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--></style><title>Re: [SCHOLCOMM] OA Overview January
2017</title></head><body>
<div>Great to have this good summary of your overall argument about
OA. I'm copying it into a Word file and keeping it in my database of
valuable resources! :)</div>
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<div>Happy New Year!</div>
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<div>At 7:13 AM -0500 1/9/17, Stevan Harnad wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 5:30 AM, David
Prosser <<a
href="mailto:david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk">david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk</a>>
wrote:</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote><b>SH:</b> (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 <i>in</i> the research output
of <i>other</i> 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.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote><b>DP:</b> So, when UCL (say) purchases access to Elsevier
articles through ScienceDIrect (say) Elsevier removes all of the UCL
articles from the bundle and prices accordingly? Of course not.
The institution is purchasing articles by researchers across the
world's,<i> including</i> its own.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>To repeat: UCL (and everyone) has their
own article output. Getting access to their own article output is not
why researchers publish, nor why institutions subscribe to journals.
It is to get access to the articles of others.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>So that version of the simplistic
double-payment plaint is, and remains, invalid. (And it, and its
(il)logic predates OA by at least a decade.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> <br>
<blockquote><b>DP:</b> SBut I agree with (12)<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>But (12) is about OA, not the old
double-payment argument against subscriptions (which, by the way, if
it had been valid would also have applied to royalty-based output,
including the institutional purchase of books by its own authors!).
The essence of the case for OA is and has always been that (refereed)
research is an author<i> giveaway</i>, written only for researcher
uptake, usage and impact, not for royalty revenue. We keep forgetting
this, with this misleading notion of "double-payment" (for
subscription access).</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>There is certainly double-payment in the
case of OA (subscription plus Fool's Gold publication fees) as well as
double-dipping (in the case of hybrid Fool's Gold). But that is not at
all the kind of double-payment that the old argument against
subscriptions was (and is) about.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Stevan Harnad (tilling other fields, but
not asleep)</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> On 6 Jan 2017, at 13:22, Stevan
Harnad <<a
href="mailto:amsciforum@GMAIL.COM">amsciforum@GMAIL.COM</a>>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>
<blockquote>(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).<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>(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 <i>in</i> the research output
of <i>other</i> 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.<br>
<br>
(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) <i>all</i> researchers at <i>all</i> the
institutions that produce <i>all</i> research output (who
lose <i>all</i> those of their would-be users who are at
non-subscribing institutions for any given journal) and
(ii) <i>all</i> researchers at <i>all</i> the
non-subscribing institutions for any given journal, who lose access to
all non-subscribed research.</blockquote>
<blockquote><br>
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).<br>
<br>
The solution is very clear, and has been clear for close to 30 years
now (but not reached - nor even grasped by most):<br>
<br>
(4) <i>Peer-reviewed research should be freely accessible to all
its users</i>. 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.<br>
<br>
(5) The only non-obsolete service that peer-reviewed journals still
perform in the online era is <i>peer review itself</i> (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!<br>
<br>
(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.<br>
<br>
(7) Now comes open access publishing ("Gold OA") - which is not
- repeat <i>not</i> - what I have just described in
(6)!<br>
<br>
(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!).<br>
<br>
(9) And there is another "double" here in some cases, because
sometimes the S-journal and the FG-journal are the <i>same
journal</i>: 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.<br>
<br>
(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.<br>
<br>
(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.<br>
<br>
(12) Yet there is another way that OA can be provided, instead of via
Fools Gold OA and that is via <i>Green
OA</i> self-archiving, by their own authors, of all refereed,
accepted, published papers, in their own institution's Green OA <a
href="http://roar.eprints.org/">Institutional Repositories</a>.<br>
<br>
(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.</blockquote>
<blockquote><br>
(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 <a
href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/">mandate OA</a> -- so
publishers decided to embargo Green OA for at least a year from
publication, offering Fool's Gold OA instead.<br>
<br>
(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 <a
href="https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/">scam FG journals</a>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.<br>
<br>
(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 <a
href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268511/">"Copy Request"
Button</a> , and a few <a
href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/94/">institutions</a> and <a
href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/362/">funders</a> are sensibly
using the eligibility rules for research evaluation as the
carrot/stick to ensure compliance with the mandate. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
So let their librarians keep whinging incoherently about
"double-payment" for yet another decade of lost research access and
impactŠ<br>
<br>
Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and
Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James
O'Donnell (Eds.) <i>Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A
Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing</i>. Washington, DC.,
Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. <a
href="http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html">
http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html</a><br>
<br>
<u>______</u> . (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of
Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. <i>D-Lib
Magazine</i> 16 (7/8). <a
href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/"
>http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/</a><br>
<br>
<u>______</u> (2014) The only way to make inflated journal
subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access. <i>LSE
Impact of Social Sciences Blog</i> 4/28 <a
href=
"http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/"><span
></span
>http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-su<span
></span>bscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/</a><br>
<br>
<u>______</u> (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When, How and Why.
In: <i>Ethics, Science, Technology, and Engineering: An
International Resource</i> eds. J. Britt Holbrook & Carl
Mitcham, (2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and
Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan Reference) <a
href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/361704/">
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/361704/</a><br>
<br>
<u>______</u> (2015) Optimizing Open Access Policy. <i>The
Serials Librarian</i>, 69(2), 133-141 <a
href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/381526/"
>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/381526/</a> <br>
<br>
<u>______</u> (2016) <i>Open Access Archivangelist:
The Last Interview</i>? CEON Otwarta Nauka (Open Science), Summer
Issue <a
href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/398024/"
>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/398024/</a><br>
<br>
Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2014)
Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button.
In: <i>Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture
Online</i> (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.) <a
href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/"
>http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/</a><br>
<br>
Swan, A; Gargouri, Y; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, S (2015) Open Access
Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3
Report. <a
href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/"
>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/</a></blockquote>
<blockquote><br>
Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine,
Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2016) <i>Estimating Open
Access Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA Score.</i> Journal of
the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 67(11)
2815-2828 <a
href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/"
>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/</a></blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>Sanford G. Thatcher<br>
Frisco, TX 75034-5514<br>
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu<br>
<br>
<br>
"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John
Ruskin (1865)<br>
<br>
"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few
people who can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)<br>
<br>
"Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance
with the limitations and incapacities of the human
misunderstanding."-Ambrose Bierce (1906)<br>
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