't do it, but I hope no one else will come back with
"but the Gold OA APC is a toll, so Gold OA is toll-access too." For pedants
we could write out "toll-access" as "access-toll to the user or to the
user's institution." When an author (or his institution) pays to
*publish*(whether Gold-OA or non-OA) the payment is not a user access
toll. Everyone
agrees that the true expenses of publishing have to be paid by someone. But
only subscription/licence/pay-per-view pays them via access tolls, denying
access if the toll are not paid. Gold OA does not. And for Green OA,
subscriptions -- while they remain sustainable -- have already paid the
publication costs, so Green OA is just supplementary access, for those
whose institutions can't afford the subscription toll. -- What the "true
expense" of publishing is is another matter. By my lights, we won't know
till universal Green OA has prevailed. And I'm betting they will turn out
to be just the cost of implementing peer review.)

There is a delay sure, but it is the same delay as the Request-A-Copy
> button, and more certain.
>

Agreed that paid pay-per-view is more certain than the button (just as paid
subscription access and paid licensed access are). Bur I would not be sure
they're both equally delayed: In principle, a user could click a request
and the author could click to comply within one minute of one another, if
they are both at their keyboards. (Unlikely if one is in Oz!)

I'd also say that the uncertainty as to whether the author will comply is
rather small...


> These issues are complex. The subscription decisions we make in libraries
> are binary (either your subscribe or you don't), but the criteria we have
> to use in making those decisions are not binary—we're typically considering
> multiple criteria (relevance, price, cost per download, demonstrated
> demand, etc.) that exist on a continuum. One thing is for certain, though:
> the more a journal's content is available for free, and the quicker it
> becomes available for free, the less likely it is that we'll maintain a
> subscription. I think that's the only rational position to take when there
> are so many journals out there that our faculty want, and that we're not
> subscribing to because we're out of money.
>

Agreed.

But the point of contention was not about cancelling journals based on what
percentage of their content was Green OA but about cancelling journals *if
their publishers do not embargo Green OA*.

*Stevan Harnad*
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