On 2012-06-25, at 4:24 AM, Richard Poynder wrote: Director of UCL Library Services Paul Ayris on the Finch Report.
Some quotes: "The Finch Report <http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/>, which was recently published in the UK, has caused a storm of comment, even controversy. Responses have been lined up behind the barricades of either Green or Gold Open Access (OA), and predictions have been made about the destruction of the UK publishing industry." "Where does the Finch view sit in a global OA world? A new report by John Houghton and Alma Swan, financed by the JISC and to be published imminently, takes a different look at the OA debate." "Their analysis tells us a lot about the difficulties of transition to a fully OA environment. Their conclusion is that, for universities, at the present time the most cost effective route is for a University to opt for Green OA. Should the whole world turn OA, then their modelling supports Finch, in that the biggest saving for a University would come from Gold (Chart 23 in the forthcoming Report)." "Another recent publication, which also acknowledges the difficulties of transition, is the LERU Roadmap Towards Open Access<http://www.leru.org/files/publications/LERU_AP8_Open_Access.pdf>. This document was published in June 2011 by the League of European Research Universities as an Advice paper for its members, and indeed for all European Universities." "The Finch Report is therefore an important marker on the road to OA, but in itself it is not the whole story." The trouble is that the ecumenical squaring of the LERU Roadmap with the Finch Report misses the very essence of the crucial contraction between Finch and LERU: Finch disparages Green OA self-archiving (and ignores Green OA self-archiving mandates altogether), downgrading Green OA to merely a means of archiving data and grey literature, and helping in digital preservation. *In place of Green OA, today, Finch recommends paying for Gold OA, today.* * * In contrast, *LERU recommends mandating Green OA, today, and funding Gold only when Green OA has been mandated.* This is the difference between night and day, because it generates OA itself, in the fastest and surest way possible, and free of any extra cost: by mandating Green OA, today. OA (Open Access) itself, now, is the primary goal of the OA movement. Most of us (including myself) agree that universal Gold OA publishing will be cheaper than today's subscription publishing model -- but *certainly not if today's prices are locked into the mechanism of transition to Gold OA*, as long proposed by publishers, a proposal now seconded wholesale by Finch: extra funding for Gold OA today, plus a UK national license for all of UK's non-OA subscription content, with a phased transition to Gold OA alone (subscription costs being reduced as Gold OA revenues grow), *effectively locking in publishers' total revenue at the level of their subscription revenues*. Hence, one can agree that the cost of post-global-Green-OA global Gold OA will be much less than today's global subscription/license cost, yet this does not at all imply that there is any agreement that paying for Gold OA pre-emptively now, at current prices, and on the publisher/Finch transition scenario, will cost less, nor that the publisher/Finch transition scenario is stable or scaleable from country to country, let alone that it will produce global OA in the foreseeable future, as mandating Green OA, today, will do. So let us not, in our haste to praise Finch for having recommended "OA" at all, omit that it has recommended OA *on publishers' terms*, at a high cost and a very slow and uncertain pace, and at the expense of the UK's lead in mandated Green OA, which is the tried-and-tested means of generating OA at a fast and proven pace (*if mandate adoption is increased and mandate implementation is optimized*), and at no extra cost, just an just an optimized policy. Finch should have recommended strengthening and extending the UK's lead and model, by increasing Green OA mandate adoption and optimizing Green OA mandate implementation. Instead Finch recommended relegating Green OA to data and grey archiving and preservation, and instead spending more money on Gold OA. That's the gist of it. The rest is just an exchange of trending buzz-words and pious slogans. Stevan Harnad
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