[GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?
Velterop
velterop at gmail.com
Mon Jan 4 13:46:42 GMT 2016
Christian, and other readers of this list,
It seems to me that many researchers are unhappy with any kind of
requirement or imposition, resorting to the 'academic freedom' argument
rather (all too?) quickly and easily. But librarians are in a bind. They
can't really cancel most subscriptions or BigDeal licences without
invoking the ire of faculty, which makes it impossible for them to have
meaningful negotiations with publishers, because there is no way for
them to have a 'walk-away point', so important when negotiating.
Publishers know, of course, that librarians are not in a position to
negotiate, and even if negotiations are escalated up to the level of
university leaders, such as we found in The Netherlands recently, their
position is also fairly weak as they face pressure from both the
publishers and their faculty, not to risk reducing access to
subscription journals. Complaining is cheap for faculty: they don't pay
for subscriptions and often are not even fully aware of the cost.
My proposal to make members of the faculty pay for articles they publish
in subscription journals was meant to address this lack of awareness. If
charging them for publishing in subscription journals doesn't work — and
I recognise the difficult position librarians are in regarding such
charges — then at least it shouldn't be beyond the possibility of
librarians to do more to make authors aware of the cost of their
decision to publish in subscription journals, short of actually charging
them. Making them aware of the cost may perhaps not immediately result
in changed behaviour, but it could be a very useful nudge in the
somewhat longer run (after decades of advocating open access, who
notices a year or two?). Does it ever happen? I'd be most interested to
hear about instances where it does.
I don't know why you think that cancelling subscriptions and getting rid
of BigDeal licences would not upset researchers much. I am very
skeptical of that idea. However, if you would cancel and replace all
subscriptions by a 'pay-by-the-drink' approach, whereby individual
articles are bought upon request, from any journal, you may be on to
something. You would ensure access for researchers (and potentially to a
much wider range of journals than you can possibly subscribe to). You
would simply be substituting the 'just-in-case' model by an actual
usage-based one.
There are no-doubt risks involved, such as researchers 'buying' far more
articles than the budget would allow for, and inconveniences, such as
needing a transaction for every article, and there will no-doubt be
objections from faculty, too, but if done transparently, it would make
them more aware of the costs and the anachronisms of the pay-wall system
of scholarly publishing.
I am certain that people will protest at this and other proposals as
'bad', 'not workable' et cetera, but the fact is that if other, new,
ways of dealing with scholarly literature are not experimented with,
nothing will change, and even where it does change, it does so painfully
slowly. The idea of open access has been around for decades now, and yet
the proportion of articles being available and re-usable barrier-free is
still very small, and though growing in number, hardly growing in
proportion to everything that is being published (it is my impression
that the growth in the total number of articles published is hardly
smaller than the number of open access articles every year).
To believe that change will come from publishers is most unrealistic.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, and not to
academia, which militates against the sort of change the scholarly
community needs. And even where some changes do occur on the part of
publishers — hybrid journals, for instance — they are almost universally
denigrated (I'm not saying that is wrong, but it's always done on the
basis of 'double-dipping', which is a red herring and masking the real
reasons why hybrid journals are an unwelcome development). The optimism
with which I, and other members of the original BOAI group of
participants insofar as I know, embarked on advocating open access has,
at least in my view, mainly been frustrated by deeply held conservatism
in academic circles. Most of what I hear and read about open access
discussions, is complaints about publishers. All too rarely do I hear or
read proposed — or better still, implemented — attempts at solutions.
There are very few around. Stevan keeps banging on about self-archiving
mandates. Admirable tenacity; poor results, so far. And there are a few
new style journal initiatives, such as PeerJ and ScienceOpen and the
like, which don't, unfortunately, account for many articles yet, and the
so far rather more successful PLOS-One. And that's it. Altogether very
small fry in the scheme of things. In fact, 'hybrid' seems to be able to
claim the most success. Quite possibly because it preserves most of the
old order, including the unnecessarily high cost of the system (doesn't
academia just lurve throwing money away?) and the journal pecking order.
Happy New Year! I am still hoping for real changes. Probably being naive.
Jan Velterop
PS. I would agree with 'flipping' now, to get open access, and then sort
out cost reduction. I don't see it happening in a hurry, unfortunately.
On 04/01/2016 00:15, Christian Gutknecht wrote:
> Stevan,
>
> I guess the record in RoarMap about the policy of the University of
> Zurich is not correct at that point. The deposition of at least the
> metadata of a publication in the IR is required to get included in the
> annual report, which is the foundation of research evaluation. It’s
> however correct that the distinction of of the accessibility on ZORA
> (Fulltext freely available or not) is not part of the research
> evaluation. But I do not know any university that only counts
> publications that are freely available at the repository.
>
> Also counting records where the full text is restricted but only
> available with a request-a-copy button as Almost-OA on the same level
> as OA is not valid for me. With „Request a copy“ there’s always a
> certain chance that you never will get the full text. Especially for
> older records you cannot expect the author to answer your request,
> because he/she may already have left the university.
>
> Regarding the suggested approach of Jan to charge authors publishing
> in subscription journals, I think this would be a bad option. Any
> requirement that tells authors where to publish (even indirectly by
> imposing charges) will be rejected as a not tolerable influence of the
> academic freedom. I mean some academics already protesting with this
> argument, if the university requires them to make their full text
> available on the IR.
>
> But I really like the idea to let researchers feel that subscription
> is an outdated model. And an easy way to do that without upsetting
> them too much, is to cancel subscriptions and get rid of the Big
> Deals. With the free money the library then can create two kind of
> funds: One is the Gold OA fund (incl. hybrid options but with a cap)
> and one is the fund for costs resulting getting access to documents
> that are not longer available via subscription (like costs for
> pay-per-view, document delivery, individual subscription of a really
> important journal). I think most libraries would find out that
> researchers would get along quite well with this option. Because
> librarians constantly overestimate the importance of their
> subscriptions and especially the Big Deals where they buy/rent a lot
> of stuff that is never used by their community. As Thomas mentioned
> it’s really easy these days to get to the papers by simply asking the
> author. Also Researchgate and academia.edu <http://academia.edu> close
> the gap where IRs fail to provide access.
>
> The advantage in this approach is that libraries clearly set the
> incentive to Gold OA without the need of additional budget. It doesn’t
> say, don’t publish in subscription journals, it’s just says that
> subscription is something that isn't supported by default anymore. And
> changing the default really can make the difference, as there will
> immediate (Hybrid) Gold OA.
>
> To be honest, I rather have a flip RIGHT NOW with the existing
> "grotesquely inflated total expenditure“, then going on like this for
> years where we spend the money anyway to the Closed Access publishers
> and get nothing in return. It’s not that I’m not concerned about the
> costs in the Gold OA world. But the current situation is with the
> subscription business is already so bad, it can’t get worse.
>
> Best regards
>
> Christian
>
> PS: Okay, it can get worse: Paying for Hybrid Gold and keeping the
> subscriptions like it’s currently done in UK is really not
> sustainable. But that was clear from the beginning. Maybe it becomes
> better when offsetting agreements are set in place.
>
>
>
>> Am 03.01.2016 um 18:31 schrieb Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at GMAIL.COM
>> <mailto:amsciforum at gmail.com>>:
>>
>> Penalizing an institution's /authors/ for publishing their own
>> articles in subscription journals will not help that institution's
>> /users/ gain access to the subscription journal articles of authors
>> /from all other institutions/, hence it will not reduce the
>> institution's subscription budget, just increase the total
>> institutional spend by the author spend. (Hence Jan's is yet another
>> unstable, unscalable solution, the only stable, coherent one being
>> for all authors, at all institutions, to be mandated to provide Green
>> OA
>> <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>.)
>>
>>
>> To assess the effectiveness of the University of Zürich
>> <http://roarmap.eprints.org/329/> Green OA mandate (which has only
>> one of the two conditions <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/> for
>> the most effective mandates <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/>:
>> immediate deposit is required, but deposit is not a precondition for
>> research evaluation) what needs to be counted is not the annual
>> proportion of OA deposits but the annual proportion of
>> immediate-deposits -- because Zora <https://www.zora.uzh.ch/>
>> implements the automated Request-a-Copy Button
>> <http://www.zora.uzh.ch/117835/> to provide Almost-OA
>> <https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=MUCJVraTOuiM8Qf8hrn4Cw&gws_rd=ssl#q=button+%22almost-OA%22>
>> for embargoed deposits.
>>
>> Once (effective) immediate-deposit mandates are universal (or
>> almost-universal), it will be universal (or almost-universal) Green
>> OA plus Almost-OA that will make journal subscriptions cancellable at
>> last, thereby not only forcing the publisher downsizing, cost-cutting
>> and conversion to Fair-Gold OA
>> <https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=MUCJVraTOuiM8Qf8hrn4Cw&gws_rd=ssl#q=harnad+%22fair+gold%22>,
>> but also providing institutions and their authors with the windfall
>> subscription cancelation savings out of which to pay the small
>> remaining fair-gold costs (i.e., just peer review alone) many times over.
>>
>> A "flip
>> <https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=MUCJVraTOuiM8Qf8hrn4Cw&gws_rd=ssl#q=harnad+flip+OA>"
>> to today's Fools-Gold, even if it had been possible (which it is not)
>> would simply have flipped today's grotesquely inflated total
>> expenditure from subscription fees to publication fees (before it all
>> flopped the very next day).
>>
>> (But I have reconciled myself to merely keep pointing the way to the
>> optimal and inevitable outcome without fretting about how long it
>> will take the research community to do the only sensible thing.)
>>
>> Your Zen Archivangelist
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 8:27 AM, Velterop <velterop at gmail.com
>> <mailto:velterop at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I have advocated this for a while now (but am not aware of any
>> university or library that's taken it up):
>> Charge authors of your university who insist on publishing in a
>> subscription journal either
>>
>> * a nominal amount that is based on an estimate of the average
>> per-article revenue of subscription journals/publishers
>> (about $5000), or
>> * the actual subscription amount paid by the university to a
>> publisher, divided by the number of articles by authors from
>> the university, published in the journals of that publisher.
>>
>> These charges should be collected from the authors' grants, be
>> put in an open access fund, and then be used by the
>> university/library to support authors willing to publish in
>> APC-supported open access journals.
>>
>> (For those who really don't like the 'gold' strategy and favour
>> the 'green' one above all: you could use the open access fund to
>> defray the cost of your open repositories and of all the effort
>> needed to ensure that every single paper from your university or
>> institution is properly and 'findably' deposited.)
>>
>> There will no-doubt be practical difficulties with this, but
>> perhaps it can be considered as the seed of an approach?
>>
>> Jan Velterop
>>
>> On 03/01/2016 12:39, Christian Gutknecht wrote:
>>> Well, I think Thomas is right. As long libraries do not shift
>>> money from the subscription side to the Gold OA side, the
>>> transformation will be very very slow.
>>>
>>> Take the University of Zurich for example. I’ve just disclosed
>>> for the first time ever what they are paying for Elsevier,
>>> Springer and Wiley and put that in relation with the
>>> institutional publication behavior in this blog post:
>>> http://wisspub.net/2016/01/03/zahlungen-der-universitaet-zuerich/
>>>
>>> The University of Zurich has a strong mandate since 2008 with
>>> probably one of the best staffed OA team (7 persons) in Europe.
>>> But regarding publications from 2014, only 23% (242 out of 1062)
>>> from all articles published articles within journals from
>>> Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Journals are freely accessible via
>>> the IR. In 2014 too, the University of Zurich paid 3.4 Mio
>>> CHF/USD to Elsevier, Springer and Wiley only for Journal
>>> subscriptions.
>>>
>>> The situation becomes even more absurd, when you learn that in
>>> 2014 there were 176 publications authored by the University of
>>> Zurich that were published by PLOS (which by the way already is
>>> the half of what the University of Zurich publishes with
>>> Wiley!). But there is only little institutional funding for APCs
>>> explicitly limited to humanities. So all authors who wish
>>> publish with PLOS have to throw in additional money by their own
>>> research budget, because the library claims to have no
>>> additional money for large scale Gold OA funding. Fortunately
>>> for the sake of OA, Swiss authors are willing to pay with the
>>> own budget that because the financial situation isn’t that bad.
>>> But think about the chance and the boost for OA, if the
>>> University of Zurich would shift all or at least a part of the
>>> money from the journal subscriptions and create a publisher
>>> neutral Open Access funds.
>>>
>>> So I think we can and should promote more Green OA and care
>>> about a better compliance. But if we really want to speed up the
>>> transition to Gold OA we really should consider to give the
>>> subscription money a new purpose and use it in a coordinated way
>>> to force the publishers to change their business model. And as I
>>> heard this was Berlin 12 about.
>>>
>>> Best regards
>>>
>>> Christian Gutknecht
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Am 31.12.2015 um 19:15 schrieb Stevan Harnad
>>>> <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk <mailto:harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk>>:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Dec 31, 2015, at 10:59 AM, Thomas Krichel
>>>>> <krichel at openlib.org <mailto:krichel at openlib.org>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Stevan Harnad writes
>>>>>
>>>>>> 1. Actually, no one really knows why it is taking so long to
>>>>>> reach the
>>>>>> optimal and inevitable outcome -- universal OA --
>>>>>
>>>>> oh I know. It's because libraries are spending money on
>>>>> subscriptions.
>>>>> And as long as they do, OA remains evitable.
>>>>
>>>> That’s about as useful as saying that "I know why there is poverty:
>>>> because the rich are rich and the poor are poor."
>>>>
>>>> Not only is it not possible to treat “libraries” as if they
>>>> were a monolith
>>>> any more than it is possible to treat “authors” as a monolith,
>>>> but it is completely out of the question for a university library
>>>> to cancel subscriptions while its users have no other means to
>>>> access that content.
>>>>
>>>> (Please don’t reply that they do cancel what they cannot
>>>> afford: that is
>>>> not relevant. Libraries subscribe to as much content that their
>>>> users need
>>>> as they can afford to subscribe to.)
>>>>
>>>> The only way to make subscriptions cancellable is to first mandate
>>>> and provide (universal — not just local) Green OA
>>>> <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>.
>>>>
>>>> SH
>>>>
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