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On 28 June 2013 15:38, Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
This is not double payment. It's just payment. If the Gold OA publishers did not exist, then there would be more closed access / subscription journals than there are now, and you would be paying more / higher subscription fees.

That's a guess. 

A journal's production costs are a function of:

a) how many submissions they process
b) how many articles they publish

If you didn't have Gold OA, then all of those submissions / published articles would have to go somewhere. And the journals/publishers taking on that work would look to recoup their costs via the mechanisms that are open to them - namely subscriptions and pay-per-view.

Even as it stands, the growth of subscription based content (3 - 4%) outstrips the percentage of hybrid gold publications (1%), hence journal price rises.
http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/no-double-dipping-policy

It may be something of a guess, but it's really not a bad one.

You can't assess the potential for double-dipping based on the amount of Gold OA articles that are published. In fact, it's probably not helpful to even think consider double-dipping at all.

Double-dipping refers only to hybrid Fools-Gold (subscriptions + Fools-Gold). I doubt there's much uptake yet, but it's certainly not true that it's not worth "considering": It's worth very closely monitoring.

Double-dipping refers to paying both subscriptions fees AND APCs for the *same* articles. It would be worth monitoring, if it was possible to do so. It's kind of hard to prove though, and less relevant than the overall cost of scholarly communication.
  
For a hybrid journal, there is a simpler point of comparison - APC vs average subscription revenue for closed access articles. Regardless of where the journal is positioned in the market, you would expect these should be roughly equivalent, or slightly favouring the APC.

I think you are very mistaken!

The hybrid-Gold publisher sets the price per article for their hybrid-Gold APC articles, and you can be sure they set APCs to ensure that their total revenue does not shrink. Unless they keep adjusting either the subscription price or the APC to keep the Fools Gold APC from increasing their revenue, they are double-dipping (since the APCs are over and above the subscription income, which is uncancelled and uncancellable -- until we have universal Green OA).

Other things being equal (i.e. setting aside the debate about whether the costs of scholarly communication are fair for minute), if a publisher is increasing the amount of articles they publish - and they are increasing by 4% per year - then you should expect the total revenue to increase (irrespective of whether that is from APCs or subscription). That's not double-dipping.

As I said, the best measure of whether a hybrid publisher's APC and subscription revenue is balanced is to compare the average APC per open article to the average subscription revenue per closed article.
  
If there were 100% Gold OA -- whether Fools Gold or Fair Gold -- I would not be bothering with any of this, because my goal, as a researcher, is to solve the research accessibility problem (which OA solves), not to solve the journal affordability problem (which Green OA would solve).

The Finch report and RCUK policies are a commitment to 100% OA in the UK - preferably, but not exclusively, Gold, So surely, there are (globally) higher priorities than OA policy in the UK?

Or we could find out that despite all expectations, nothing much happens to nothing much happens to subscription costs (because primary links are still to the publisher's site, etc.) - in which case, nothing much changes.

It is definitely a possibility (though I think an unlikely one) that universal mandatory Green OA will only solve the research accessibility problem, but not the journal affordability problem:

It's only a partial solution to the research accessibility problem. It doesn't (adequately) address immediacy, re-use or text mining, which in itself will continue to hold back research.

PS My pejorative term "Fools-Gold" obviously only refers to paid-Gold, not to that vast-majority of Gold OA journals that do not charge APCs at all, but subsist instead on subscriptions or subsidy. Alas those free-Gold journals are not among the must-have journals that this is all about. (Keep that in mind too.)

The only publication that I know of like that is D-Lib, which does not undertake peer-review. How many free Gold, peer reviewed journals are there?