On 2012-01-12, at 7:14 AM, FrederickFriend wrote: > I am surprised by Steve [Hitchcock's] view that "calls to abandon library > journal subscriptions.... > are ultimately antithetical to repositories". It would be helpful if Steve > could explain his viewpoint in more detail.
Because *until they are made freely accessible online* (Green OA), researchers still need access to those journal articles. Hence universal Green OA mandates must come before any talk of journal cancelation. > I can understand an argument that if subscriptions are cancelled, some > journals may die and therefore the versions currently published in those > journals will not be available for deposit in repositories. But under that > scenario two other version types would still be available for deposit in > repositories: the author's final version, and the OA journal version if > publication switches from subscription journals to OA journals. Abandoning > the current high-cost journal subscriptions would enable expenditure to be > spent more effectively either by adding peer review to the author's final > version in a repository, or by paying the charges for publication in OA > journals with simultaneous deposit in a repository. Under either of these > models a university would retain the administrative value it gains by having > all its researchers' publications in its repository. Researchers would gain > by having immediate open access instead of open access delayed by a > publisher's embargo. Maintaining the current high-cost library subscriptions > only delays a large-scale switch to open access. Once Green OA is mandated *universally*, you can think of cancelling. But not until: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/ Stevan Harnad, EOS > Fred Friend > Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
