The following query has been anonymized:

> Journal [JX] has a useful (but declining) revenue stream
> for the hard copy version. At the moment authors have to wait for 1 year
> before being permitted to put up their published  papers on their own
> website. I'd like to see JX go OA and was hoping that all the UK Research
> Councils would insist on this for any papers published as a result of public
> money distributed in the form of research grants.

At this point in time it makes much more sense for a journal like JX
to (1) go Green on OA self-archiving than to convert to (2) OA Gold
publishing.

(1) Going Green means endorsing immediate author self-archiving (no
embargo).

(2) Going Gold means either

    (2a) making the entire online edition free for all and continuing
    to sell the hard copy edition for subscriptions, as now, or

    (2b) charging an extra fee per article to author-institutions for
    making that article free online (hybrid Gold "Open Choice"), or

    (2c) abandoning the subscription model and the hard copy edition
    entirely, and charging the author-institutions for publishing in
    the online (sole) edition.

Going Green entails some possibility of risk to subscriptions, but that is
unlikely to be significant -- it has not caused detectable cancellations
for the other 62% of journals that are Green, including the physics journals
that have been Green longest (over a decade) and some of whose contents have
been 100% self-archived for years now.

Going Gold via (2a) would be far riskier, and needlessly so, than going
Green (1), because Green OA grows anarchically, article by article,
whereas Gold OA is total and immediate for the journal.

Going hybrid Gold via (2b) would essentially be to make a gratuitous
extra author charge for self-archiving -- a highly retrogressive step
(unless also coupled with going Green), while continuing to sell the
hard copy edition for subscriptions.

And (2c) would be to needlessly jettison the hard copy edition and
subscription revenue for no particular reason.

JX should go Green and then wait to see what happens. Green might
eventually propel all journals to (2c), but it certainly won't do it to
JX alone, nor soon. (Going Green (1) *and* hybrid Gold, (2b), is also a
reasonable option, though you will not have many takers for optional Gold,
with or without mandates, unless the fee is negligibly low.)

> However, I'm told that EPSRC is holding out, for the moment, against OA as
> a result of protests from [Society SX] and [Society SY] that they'll
> be in serious trouble if they lose the revenue stream from their hard
> copy journals (but in the end this is going to happen anyway it seems
> to me ...)

It is not entirely clear why EPSRC is holding out against mandating
Green OA. Whatever the reason, it's a bad and counterproductive one, for
research, and if SX and/or SY are behind it, all three ought to be
ashamed, and it ought to be exposed. In any case, I agree that Green
OA is going to happen anyway.

> Can you confirm that this is the case? Are EPSRC the only refuseniks? What
> about MRC?

Five of the 7 UK research councils have already mandated Green OA
(including the MRC). The only two holdouts are EPSRC and AHRC (and AHRC
are considering adopting a Green OA mandate). EPSRC have instead decided
to wait for the outcome of a long-term "study" of the impact of
mandating Green. (Nonsense, of course, because the only way to study its
effects is to mandate it.)

> As you can imagine UK publicly-funded researchers who want to submit to
> [JX] are more likely to be getting money from EPSRC than any other of
> the Councils so this is the one I really need to know about.

Sorry I don't know any more -- except that there is a chance that the UK
universities may also mandate Green OA (as a few, such as Southampton
and Brunel have already done). In that case, whether or not they are
funded by EPSRC, UK authors will all have to self-archive, no matter
what journal they publish in.

And of course there is also the European ERC Green OA mandate, and
the prospect of more, worldwide.

> Any other insight(s) gratefully received.

My suggestion: Urge JX to go Green (and, optionally, also hybrid/optional
Gold, 2b) and leave it at that for now. Journal embargoes are in any case
easily defeasible by ID/OA mandates (Immediate-Deposit, Optional-Access)
paired with the "Fair Use" Button:

    http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
    http://www.eprints.org/news/features/request_button.php

Stevan Harnad