<div>** Cross-Posted **</div><div><br></div>On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Frederick Friend <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk" target="_blank">ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<div><br><div class="gmail_quote">
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<div>Is it not amazing how, even in these difficult economic times, governments
can find extra cash to smooth over the mistakes in their own policies! The extra
£10 million for 30 UK universities to pay APCs to publishers is a political
gesture to counter the opposition to the UK Government’s mistaken endorsement of
the Finch Report proposals. Never mind that the money could have been spent far
more effectively in supporting open access repositories! Never mind that the
effect will be inflationary, enabling publishers to raise the level of charge
for APCs! Never mind that the UK Government made exactly the same mistake 25
years ago in giving university libraries £10 million to pay for the higher cost
of journal subscriptions, generosity which only poured petrol on the flames of
journal inflation and within a couple of years left libraries no better off!
Never mind that the UK Government has not thought through what to do when the
£10 million is used up and we are left with a publisher-led open access
infrastructure costing the UK taxpayer much more than an improved repository OA
infrastructure would do! In brief this extra money is a short-term gesture still
leaving the UK open access infrastructure worse off then it was pre-Finch.
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<div>For the UK Government announcement see <a href="http://news.bis.gov.uk/Press-Releases/Government-invests-10-million-to-help-universities-move-to-open-access-67fac.aspx" target="_blank"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt" color="#0000ff">http://news.bis.gov.uk/Press-Releases/Government-invests-10-million-to-help-universities-move-to-open-access-67fac.aspx</font></a>
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<div>Fred Friend</div>
<div>Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL</div>
<div><a href="http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk" target="_blank">http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk</a>
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</blockquote></div><br></div><div>Fred is so right.</div><div><br></div><div><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">At first, researchers will applaud: "More money for us [sort of]! Hurrah!"</span><br style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
<br style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Then they will think: "But that money could have been spent on funding more research, of which there is already too little to go round…."</span><br style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
<br style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">And then they will realize that:</span><blockquote style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
- they are being steered toward journals they don't want to publish in, <br><br>- forced to pay for an OA that they could have had with just a few gratis Green keystrokes, <br><br>- forced to reach into their grants (or pockets!) when the 10M pounds run out, <br>
<br>(since the UK, although it produces only 6% of the articles published annually worldwide, produces a lot more than what 10M will pay for at 1K per paper for Gold OA publishing fees: do the arithmetic, even assuming that the world only publishes a million refereed research journal papers per year, and then see how far £10M takes you for the UK's 60,000 papers at (say) £1K for Gold OA fees per paper: an order of magnitude shortfall)<br>
<br>- and not only that they are gaining no more OA to the other 94% of research from the rest of the world, to which they need OA,<br><br>- but that the UK's shift from mandating cost-free Green OA self-archiving to paying publishers extra for pricey Gold OA <br>
<br>is actually making it harder for the rest of the world to mandate and provide the cost-free Green OA that everyone needs...</blockquote><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The BIS's largesse would just be another case of (mostly) wasted funds (which should not be our main concern) if it weren't coupled with the completely gratuitous and self-injurious undermining of a virtually cost-free means of achieving the same local end -- and also achieving far more, globally, in an affordable, scaleable and sustainable way.</span><br style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
<br style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">But all of this would be fixed, if one 9-word clause were expunged from the new RCUK OA policy: the one forcing researchers to choose Gold over Green. For then this BIS largesse would just be a hand-out to pay for Gold OA (voluntarily) for 1000 UK research papers: 1/60th of the UK's annual research output.</span></div>
<div><a href="http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/930-Simple-9-Word-Strike-Out-Tweak-to-Fix-RCUK-Open-Access-Mandate.html">http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/930-Simple-9-Word-Strike-Out-Tweak-to-Fix-RCUK-Open-Access-Mandate.html</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>I will be discussing this (and how to make Green OA mandates more effective) in Oxford on Tuesday:</div><div><a href="http://digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk/programme/tues-am-keynote">http://digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk/programme/tues-am-keynote</a><br style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">
<br style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span style="color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Stevan Harnad</span></div>
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