[GOAL] The Inevitable Success of Transitional Green Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

This is a response to:

Michael Eisen (2015) *The inevitable failure of parasitic green open access*
<http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1710> (blogged May 25, 2015 in *it is
NOT junk <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/>*)

I will respond to Mike [*M.E.*] paragraph by paragraph. Here are my first
observations:

I think it is subscription journal publishing that is parasitic on the work
of researchers, peer-reviewers and their institutions, as well as on the
money of the tax-payers who fund the research -- not the other way round.

Green Open Access mandates are the remedy, not the malady.

Gold Open Access is premature until Green OA has been mandated and provided
universally, so that it can first make subscriptions cancellable (as
publishers anticipate -- and that's the real motivation for their Green OA
embargoes).

The reason pre-Green Gold OA is premature is that while access-blocking
journal subscriptions still prevail the contents of those journals are
accessible only to subscribing institutions, so those subscriptions cannot
be cancelled *until and unless there is an alternative means of access*.

Immediate-Deposit Green OA mandates
<https://www.google.ca/search?num=20&q=harnad+%22immediate+deposit%22+mandate&oq=harnad+%22immediate+deposit%22+mandate&gs_l=serp.3...25005.29000.0.29670.2.2.0.0.0.0.76.143.2.2.0.ckpsrh...0...1.1.64.serp..2.0.0.IJQg6AgFD34>
provide
that alternative means of access (and they do so even if the deposited
papers are under a publisher OA embargo, thanks to the institutional
repositories' copy-request Button
<https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/RequestCopy>, which can provide
"Almost-OA" individually with one click from the requestor and one click
from the author).

Until subscriptions are cancelled, Gold OA fees have to be paid over and
above all existing subscription fees. Hence they are double payments,
unaffordable alongside subscriptions.

Pre-Green Gold OA fees are also arbitrarily over-priced: Post-Green, all
that will need to be paid for is the editorial management of peer review
(picking referees, adjudicating reports and revisions). The rest
(archiving, access-provision) will be provided by the worldwide network of
Green OA repositories.

Nor is it possible for publishers to prevent Green OA by trying to embargo
it. In the virtual world
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1152-Elsevier-Trying-to-squeeze-the-virtual-genie-back-into-the-physical-bottle.html>,
research-sharing is optimal and inevitable
<https://www.google.ca/search?num=20&q=harnad+optimal+inevitable&oq=harnad+optimal+inevitable&gs_l=serp.12...0.0.0.42840.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0.ckpsrh...0...1..64.serp..0.0.0.bgHsNYdEpZY>
for
research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the
tax-paying public that finances their research) -- and it is also
unstoppable, if authors wish to provide it.

*M.E.: *At the now famous 2001 meeting that led to the Budapest Open Access
Initiative [BOAI] – the first time the many different groups pushing to
make scholarly literature freely available assembled – a serious rift
emerged that almost shattered the open access movement in its infancy.

Green Open Access self-archiving (before it even got that name) had already
been going on for at least two decades
<http://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions> in 2001. There had also been
free and subsidized online journals for over a decade
<http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?mood.1>. (The names
"OA," "Green" and "Gold" came later.)

I would say that the BOAI
<http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/background> in 2001
*accelerated* the OA movement, rather "almost shattered" it. It also
supplied the name for it ("OA").

*M.E.: *On one side were people like me (representing the nascent Public
Library of Science) and Jan Velterop (BioMed Central) advocating for “gold”
open access, in which publishers are paid up-front to make articles freely
available. On the other side was Stevan Harnad, a staunch advocate for
“green” open access, in which authors publish their work in subscription
journals, but make them freely available through institutional or field
specific repositories.

And BOAI opted to endorse both roads to OA -- originally dubbed BOAI-I and
BOAI-II <http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read>, then later
renamed Green and Gold OA
<http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html>, respectively.

*M.E.: *On the surface of it, it’s not clear why these two paths to OA
should be in opposition. Indeed, as a great believer in anything that would
both make works freely available, I had always liked the idea of authors
who had published in subscription journals making their works available, in
the process annoying subscription publishers (always a good thing) and
hastening the demise of their outdated business model. I agreed with
Stevan’s entreaty that creating a new business model was hard, but posting
articles online was easy.

There is complete agreement on the fact that there are two means of
providing OA and both will be important.

But what is *hard* is not just creating the Gold OA business model but
making it affordable and scalable. The problem is current institutional
subscription access needs. Until access to each institution's current
must-have journals is available by some means other than paid-access
(usually subscriptions), Gold OA means *double payment*: for incoming
access via subscription fees and for outgoing publication via Gold OA fees.
And double-payment at arbitrarily inflated Gold OA fees, in which many
obsolete products and services are still co-bundled, notably, archiving,
access-provision, and often also the print edition.

Universally mandated Green OA provides this other means of access, which
will in turn make subscriptions cancellable, forcing publishers to cut the
obsolete products and services and their costs, downsize to the peer-review
service alone, offload archiving and access provision to the global network
of Green OA repositories, and convert to affordable, scalable and
sustainable post-Green Fair-Gold OA.

The SCOAP3 consortial "flip" model
<https://www.google.ca/search?num=20&q=scoap3+flip+open+access&oq=scoap3+flip+open+access&gs_l=serp.3...4890.4890.0.5032.1.1.0.0.0.0.82.82.1.1.0.ckpsrh...0...1.1.64.serp..1.0.0.OqqZEPrp2LE>--
flipping individual institutional subscriptions to consortial institutional
Gold OA "memberships" -- is unstable, unscalable and unsustainable
<https://www.google.ca/search?num=20&q=%28scoap3+OR+flip%29++harnad&oq=%28scoap3+OR+flip%29++harnad&gs_l=serp.3...22918.37448.0.38792.6.6.0.0.0.0.114.515.5j1.6.0.ckpsrh...0...1.1.64.serp..4.2.206.ddt1YjNXoYY>.
Not only can all the planet's ~c30K peer-reviewed journals and ~10K
institutions not be consortially "flipped" all at once, but consortial
memberships are evolutionarily unstable strategies, being open to
institutional defection at any time, especially from institutions that
publish little in a given journal, thereby raising the "membership" fee for
the remaining institutions. The problem is not solved by flipping instead
to individual paper-based fees either, because that faces the
double-payment problem. And both models still have arbitrarily inflated
prices until there is a means to jettison the obsolete print edition and
offload the publisher cost of access-provision and archiving elsewhere.

*M.E.: *But at the Budapest meeting I learned several interesting things.
First, Harnad and other supporters of green OA did not appear to view it as
a disruptive force – rather they envisioned a kind of stable alliance
between subscription publishers and institutional repositories whereby
authors sent papers to whatever journal they wanted to and turned around
and made them freely available. And second, big publishers like Elsevier
were supportive of green OA.

I'm afraid Mike is recalling wrongly here. I have been predicting and
advocating a transition from toll-access subscription publishing to (what
eventually came to be called) Fair-Gold OA publishing from the very outset
(1994). But this was always predicated on a *viable, realistic transition
scenario* to get us from here to there. This always entailed an
intermediate phase in which Green OA self-archiving would grow in parallel
alongside subscription publishing, rather than an unrealistic attempt to
make a direct transition ("flip") to Gold: Green OA needed to become
universal (or near-universal) before there could be a viable transition to
Gold.

Mike also misinterprets the references to "peaceful co-existence" between
Green OA self-archiving and subscription publishing. No one can predict the
future with certainty, and it is certainly true
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/261160/> that there is no evidence yet of Green
OA's causing subscription cancellations
<http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/UKSG-Apr07-SP.pdf>, even in fields where
it has already attained 100% Green OA for more than two decades. But I
never denied my own belief that once all research in all fields had reached
or neared 100% Green, subscriptions would become unsustainable and journals
would have to downsize and convert to Fair-Gold OA.

Not only was this "disruptive scenario," already implicit in my "Subversive
Proposal
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/harnad$20subversive$20proposal$201994/bit.listserv.vpiej-l/BoKENhK0_00/2MF9QBO9s2IJ>"
of 1994, as well as in my very first posting in August 1998
<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0001.html> to the
AmSci September Forum (which eventually became the the Amsci OA Forum and
then the Global OA Forum (GOAL)), but I made it completely explicit in the
2000 draft of "For Whom the Gate Tolls
<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1061.html>" in
sections 4.1 <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4>and
4.2 <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2>:









*"Eight steps will be described here. The first four are not hypothetical
in any way; they are guaranteed to free the entire refereed research
literature… from its access/impact-barriers right away. The only thing that
researchers and their institutions need to do is to take these first four
steps. The second four steps are hypothetical predictions, but nothing
hinges on them: The refereed literature will already be free for everyone
as a result of steps i-iv, irrespective of the outcome of predictions
v-viii.i. Universities install and register OAI-compliant Eprint
Archives…ii. Authors self-archive their pre-refereeing preprints and
post-refereeing postprints in their own university's Eprint Archives…iii.
Universities subsidize a first start-up wave of self-archiving by proxy
where needed…iv. The Give-Away corpus is freed from all access/impact
barriers on-line…"...However, it is likely that there will be some changes
as a consequence of the freeing of the literature by author/institution
self-archiving. This is what those changes might be:v. Users will prefer
the free version?…vi. Publisher toll revenues shrink, Library toll savings
grow?…vii. Publishers downsize to providers of peer-review service +
optional add-ons products?…viii. peer-review service costs funded by
author-institution out of reader-institution toll savings?... "If
publishers can continue to cover costs and make a decent profit from the
toll-based optional add-ons market, without needing to down-size to
peer-review provision alone, nothing much changes."But if publishers do
need to abandon providing the toll-based products and to scale down instead
to providing only the peer-review service, then universities, having saved
100% of their annual access-toll budgets, will have plenty of annual
windfall savings from which to pay for their own researchers' continuing
(and essential) annual journal-submission peer-review costs (10-30%); the
rest of their savings (70-90%) they can spend as they like (e.g., on books
-- plus a bit for Eprint Archive maintenance)."*This original transition
scenario has since been further elaborated many times, starting from before
BOAI in *Nature* in 2001
<http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1>,
with updates to keep pace with OA developments (repositories, mandates,
embargoes) in 2007 <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/>, 2010
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html>,  2013
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/353991/>,  2014
<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>,
and 2015 <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/361704/>.

*M.E.: *At first this seemed inexplicable to me – why would publishers not
only allow but encourage authors to post paywalled content on their
institutional repositories? But it didn’t take long to see the logic.
Subscription publishers correctly saw the push for better access to
published papers as a challenge to their dominance of the industry, and
sought ways to diffuse this pressure. With few functioning institutional
repositories in existence, and only a small handful of authors interested
in posting to them, green OA was not any kind of threat. But it seemed
equally clear that, should green OA ever actually become a threat to
subscription publishers, their support would be sure to evaporate.

I continue to laud those subscription publishers who do not embargo Green
OA as being on the "side of the angels
<https://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=harnad+%22side+of+the+angels%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=EeJlVba-Bo-jpAWm2oCgDQ>,"
to encourage them. (And they are indeed on the side of the angels: Green OA
mandates would be much more widely adopted and effective if it weren't for
the nuisance tactic of publishers embargoing Green OA. But the Button is
the antidote, facilitating "Almost OA," which will nevertheless be enough
to carry the transition scenario to 100% Green OA and its sequel; it will
just take a little longer.)

And if and when they go over to the dark side (as Elsevier has now done), I
immediately name-and-shame them for it.

As it happens, I think Elsevier's reneging too late: Not only will it be
extremely costly to them in terms of PR. But they can no longer force the
genie back into the bottle...

So it was worth trying to keep them angel-side all these years.

*M.E.: *Unfortunately, Harnad didn’t see it this way. He felt that
publishers like Elsevier were “on the side of the angels”, and he reserved
his criticism for PLOS and BMC as purveyors of “fools gold” who were
delaying open access by seeking to build a new business model and get
authors to change their publishing practices instead of encouraging them to
take the easy path of publishing wherever they want and making works freely
available in institutional repositories.

The ones who were the fools were not the purveyors of the fool's gold, but
those who bought it (and, worse, those
<https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&q=harnad+finch&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=>
who
tried to mandate that they buy it).

And the reasons it's fool's gold are three: it is not only (1) arbitrarily
overpriced, but, being pre-Green -- meaning subscriptions cannot yet be
cancelled because the Green version is not yet available -- it is also (2)
double-paid (incoming subscription journal fees plus outgoing Gold journal
fees) and, to boot, it is (3) unnecessary for OA, since Green OA can be
provided for free.

Yes, subscription publishers that do not embargo Green are facilitating the
transition to Green OA and eventually to post-Green Fair-Gold;
unfortunately, pre-Green Fool's-Gold is not.

(The only reason to publish in any journal, whether subscription or Gold,
is the quality of the journal, not in order to provide OA.)

*M.E.: *At several points the discussions got very testy but we managed to
come to make a kind of peace, agreeing to advocate and pursue both paths.
PLOS, BMC and now many others have created successful businesses based on
APCs that are growing and making an increasing fraction of the newly
published literature immediately freely available. Meanwhile, the green OA
path has thrived as well, with policies from governments and universities
across the world focusing on making works published in subscription
journals freely available.

Agreed.

*M.E.: *But the fundamental logical flaw with green OA never went away. It
should always have been clear that the second Elsevier saw green OA as an
actual threat, they would no longer side with the angels. And that day has
come. With little fanfare, Elsevier recently updated their green OA
policies. Where they once encouraged authors to make their works
immediately freely available in institutional repositories, they now
require an embargo before these works are made available in an
institutional repository.

There was no fanfare but there's plenty of spin, to make it seem that
withdrawing an agreed author right was being done for positive reasons
(research sharing) rather than negative ones (insurance policy for
Elsevier's current income levels). And this is because there was an
(accurately) perceived need for a justification. It would have been much
easier to sell embargoes to the Elsevier author community if self-archiving
had never been allowed. So I'd say that Elsevier's 8-10 years on the side
of the angels has served OA well.

Nor is it over. Elsevier and its legal staff have rightly sensed that
finding rules that have their intended effect and are accepted by the
author community is not so easy to do.

In fact I am quite confident that it is impossible. The virtual genie is
out of the bottle and there is no way to get it back in. Stay tuned.

*M.E.: *This should surprise nobody. It’s a testament to Stevan and
everyone else who have made institutional repositories a growing source of
open access articles. But given their success, it would be completely
irrational of Elsevier to continue allowing their works to appear in these
IRs at the time of publication. With every growing threats to library
budgets, it was only a matter of time before universities used the
available of Elsevier works in IRs as a reason to cut subscriptions, or at
least negotiate better deals for access. And that is something Elsevier
could not allow.

I think Mike is completely mistaken on this. It was exactly the other way
around. The global immediate-Green-OA level for any journal today is still
under 30% -- probably a lot under, since no one has accurate timing data --
which is certainly no basis for cancelling a journal. Green OA mandates are
not yet having any effect on institutional subscriptions, but, because
Elsevier began to worry that they eventually might, they first tried, in
their pricing deals, to persuade institutions that in exchange for a better
price deal they should agree *not* to mandate Green OA. That failed, so
they next tried to embargo only mandatory Green OA. That failed too -- and
was rightly seen as so arbitrary and ad hoc that they have now tried to
make their embargoes "fair" by embargoing everything -- but they still had
to have a sugar coating, and that was "sharing."

Trouble is that it is precisely sharing at which the virtual medium and its
software is the most adept and powerful. And Elsevier is about to discover
that there is no way to contain it with arbitrary words that have no actual
meaning in the virtual medium.

*M.E.: *Of course this just proves that, despite pretending for a decade
that they supported the rights of authors to share their works, they never
actually meant it. There is simply no way to run a subscription publishing
business where everything you publish is freely available.

I agree completely that Elsevier went angel-side just for reasons of image:
The OA clamor was growing, alongside all the anti-Elsevier sentiment, and
they saw allowing immediate Green OA self-archiving as no risk but a PR
asset. And it was.

But this also gave Green OA a chance to grow, via Green OA mandates, which
Elsevier had not anticipated in 2004 (though they were already beginning).

So now Elsevier is using "fairness" and "sharing" as their PR ploys for
camouflaging the fact that the purpose of the embargoes is purely
self-interested (insuring current Elsevier revenue streams).

Well, first, the public is not currently to sympathetic about Elsevier
revenue streams (which they hardly see ass "fair").

But, more important, now it will be the online medium's Protean resources
for sharing that will be Elsevier's embargoes' undoing.

*M.E.: *I hope IRs will continue to grow and thrive. Stevan and other green
OA advocates have always been right that the fastest – and in many ways
best – way for authors to provide open access is simply to put their papers
online. But we can longer pretend that such a model can coexist with
subscription publishing. The only long-term way to support green OA and
institutional repositories is not to benignly parasitize subscription
journals – it is to kill them.

But there is no need at all (nor is there a means) to "kill" established,
high quality journals of long standing that researchers want to use and
publish in: What there is is a means to induce them to adapt to the OA era
-- by mandating Green OA and allowing that to force nature to take its
evolutionary course to the optimal and inevitable (via the transition
scenario I've now several times described here): First 100% Green Gratis
OA, then cancellations, then obsolete-cost-cutting and conversion to
affordable, scalable, sustainable Fair-Gold.

No point waiting around instead for some unspecified assassin to kill off
perfectly viable journals, needlessly...

*Stevan Harnad*
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