Group items tagged

A tersely expressed rationale for the "Green first, Gold next" approach. Excerpt: "...once OA becomes universally mandatory, Green OA will make subscriptions unsustainable, and journals will have to cut costs, downsize, and find another source of revenue to cover the remaining costs -- and that other source of revenue will be Gold OA APCs, per paper submitted for peer review, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid out of portion of each institution's annual windfall savings from the subscription-cancellations induced by universal Green OA. That will be affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (as compared to today's Fool's Gold OA, double-paid alongside subscriptions at an absurdly inflated price)."

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."'

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.

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."

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."

Peter Coles (Head of Sussex University's School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences) blogging in a personal capacity comments on the RCUK policy, and on what could/should be done with the block grant. Excerpts: "Yesterday I was informed of the allocation of funds for Open Access to the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex arising from these block grants. The cash sum involved is too small to pay for Gold Open Access for more than a handful of papers produced within the School, so difficult decisions would have to be made about who is allowed to pay the Author Processing Charges if this pot of money is used in the way RCUK envisages." and "Even if I could force myself to grit my teeth and agree to fork out out the money in APCs to the Academic Publishing Racketeers, I can't think of any sensible basis for deciding which papers should be published this way and which shouldn't. In any case, at least in particle physics and astronomy, most papers are compliant with the RCUK policy anyway because they are placed on the arXiv. I therefore propose not to pay out a single penny of the RCUK OA funds for Gold Open Access, but simply to donate the entire sum as a contribution to the running costs of the arXiv."

Suber highlights the many misconceptions about Gold OA and APCs. Excerpt: "The survey definition of gold OA leaves two false and harmful impressions: first that all (or even most) OA journals charge APCs, and second, that all (or even most) APCs are paid by authors. But most OA journals charge no APCs, and most authors even at those APC-charging journals don't pay them. In fact, only 3.7% of authors who publish in OA journals overall (12% of 31%) pay APCs. I've been complaining since 2006 about interviews and surveys that misinform their subjects, on just this point, before questioning them. http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4391309 In my book (Open Access, MIT Press, 2012, p. 140) I put it this way: "The false belief that most OA journals charge author-side fees also infects studies in which authors misinform survey subjects before surveying them. In effect: 'At OA journals, authors pay to be published; now let me ask you a series of questions about your attitude toward OA journals.'" http://bit.ly/oa-book "

Key points: * OASPA recognizes the interests of funders in seeking to maximize access to the results of research funded under their programmes. * OASPA supports the RCUK policy support for gold open access as the preferred model, with additional funds being made available. * OASPA supports the RCUK policy requirement for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) Licence to be used where Research Council funds are used to meet a gold open access fee. * The APC levels per article that are assumed by the RCUK policy following the Report by the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, are reasonable and in line with the experiences of open access publishers. * Infrastructural challenges exist (e.g. payment mechanisms), and are being addressed by the necessary stakeholders. OASPA is committed to engaging actively with stakeholders to resolve these.

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."

Conclusions: * RCUK must clarify its policy guidance to reflect its incremental approach to compliance in the initial five-year implementation phase of its open access policy; * RCUK must monitor the effects of its open access policy and its Autumn 2014 review of the policy should consider 6 key points relating to embargo periods, the case for gold; APCs and their impact; impact on Q of peer review; impact on R collaboration; impact on learned societies. * The Government should conduct a full cost-benefit analysis of the policy, in view of their stated preference for gold open access; and * The Government should review the effectiveness of RCUK's consultation regarding this significant change in policy. (RCUK holding response: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2013news/Pages/130222.aspx indicates that RCUK will shortly be issuing revised guidance on its policy.)

Review/critique by Stevan Harnad of article by Edinburgh University's Open Scholarship Development Officer in Ariadne 70 "Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs" (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/andrew)

Media release that starts as follows: Jisc Collections, the UK academic community's shared service for content licensing and administration, has entered into an agreement with Open Access Key (OAK), the online payment platform for open access publishing, to run a 12 month pilot project, Jisc APC, to test its role in managing and processing Gold OA article payment charges made by its member institutions.

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"

Whether or not you agree with any or all of it, this superbly written 5 page PDF by Colin Jones and Peter Mandler provides a coherent and very comprehensive summary of H&SS concerns about current OA policy in the UK, and its impact. The nine aspects covered are: the gold question; green issues; publishers' business models; universities and gold/green; universities as publication gatekeepers; a way out of rationing; freedom to publish; internationalisation. All set against a backdrop of RHS reiterating its "strong support for widening access to publicly-funded academic work, in forms that sustain peer review and high-quality editorial work."

Interesting blog post by Stephen Curry from the 25/2/2013 Royal Society's conference "Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research". Excerpt (but the post has a broader focus than this): " I would like to hear more from advocates of a transition based only on green OA mandates on exactly how the ultimate switch to gold OA can be made from the melee of subscription cancellations that they reckon will be the inevitable consequence of the success of their approach, particularly since green OA depends on compliance from the companies and learned societies that will suffer short-term financial losses. The transition problem, whatever the route plotted through it, remains a tough nut to crack. No-one I spoke to at Monday's meeting had a clear idea of how it would occur. We are on an experimental journey feeling our way more or less blindly - a source of occasional but considerable frustration. "

Jeffrey Beall highlights IEEE's announcement "IEEE has just announced that it will be starting a new gold open-access mega-journal to be called IEEE Access. In launching the journal, the publisher has also coined a new term for the journal's genre: Multidisciplinary Open AccessMega Journal (MOAMJ)."

An attack on what the author sees as a ham-fisted ad-hoc bit of policy-making and policy-adjustment. Excerpt: "... unilateral gold open access is the knowledge economy equivalent of saying: "We will build a high-speed rail network across the country but only use the existing horse and cart owners to provide services"; it simply reproduces the model of commercial print journals in another medium." "A true investment in openness as a defining principle of the advancement of knowledge requires us to think in a completely different way about a new Enlightenment, illuminated by the possibilities of digital technology, rather than reinscribing the rights of vested interests."

Google's "Policy by the Numbers" blog has this coherent summary of the argument for author self archiving rather than Gold. Written by Andrew Adams (Professor of Information Ethics in the Graduate School of Business Administration and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics at Meiji University in Tokyo). An earlier "Policy By the Numbers" post by Andrew Adams "Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Why It Matters" is at http://policybythenumbers.blogspot.com/2012/12/open-access-to-scholarly-literature-and.html.