<font class="Apple-style-span" face="Helvetica"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial">On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 4:34 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:pm286@cam.ac.uk" target="_blank">pm286@cam.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:</span><br>
</font><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Mike Taylor has asked about Green OA and revenues and I have forwarded his mail here for an authoritative reply.<br>
<br>P.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Mike Taylor</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mike@indexdata.com" target="_blank">mike@indexdata.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 9:25 AM<br>Subject: [Open-access] Does Green OA has a negative effect on journal revenues?<br>To: <a href="mailto:open-access@lists.okfn.org" target="_blank">open-access@lists.okfn.org</a><br><br>
Dear all,<br>
<br>
I've often seen it said that there's no evidence that allowing Green<br>
OA has a negative effect on journal revenues. Is there any evidence<br>
that it does NOT have a negative effect, or is it just that no-one's<br>
done a good study that shows there IS a negative effect?<br>
<br>
Does anyone have references, either way?<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Helvetica">Alma Swan has published the response of both the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics -- from the discipline with the most and the longest-standing Green OA, near 100% in high energy physics and astrophysics for almost 2 decades: Both publishers report that there is no correlation between Green OA growth and subscriptions: <a href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/261006/">http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/261006/</a></span><div style="font-family:Helvetica">
<br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica">However, in view of the recent, unaccountably publisher-dominated and counterproductive Finch Report <a href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/907-.html">http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/907-.html</a></div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica">I think it is time for the research community (researchers, universities, funders) to stop this needless and self-damaging preoccupation with the protection of publishers' current subscription revenue streams, which are flowing amply in many cases opulently.</div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica">It is not the duty or responsibility of the research community -- which provides publishers with its papers for free and provides peer review for free -- to sacrifice the maximized research access, usage and impact that had been made possible by the online era in order to protect the interests of publishers from natural evolutionary adaptation, at the expense of the interests of research. (I have many times pointed out that this amounts to allowing the publishing tail to wag the research dog: in fact, it is more like letting the flea on the tail of the research dog wag the dog!)</div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica">Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates grow anarchically, paper by paper, institution by institution, not systematically, journal by journal. The most likely reason why journals are not yet feeling any cancelation pressure from Green OA despite the hard economic times globally is that Green OA is still only at about 20% globally, for all disciplines except high energy physics and astrophysics, and in those disciplines the APS and IOP journals are reasonably enough priced that almost all research-active users worldwide are at institutions that can still afford subscription access. </div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica"><br></div><div style="font-family:Helvetica">(Nevertheless, high energy physics is precisely the area where a number of of subscribing institutions are currently experimenting with a joint agreement to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA with a kind of collective "membership" in the SCOAP3 consortium: <a href="http://scoap3.org/">http://scoap3.org/</a> -- a process that there are strong reasons to believe will prove unstable, unscalable and unsustainable: <a href="http://bit.ly/SCOAP3gold">http://bit.ly/SCOAP3gold</a> ).</div>
<div style="font-family:Helvetica"><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Helvetica">But now that the publishing lobby has successfully persuaded the Finch Committee to subordinate the interests of research to the interests of publishers, with the risk that its recommendations will slow or halt the growth of Green OA and Green OA mandates, and instead put OA on the slow, expensive and uncertain track of pre-emptive Gold OA payment, it would seem to be the time for the research community to stop thinking of itself as beholden to do or not do whatever it takes to guarantee the current revenue streams and modus operandi of research journal publishers, come what may:</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Helvetica"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial"><a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/">http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/07/04/why-the-uk-should-not-heed-the-finch-report/</a></span></span></div>
<div><br></div><div>The research community needs to remind itself that research is not funded by the public and conducted by researchers and their institutions as a service to the publishing industry. It is the publishing industry that is selling a service -- the management of peer review -- to the research community. Green OA mandates will ensure that that service is no longer inescapably co-bundled with obsolete products and services (print edition, publisher's PDF, publisher archiving, publisher access-provision) and accessible only to those researchers whose institutions can afford to pay for the whole co-bundled package, in the form of a subscription.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The first step in this healthy realization that the powerful new potential of the online medium to maximize research access, usage and impact is in the research community's own hands is stop obsessing about whether Green OA will have a negative effect on journal revenues: It will, and it should, and journal publishers will adapt to the new downsized reality, when the time comes. And what is needed in order to hasten and ensure this optimal and inevitable transition is Green OA.</div>
<div><br></div><div>What research institutions and funders need to do now is to press on at full speed toward universally mandating Green OA, ignoring completely the perverse and self-destructive recommendations of the Finch Committee, echoing as they do, the familiar self-interested recommendations of the publishing lobby.</div>
<div><br></div><div>And dropping the gratuitous obsession with whether Green OA will have a negative effect on journal revenues: Let's hope it will, as lower journal costs and prices mean less of the research communities scarce funds needlessly diverted from paying for research to for paying publication.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Stevan Harnad</div><div><br></div></div>