tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post7302510213703768060..comments2024-03-17T08:30:21.129+00:00Comments on Open and Shut?: Open Access: A Tale of Two TablesRichard Poynderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-22477809163990310062013-02-22T13:30:55.627+00:002013-02-22T13:30:55.627+00:00PUBLISHERS OFFERING HYBRID GOLD WITHOUT ALLOWING I...<b>PUBLISHERS OFFERING HYBRID GOLD WITHOUT ALLOWING IMMEDIATE, UN-EMBARGOED GREEN IS EXTORTION</b><br /><br />@Steve Hitchcock<br /><br />RCUK allowing hybrid Gold payment only if the publisher allows the Green option within the RCUK 6-12-24+ embargo limits is no solution for the perverse effects of the new RCUK policy. <br /><br />The only solution is for RCUK to <i>allow hybrid Gold payment only if the publisher allows an immediate un-embargoed Green option</i> -- and RCUK must leave the <i>choice between Green or Gold options completely up to the author</i> (no "preference," no "decision tree").<br /><br />A subscription publisher that pits paid hybrid Gold against embargoed Green is practicing extortion, with or without the help of RCUK's perverse policy.<br /><br />Embargoes are a complicated story that will soon have to be told forthrightly. <br /><br />Publishers embargo green under the pretext that it's the only way to protect themselves from sure ruin. <br /><br />That is utter nonsense, of course. <br /><br />What embargoes really do is to delay -- i.e. embargo -- the natural, inevitable evolution from subscription publishing to Fair-Gold OA publishing, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price by "protecting" double-payment at today's grotesquely inflated Fool's-Gold price.<br /><br />Embargoes embargo both OA and Fair Gold, in order to lock in current subscription revenues and Fool's Gold.<br /><br />Think about it….<br /><br />But the compromise of an immediate-deposit/optional-access (ID/OA) mandate (in which deposit must be immediate but access to the deposit may be embargoed) not only provides a basic one-size-fits-all mandate for universal adoption, but it will also ensure that publishers will be unable to embargo the optimal and inevitable outcome for researchers much longer.<br /><br />Whatever else it does, RCUK should immediately and unambiguously adopt (and ensure compliance with) an ID/OA mandate.<br />Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-81731855725824585382013-02-22T11:13:48.468+00:002013-02-22T11:13:48.468+00:00One simple way around the issue of the encourageme...One simple way around the issue of the encouragement by policy towards expensive hybrid OA journals and extended green embargoes is for policy makers preferring gold and prepared to pay hybrid OA fees to require those hybrid journals are also green within the terms of the policy, i.e. within the policy embargo.<br /><br />It is argued that green OA has not impacted on subscription fees because you can't know in advance which papers within journals will become OA, so you have to continue to subscribe. The same is true for hybrid OA journals, which being based on existing value-adding infrastructure makes them not only the most expensive route to OA but also makes them ripe for 'double-dipping' of OA fees and subscriptions. Requiring that hybrid journals are green would place a constraint on the possibility of exploitation of high OA fees and double dipping.<br /><br />Hybrid OA tends to be associated with gold, because it provides open access to selected papers based on fees to provide OA. But these journals are not gold, and it is even potentially misleading to call them hybrid-gold. Instead, better for OA, and clearer terminology, would be to require them to be hybrid-green.Steve Hitchcockhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14378552773631189957noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-14112924571527769632013-02-21T18:46:20.896+00:002013-02-21T18:46:20.896+00:00SOWING DISCORD -- OR THE GREEN SEEDS FOR A GOLDEN ...<b>SOWING DISCORD -- OR THE GREEN SEEDS FOR A GOLDEN HARVEST?</b> (2nd of 2)<br /><br /><b>3. RP:</b><i> "the SPARC table could be taken to imply that the Wellcome Trust only supports Green OA"</i><br /><br />The Wellcome policy allows either Green or Gold,<br /><br />But, without announcing it explicitly, and without placing any pressure on authors, Wellcome too prefers Gold (and most of the OA that is generated by its policy is Gold OA). This is no coincidence, for the new UK policy was strongly influenced by, and to a great extent modelled upon, the Wellcome policy.<br /><br />Wellcome gets the historic credit for having been the first funder in the world to mandate OA. (They did it before NIH.) But the Wellcome policy is deeply flawed and was for several years ineffective because compliance was in no way monitored and there were no consequences for noncompliance. <br /><br />Now, both NIH and Wellcome monitor compliance: funding may not be provided or renewed if fundees fail to comply. But NIH still only mandates Green, whereas Wellcome, a private charity, has adopted the (simplistic) maxim that "Publication costs are part of research costs (1.5%) and a research funder should be prepared to pay them."<br /><br />That is Wellcome's rationale for (implicitly) preferring Gold: "We fund the research: we're ready to pay its publication costs too."<br /><br />The trouble is that most research publication is still subscription based. And institutions still have to pay those subscription costs, so their users can access the research. Wellcome is not offering to pay for that: just for the Gold OA costs of publishing the research Wellcome funds. Subscription journals are happy to take the extra Wellcome money, and duly offer a hybrid Gold choice for any author who wants to pay for it -- but they also continue to collect subscriptions, and institutions continue to have to pay for them. So Wellcome is merely subsidizing a 1.5% double-payment to publishers in exchange for Gold OA.<br /><br />This absurd subsidy to publishers is fine when offered by a private funder that has nothing to spend its money on other than research (98.5%) and its publication (1.5%).<br /><br />But this simplistic formula doesn't work for the UK (or any) government, or any public research funder. For unlike private charities, governments are using tax-payer money not only to pay for research (100%), but also to pay for journal subscriptions (100%). Hence if they foolishly elect to pay publishers even more -- 100% for subscriptions plus 1.5% more for Gold OA -- they are throwing taxpayer money away to double-pay publishing costs that they are already paying via subscriptions.<br /><br />Hence, paradoxically, the very first funder to mandate OA, the Wellcome Trust, is definitely not the model to follow. Yet the UK has now done just that, adding to the Wellcome Trust's generosity to publishers an explicit preferential pressure on UK authors, with perverse consequences for the UK as well as the rest of the world.<br /><br />(For a clear grasp of the contingencies, complementarity, and time-course of Green and Gold OA, the reader could do no better than to consult Houghton & Swan's "Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest": http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january13/houghton/01houghton.html )Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-70644076697787200822013-02-21T18:42:33.091+00:002013-02-21T18:42:33.091+00:00SOWING DISCORD -- OR THE GREEN SEEDS FOR A GOLDEN ...<b>SOWING DISCORD -- OR THE GREEN SEEDS FOR A GOLDEN HARVEST?</b> (1st of 2)<br /><br />Another excellent, timely, comprehensive overview of OA goings-on by Richard Poynder.<br /><br />Three comments:<br /><br /><b>1. RP:</b><i> "Some would argue that the US has long been the natural leader of the OA movement, a leadership role it could be said to have acquired in 2005 [with] the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) [Green OA mandate]"</i><br /><br />I for one would not say the the US has been the leader of the worldwide OA movement (though it is certainly naturally placed to do so): The historic leader to date has been the UK. The world's first Green OA repository software was created in the UK (2000); the world's first Green OA mandate was adopted in the UK (2003); the UK parliamentary Select Committee was the first in the world to recommend that all institutions and funders mandate Green OA (2004); all of the UK's research funding councils (RCUK) have mandated OA (2006-2011) and the UK today has more funder (16) and institutional (25) Green OA mandates than any other country in the world. <br /><br />(The US is second with 4 funder mandates and 19 institutional mandates. Little Finland leads in institutional mandates with 28; it has no funder mandates, but with all Finnish universities mandated, it hardly needs them!)<br /><br />It is only now, with its flawed BIS/Finch/RCUK Gold-Preferential policy that the UK has lost its worldwide lead: In fact, as shown by the SPARC Europe Table, all other countries are now following the path that the UK pioneered in 2003-2004: the only country not following the UK's historic lead now is the UK itself!<br /><br />But the good news is that the UK's lead can easily be regained, if the UK simply drops its gratuitous preference for Gold and throws its full weight behind implementing an effectively verified Green OA mandate, leaving the option of publishing and paying for Gold as purely a matter of author choice. <br /><br /><b>2. RP:</b><i> "Green does usually mean a delay before OA is provided… usually... an embargo period of anything between 6 months and three or more years — a delay intended to allow the publisher to recoup the costs it incurred in publishing the paper."</i><br /><br />This too is one of the unanticipated negative consequences of the new RCUK OA policy. It is not true that Green OA means delayed/embargoed OA. At the moment, over 60% of subscription journals, including almost all the top journals in most fields, endorse immediate, un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving by their authors. (See the SHERPA/Romeo registry.)<br /><br />Fewer than 40% of journals try to impose a Green OA embargo, and even for those, there is a compromise solution that is "Almost-OA": <br /><br />All papers (100%) need to be deposited in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication, but access to the deposit can be set as "Closed Access" instead of Open Access during the embargo period. During the embargo, the repositories have an email-eprint-request Button that allows individual users to request, and authors to provide, with one click each, a single eprint for research use. <br /><br />This means that an effective Green OA immediate-deposit mandate can immediately provide at least 60% immediate-OA plus 40% Almost-OA.<br /><br />But RCUK's flawed policy, by providing an irresistible incentive for subscription publishers to offer UK authors hybrid Gold OA for an extra fee encourages publishers, by the same stroke, to adopt and to lengthen Green OA embargoes beyond RCUK's allowable limit in order to make sure that UK authors must pick the paid Gold option (the UK's "preferred" one) rather than the cost-free Green one.<br /><br />This too is easily fixed if the UK simply drops its gratuitous preference for Gold and throws its full weight behind implementing an effectively verified Green OA mandate, leaving the option of publishing and paying for Gold as purely a matter of author choice.<br /><br />(continued)Stevan Harnadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14374474060972737847noreply@blogger.com