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Lord Krebs's follow-up letter raising 3 sharp points with RCUK about the revised #OpenAccess policy and guidance [PDF]

Cost-effectiveness of open access publications by Jevin West, Theodore Bergstrom and Carl T. Bergstrom. Tool: http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/ Abstract: "Open access publishing has been proposed as one possible solution to the serials crisis | the rapidly growing subscription prices in scholarly journal publishing. However, open access publishing can present economic pitfalls as well, such as excessive publication charges. We discuss the decision that an author faces when choosing to submit to an open access journal. We develop an interactive tool to help authors compare among alternative open access venues and thereby get the most for their publication fees."

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."

Open letter from the editors of over 110 French language journals in the humanities and social sciences to the Minister of Higher Education and Research, the Minister of Culture and Communication, the presidents of universities and grandes écoles, and heads of major research institutions. Opening and closing paras: "We are calling for the urgent opening of dialogue on the issues associated with open access in the humanities and the social sciences. The definition of sufficiently long periods of embargo, allowing journals to choose their economic model (balancing what they offer for free and what they offer for payment), is the only way to guarantee diversity and independence in academic research and public debate." "Consequently, we urgently call for an independent impact assessment to be carried out on these matters. This study should take into account the specificities of the humanities and social sciences and of publications in French. We also expect without delay the opening of a genuine dialogue on these issues between the above-mentioned state actors, researcher organizations, scholarly organizations, the heads of journals in the humanities and social sciences, and editors."

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)

300 page PDF on the Parliament web site, with nearly 70 responses including from Government (David Willetts), funders, publishers, individuals with knowledge of the field, learned societies, universities.

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)."

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.

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.

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.

Useful, broad, measured perspective from Felice Levine with a focus on how the OA position might develop in the US "The best current intelligence for where we are in the US is that the US Federal Government is not likely to issue a narrowly tailored policy on OA which would constrain or define business models. It is clear about the value of OA but it has not mandated particular models of OA. Will there be arrogance from US journals towards non-US scholars and their need for OA? The current model (and the AERA parallels most learned societies) provides toll-free links to authors' webpages and institutional archives of publications and online-first publication. If this does not satisfy the requirements, then the author-fee option is still there."

Ross Mounce is a final year PhD Student at the University of Bath & Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow. His well-linked response to the Inquiry has a pragmatic and sensible feel, though he down-plays the impact on learned societies of loss of income, and wrongly reduces their outreach work to "perks".

Piece in Nature about the "Episciences Project" which, with money from the French Government aims to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. See also Tim Gowers on the subject: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/

Tony moved from a senior role in the University of Southampton to a senior role in Microsoft in 2005. Prior to moving he'd presciently coined the memorable term Data Deluge. Over the last few weeks he's been writing a lucid mutli-part series about the journey to open access - essentially from Arxiv, via ePrints and Dspace to Green to..... We do not know yet. This is a link to Part 3.

Science blog post in The Guardian by Mike Taylor which responds to the the arguments that are used to justify the conventional publishing model, under the strap-line "As a scientist you job is to bring new knowledge into the world. Hiding it behind a journal's paywall is unacceptable"

A Harvard Berkman Centre project to track and tag all things Open Access (and not just OA scholarly publishing) with Peter Suber the "ideas guy". Uses TagTeam, an open-source RSS (and atom) aggregator.