On 2012-08-05, Stella Dutton on LIBLICENSE wrote:
> ... insisting on 'green' open access before 'gold' can
> be considered is at the very least like opening the parachute a split
> second before hitting the ground. The only thing I would add is that
> most publishers don't believe that they will be handed the parachute!
Green OA and Green OA mandates don't grow systematically. journal
by journal, but anarchically, author by author, institution by institution,
funder by funder.
Hence the transition from today's 20% OA to 100% OA will be gradual,
not all of a sudden, "a split second before hitting the ground."
Moreover, it is not even evident whether having the Green OA version
-- the author's peer-reviewed final draft -- freely accessible to all users
will be adequate enough for users' needs to induce cancelations and
make subscriptions unsustainable.
The only thing that is evident is that OA is beneficial to research and
researchers, that mandating Green OA will provide it, and that it is
already long, long overdue.
So it is evident that institutions and funders should all mandate
Green OA.
As to Gold OA, publishers are certainly free to convert now, if they
wish, but if I were a subscription publisher I would not do it while
there is still a sustainable demand for subscriptions. I would just
offer hybrid Gold OA and plan and prepare for the inevitable,
which is that one day there may no longer be a demand for my print
edition, nor for my online edition, nor for my copy-editing services,
nor for any other products or services other than the management
of peer review, its outcome certified by my journal title.
Managing peer review is not without cost. I would budget out
exactly what the true cost of managing peer review amounts to,
factoring out all other costs.
And I would prepare for the possibility that once global Green
OA is at or near 100%, subscriptions may become unsustainable,
so I may have to phase out all obsolete products and services
for which there is no longer any demand, and downsize to just
providing the service of peer review management.
Publishing will adapt, of course, but it will be the survival of the
fittest: those who planned and executed their downsizing at the
right time. which will probably be gradually, with obsolescent
products and services and their associated costs phased out
gradually under growing cancellation pressure under pressure
from the availability of Green OA.
One of the benefits of having cancellation pressure lead in
driving the downsizing is that it also releases the institutional
subscription savings to be used to pay for Gold OA once the
journal decides it's time to make the transition.
And ask yourself also what the "parachute" argument implies:
Are institutions, while they are still paying for subscriptions,
also supposed to pay extra for hybrid Gold OA (out of scarce
research funds) in the hope that publishers will make good on
their promise to lower subscription costs in proportion to rising
Gold OA revenues?
That's not a realistic solution, because it puts all the risk and cost
on the research community in order to protect the publishing
community from risk and cost. And, worse, it keeps denying the
research community the OA it wants and needs, restricting it to
just the Gold OA it can afford to buy today by redirecting its scarce
research funds.
No, it is evident that it is not for the research community to
keep denying itself OA and to dip into its dwindling research
resources to buy what Gold OA can afford when their option
is to mandate Green OA and provide 100% OA, now, at no
extra cost.
Subscriptions are the rub: While they are still being paid,
either institutions do without OA or they have to pay even
more, on top of subscriptions, for Gold OA. There's no quid
pro quo, because institutions subscribe to entire journals,
collectively, whereas authors publish individual articles,
singly. So the money to pay extra for Gold OA, now, must
come from elsewhere than what is already being paid for
subscriptions.
Some publishers have proposed that authors from subscribing
institutions be given Gold OA at no added cost, but that doesn't
scale. For if most of a journal's author-institutions are subscribers
it amounts to converting institutional subscriptions to Gold
"memberships," which can (and will) soon be cancelled,
once a journal is 100% or near-100% Gold. Alternatively,
if many of the institutions of a journal's authors are not
subscribers then the journal risks losing its authors.
And this is all without mentioning that it may be that
most of journals' current products and services today,
as well as their associated costs, will no longer be necessary
in the OA era, hence there is no reason to try to ensure that
current total subscription revenues and are locked in, come
what may:
Green OA pressure itself will be the way to induce the
requisite downsizing as well as releasing the money to
pay for the essentials after the transition.
> The idea that gold can only be entertained after green has made
> subscriptions unsustainable is simply not practical . At what stage
> are subs considered unsustainable? Who makes that judgement? How many
> journals would wither away before the gold route would be allowed.
The market will decide. But what research and researchers need
now is 100% OA, not a continuing wait for Gold, on publishers'
terms.
> Publishers simply cannot see the way through with a green only route.
No one is proposing a Green-only route:
Green OA should be universally mandated by institutions and funders *and*
pre-emptive Gold OA can be paid from whatever spare cash institutions and
funders have available.
But the crucial world is *and* -- rather than "instead* of mandating Green OA.
> All the processes involved in vetting and disseminating research
> papers have costs associated with them which some way or other have to
> be picked up.
Vetting is the peer review management. Dissemination is another matter,
and once Green OA has prevailed globally, all of dissemination's associated
process and their costs will have been offloaded onto the global network of
Green OA Institutional Repositories. Hence dissemination costs no longer
need to be picked up.
> Most publishers support the gold route because it
> allows them to transition in a planned and gradual way from one system
> where the reader picks up the cost to another system where the author
> does.
Yes, but what gets lost in that long gradual transition, if it ever takes place, is
all the OA that is still being lost daily today, year after year, while waiting and
waiting and waiting.
And since institutional subscriptions are being paid today, the only way to
pay for Gold OA is to pay still more. And all that, not in order to preserve
publishing, but in order to preserve publishing's current revenue streams,
and the products and services they pay for, whether or not they are still
needed -- or would be, if universal Green OA were being provided.
No, the "parachute" argument is no justification for lobbying against
Green OA mandates.
> Evolution rather than revolution tends to be less risky for
> all, and I'm talking about less risky for science here not just
> publishers.
Mandating Green OA is part of evolution, and so is publishers
adapting to it.
Lobbying funders and governments not to mandate Green OA is
the attempt to prevent evolution and lock in the status quo.
> At the BMJ , we had an experiment for several years where
> our papers were entirely free, as another publisher said to me the
> 'nobody pays' business model. It was no surprise to me that our subs
> income fell significantly. Subsequently, we introduced access controls
> for our non research papers material and we have now introduced an
> author pays model for research papers. So, I feel that in a way we
> have sort of done the green only route, proved it didn't work and have
> now introduced gold.
No, BMJ did not do the Green only route. It did a premature Gold route,
by making all of its articles Gold OA, pre-emptively.
(Gold OA does not necessarily mean author-pays: it just means the journal
provides the OA.)
As I said, Green OA grows gradually and anarchically, by the individual
article, not abruptly and all-or-none, by the journal: *That's* what's more
like jumping prematurely and waiting to pull the parachute cord
"a split second before hitting the ground."
A journal converting to pure-Gold OA is still risky today, even with
author-fees. BMJ's doing it for free was a rather a very generous but
also a very risky (and doomed) policy (as I very consciously thought at the time).
Now BMJ has reverted to hybrid Gold OA, which is fine -- as long as BMJ remains
Green on author self-archiving (and does not lobby against Green OA mandates).
That will let evolution follow its natural course in the online era, toward
the universal OA era.
Journals will adapt. (But it's already time to start planning for the
downward descent.
Stevan Harnad
>
> Stella Dutton
> Chief Executive Officer
> BMJ Publishing Group Limited
> BMA House
> Tavistock Square
> London WC1H 9JR
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