[GOAL] Re: What would be the implications of a 'gold' Open Access REF policy?

[Stevan Harnad]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Richard Poynder <richard.poynder at cantab.net
> wrote:

> A blog post by Ben Johnson, policy adviser for research at the Higher
> Education Funding Council for England that might be of interest.
>
>
>
>
> https://ersatzben.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/what-would-be-the-implications-of-a-gold-open-access-ref-policy/
>
>
>

*THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE GREEN OPEN ACCESS REF POLICY*


*Comments on "**What would be the implications of a ‘gold’ Open Access REF
policy?*
<https://ersatzben.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/what-would-be-the-implications-of-a-gold-open-access-ref-policy/>
*"* (Ben Johnson, HEFCE)


*BJ:** “this post ignores … the commonly heard prediction that universal
green OA will somehow deliver a sustainable gold OA future all on its own…”*


Let me spell out exactly how and why pre-green gold OA is *fool’s gold*
<http://j.mp/foolsGOLDoa> -- unaffordable and unsustainable -- and how
universal green OA will deliver a sustainable gold OA future in the form of
post-green *fair-gold* <http://j.mp/OAschema>:


1. Pre-green gold is arbitrarily and hugely over-priced. (We will see how
and why shortly.)


2. Payment for pre-green gold is double payment: subscription fees for
incoming papers plus gold fees for outgoing papers. (Must-have subscription
journals cannot be cancelled by an institution until their articles are
accessible to users in some other way.)


3. Paying the same hybrid journal for pre-green hybrid gold also allows
publisher double-dipping.


4. Even if the pre-green hybrid gold publisher promises all N of its
subscribing institutions a full rebate on all hybrid gold income, that only
means that (N-1)N of whatever hybrid gold any institution pays for its
outgoing hybrid gold papers becomes a subsidy to all the other N-1
subscribing institutions: The institution only gets back 1/Nth of its
hybrid gold outlay. (The UK, for example, would get back a 6% subscription
rebate for its hybrid gold outlay; the rest of the UK hybrid gold outlay
would become a rebate to the other 94% of subscribing institutions in the
countries that were not foolish enough to pay pre-emptively for pre-green
gold.)


5. Research funds are scarce, subscriptions are barely affordable, and
pre-green gold payment is completely unnecessary, because green OA can be
provided at no extra cost. (Institutional repositories already exist
anyway, for multiple purposes, so their cost per paper is negligible,
particularly compared to the grotesque cost per paper for pre-green gold.)


6. CC-BY is most definitely not worth the extra cost of pre-green gold —
and CC-BY will come soon after green . (We will see how and why shortly.)


7. Publisher embargoes on green are ineffectual because of the
repositories’ copy-request Button (*if* the paper was mandatorily deposited
immediately upon acceptance for publication, exactly as HEFCE requires).


8. So post-green — i.e., once immediate-deposit green has been mandated
globally, by all institutions and funders, as HEFCE has done --
institutions can at last cancel their journal subscriptions.


9. The post-green unsustainability of subscriptions will force publishers
to cut publishing costs that have been made obsolete by the post-green OA
era by phasing out the print edition, the online edition, access-provision
and archiving: these functions will now be offloaded onto the distributed
global network of green OA institutional repositories.


10. To cover the remaining remaining post-green cost of peer-reviewed
journal publishing — peer review itself — post-green journals will convert
to affordable, sustainable fair gold, which institutions will easily pay,
per outgoing paper, out of a fraction of their windfall subscription
cancelation savings on incoming papers.


In other words, post-green, subscriptions will be gone, embargoes will be
gone, and all OA will be CC-BY (where desired).


*BJ: **“Would repositories disappear in a gold OA world? No, they’re still
useful for theses etc. Monitoring would continue to be necessary for any OA
policy.”*


In the Post-green fair-gold OA world there will no longer be any need to
monitor OA policy. But there will ceratinly be a need for the worldwide
network of green OA repositories — to provide access and archving in place
of the pre-green subscription journals.
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