[GOAL] OA Overview January 2017

Fri Jan 6 13:22:45 GMT 2017

(1) The old librarians’ “double-payment” argument against subscription
publishing (the institution pays once to fund the research, then a second
time to “buy back” the publication) is false (and silly, actually) in the
letter (though on the right track in spirit).
(2) No, the institution that pays for the research output is not paying a
second time to buy it back. Institutional journal subscriptions are not for
buying back their own research output. They already have their own research
output. They are buying *in* the research output of *other* institutions,
and of other countries, with their journal subscriptions. So no
double-payment there, even if you reckon it at the funder- or the
tax-payer-level instead of the level of the institution that pays for the
subscription.

(3) The problem was never double-payment (for subscriptions): It was (a)
(huge) overpayment for institutional access and (b) completely intolerable
and counterproductive access-denial for researchers at institutions that
couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for subscriptions to any given journal (and there
are tens of thousands of research journals): The users that are the double
losers there are (i) *all* researchers at *all* the institutions that
produce *all* research output (who lose *all* those of their would-be users
who are at non-subscribing institutions for any given journal) and (ii)
*all* researchers at *all* the non-subscribing institutions for any given
journal, who lose access to all non-subscribed research.

Now take a few minutes to think through the somewhat more complicated but
much more accurate and informative version (3) of the double-payment
fallacy in (1).

The solution is very clear, and has been clear for close to 30 years now
(but not reached — nor even grasped by most):

(4) *Peer-reviewed research should be freely accessible to all its users*.
It is give-away research. The authors gets no money for it: they (and their
institutions and funder and tax-payer) only seek readers, users and impact.

(5) The only non-obsolete service that peer-reviewed journals still perform
in the online era is *peer review itself* (and they don’t even do most of
that: researchers do all the refereeing for free, but a competent editor
has to understand the submissions, pick the right referees, umpire their
reports, and make sure that the necessary revisions are done by the autho).
Journals today earn from $1500 to $5000 or more per article they publish,
combining all their subscription revenue, per article. Yet the true cost of
peer review per article is a small fraction of that: My estimate is that
it’s from $50 to $200 per round of refereeing. (Notice that it’s not per
accepted paper: There’s no need to bundle the price of refereeing all
rejected, or many times re-refereed papers into the price of the winning
losers who get accepted!

(6) So the refereeing service needs to be paid for at its true, fair price,
per paper, regardless of whether the outcome is accept, revise +
re-referee, or reject: a service fee for each round of refereeing.

(7) Now comes open access publishing (“Gold OA”) — which is not — repeat
*not* — what I have just described in (6)!

(8) Gold OA today is “Fool’s Gold OA,” and it includes two subtler kinds of
double payment than the simplistic notion in (1). It has to be calculated
at the level of the double-payer, the institution: Institutions must,
first, pay (A) for the subscription journals that they need and can afford:
the ones whose contents are otherwise not accessible to their users but
need to be. Then, second, they must pay (B) the FGold OA publication costs
for each paper that their researchers publish in a non-subscription
journal. That’s already a double-payment: Subscription costs plus FGold OA
costs. The S costs are for incoming S-research from all other institutions
and the FG costs are for their own outgoing FG research output. And the FG
costs are not $50-$200 per paper for peer review, but $1000 or much more
for FG “publication costs” (now ask yourself what are the expenses of which
those are payment!).

(9) And there is another “double” here in some cases, because sometimes the
S-journal and the FG-journal are the *same journal*: The "hybrid"
subscription/ FG publishers: These publishers offer FG as an option that
the author can choose to pay for. That is double-dipping. And even if the
hybrid journal promises to lower the subscription price per article in
proportion to how many articles pay for FG, that just means that the
foolish institution that is paying for the FG is subsidizing, with its huge
payment per article, the subscription costs of all the other subscribing
institutions.

(10) So FG is not only outrageously over-priced, but it means
double-payment for institutions, the possibility of double-dipping by
publishers, and, at best, paying institutions subsidizing the S
institutions with their FG double payments.

(11) So FG does not work: Publishers cannot and will not cut costs and
downsize to just providing peer review at a fair price (“Fair Gold”) while
there are still fat subscription revenues as well as fat FG payments to be
had.

(12) Yet there is another way that OA can be provided, instead of via Fools
Gold OA and that is via *Green OA* self-archiving, by their own authors, of
all refereed, accepted, published papers, in their own institution's Green
OA Institutional Repositories <http://roar.eprints.org/>.

(13) Not only does Green OA provide OA itself, but once it reaches close to
100%, it allows all institutions to cancel their subscription journals,
making subscriptions no longer sustainable, thereby forcing publishers to
cut costs by unbundling peer review and its true costs from all the
obsolete costs of printing paper, producing PDF, distributing the journal,
archiving the journal, etc. That’s all done by the global network of Green
OA Institutional repositories, leaving only the peer review as the last
remaining essential service of peer-reviewed journal publishers. That's
affordable, sustainable, Green-OA-based "Fair Gold" OA.

(14) 100% Green OA could have been had over 20 years ago, if researchers
had just provided it. Some did, but far too few. Most were too lazy, too
dim-witted or too timid to do it. Then their institutions and funders tried
to mandate OA <http://roarmap.eprints.org/> -- so publishers decided to
embargo Green OA for at least a year from publication, offering Fool's Gold
OA instead.

(15) And that’s about where we are now: Weak Green OA mandates providing
some Green OA but not enough. Some FG OA, doubly compromised now by the
fact that authors have been taking it up as a kind of pay-to-publish
opportunity, with weak peer review (or none at all, in the case of the
many scam
FG journals <https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/>who are rushing to cash in
on the Fool’s Gold Rush). Meanwhile OA activists are foolishly clamouring
ore-emptively for “open data,” “CC-BY licenses” and “open science” when
they don’t even have OA yet, subscriptions are doing fine, and FG is
outrageously over-priced and double-paid, hence unaffordable.

(16) There are simple solutions for all this, but they require sensible,
concerted action on the part of the research community: Green OA mandates
need strengthening, monitoring and carrot/stick enforcement; there is a
simple way around publishers’ Green OA embargos (the “Copy Request” Button
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268511/> , and a few institutions
<http://roarmap.eprints.org/94/> and funders
<http://roarmap.eprints.org/362/> are sensibly using the eligibility rules
for research evaluation as the carrot/stick to ensure compliance with the
mandate.

But I’ve tired of repeating myself and tired of waiting. It can all be said
in these 16 points, and has been said, countless times. But it’s one thing
to lead a bunch of researchers to the waters of Green OA self-archiving;
it’s quite another to get them to stoop to drink.

So let their librarians keep whinging incoherently about “double-payment”
for yet another decade of lost research access and impact…

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*______* . (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
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*______* (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions
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*______* (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why. In: *Ethics,
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*______* (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. *The Serials Librarian*,
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*______* (2016)  *Open Access Archivangelist: The Last Interview*? CEON
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Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014) Open
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Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière,
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