Group items tagged

Two key paras: "7. Moreover, our modelling shows that Green OA is cheaper. When the UK, or any individual country, individual university or research funder seek to make their research freely accessible and usable they must face the cost of doing so, and cannot reap the benefits of free access until others also move to Open Access. With article publishing charges at £1500, adopting Gold OA would cost the UK universities we studied in our "Going for Gold?" report 12 times the cost of adopting Green OA, and for the more research intensive universities going for Gold could cost 25 times as much as going Green. As article processing fees rise, these multiples rise too. 8. The BIS innovation agenda is best served by Green Open Access, which is affordable now. The Finch study lost focus on this because the composition of the Group meant there was a focus on the needs of the academic world and the publishers that serve that constituency. The expensive 'solution' proposed by Finch does virtually nothing for the innovative business sector."

Peter Suber's overview of the FASTR is clear and to the point. One key clause: "The NIH budget alone is more than six times larger than the budgets of all seven of the UK research councils put together. Hence, it's significant that FASTR disregards or repudiates the gold-oriented RCUK/Finch policy in the UK, and sticks to the FRPAA model of a pure green mandate. For some of the reasons why I think OA mandates should be green and not gold, or green first, see my critique of the RCUK/Finch policy from September 2012. http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/9723075"

The session starts at 11.40 and lasts for just under 1 hour. In his introduction, the Chair John Krebs says "We are not here to question the whole Open Access agenda. We take that as a given. We are not questioning the recommendations of the report. We are very much focused on the current plans for implementation and on the concerns that have been raised with us by various stake-holders which allude to in your written evidence." During the session 4 or 5 peers spoke in addition to Krebs - Rees, Sharpe, Broers, and Winston. All seemed variously well informed, not least Rees who looks to be aware of the concerns of Humanities and Social Sciences societies. Finch gave a confident and calm account of herself and in some ways this 1 hour session in which the ideas of a clever, knowledgeable and research-experienced person are developed under questioning by other clever, knowledgeable and research-experienced people. The full session on 29 January (when RCUK, HEFCE, and David Willetts will give evidence) will be interesting.

Tony Hey, now with Microsoft, was in the thick of things in the UK when the original push for (repository based) OA began, so his very balanced observations on Finch and the RCUK OA policy are particularly germane. Key paragraph: "What should RCUK do now? In my opinion, RCUK could make a very small but significant change in its open access policy and adopt a rights-retention green OA mandate that requires 'RCUK-funded authors to retain certain non-exclusive rights and use them to authorize green OA'. In the words of Peter Suber, this would 'create a standing green option regardless of what publishers decide to offer on their own.' In addition, RCUK should recommend that universities follow the Open Access Policy Guidelines of Harvard, set out by their Office of Scholarly Communication. Under this policy, Harvard authors are required to deposit a full text version of their paper in DASH, the Harvard Open Access Repository even in the case where the publisher does not permit open access and the author has been unable to obtain a waiver from the publisher."

From Poynder's introduction: 'Suber's answers to my ten questions are published below. Personally, what I found noteworthy about them is that - along with most of the interviewees in this series so far - Suber singles out for censure both the Finch Report and the subsequent Research Councils UK (RCUK) OA policy, in which researchers are exhorted to favour gold OA over green OA, and permitted to opt for hybrid OA. Like many OA advocates, Suber also argues that green OA is a more effective and efficient strategy for achieving Open Access than gold OA in the short term. As he puts it, "[I]t's still the case that green scales up faster and less expensively than gold. I want us to work on scaling up gold, developing first-rate OA journals in every field and sustainable ways to pay for them. But that's a long-term project, and we needn't finish it, or even wait another day, before we take the sensible, inexpensive, and overdue step of adopting policies to make our entire research output green OA." He adds, "I still believe that green and gold are complementary, and that in the name of good strategy we should take full advantage of each. From this perspective, my chief disappointment with the RCUK policy is that it doesn't come close to taking full advantage of green."'

Scroll down to get to this letter (it is #4) from several heavyweight academics all or all but one of whom are very heavyweight historians including the current and past presidents of the Royal Historical Society. Starts and ends with statements in favour of Open Access. Three features of the Finch recommendations as acted on by the Government are summarised: 1. inadequate monies for APCs leading to administrators having to create rationing systems; 2. researchers publishing in non-compliant international journals being excluded from REF 2020; 3. short para asserting that CC-BY would seriously undermine the integrity of the work scholars produce.

Abstract: The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the Finch Report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned that there may be some misinterpretation of this work. This short paper sets out the main conclusions of our work, which was designed to explore the overall costs and benefits of Open Access (OA), as well as identify the most cost-effective policy basis for transitioning to OA at national and institutional levels. The main findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not yet anywhere near having reached an OA world. At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of unilaterally adopting Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost.

A. Townsend Peterson, Ada Emmett and Marc Greenberg article in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Excerpt: "By seeking 'author-pays' models as a main means of making OA journals viable, academia creates another problem: a scholarly communication world in which access is open to readers, but not to authors. Academia is globalizing rapidly, with a growing proportion of top researchers working in developing countries. If public monies are to be used to finance shifts to completely OA journals ('Gold' OA systems) via taxpayer subsidy (see, e.g., Finch, 2012), for example, business models will have to be examined carefully to assure that global wealth distribution does not translate into new imbalances in access to scholarly communication. That is, commercial gold OA journals will not necessarily solve this problem for less-prosperous individuals, institutions, or countries. As scholars struggle to open access globally, they must avoid the trap of assuming that all competent authors will have resources for publication charges (or the gumption to request fee waivers), such that some authors with important insights end up effectively excluded from this system."

Open Access Research and the Future for Academic Publishing. PDF of PPT used by Martin Hall, VC of the University of Salford, Chair of OAIG, and member of the Finch Group at 5/2/2013 Westminster Higher Education Forum

Somewhat ill informed attack on "the historians" asserting that the latter's hostility to Finch involved fear of "casting pearls before proles", and that it is the "cost of checking and editing" that has stopped the Internet bringing down the costs of scholarly publishing. [Some of the comments on the piece are interesting.]

Blog post with dialogue in the comments section between the author and Stevan Harnad. Concluding para: "Open Access publishing is itself a complex, and currently controversial, issue. The "Green" versus "Gold" debate, though, is misleading. The imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case has been remade in a recent - excellent - posting by Stuart Shieber, Harvard's Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication."

Videos, text transcripts, and slides from most if not all of the sessions at a two-day Conference organised by the Academy of Social Sciences, sponsored by the THE, Routledge, Wiley Blackwell and SAGE to look at the implementation of the recommendations of the Finch Review for Open Access publishing in the UK.

Interesting to see that the things which appear to be "text transcripts" are in fact edited notes with a lot of bits missed out. I discovered this by looking at my notes and then checking with the (hits less than 100) You Tube videos. I would not mind this if it made it clear that they had been amended, but it doesn't as far as I can see.

The URL points to a DOC file that is the SLSA's thoughtful though slightly "plague on both green and gold" evidence to the House of Commons Select BIS Committee Inquiry into Open Access, written from the perspectives of a learned society that does not publish a journal.