Any OA to formally published peer reviewed literature, including 'green' OA, is only possible if the publishing of this literature takes place in a financially sound, sustainable way. Let's not forget that 'green' OA is not 'free', unless the TA publishers that formally publish the 'greened' articles in peer-reviewed journals in the first place are financially sustainable. 'Green' OA is paid for by subscriptions and only as long as there are enough of them and they can command a high enough fee.
OA to manuscripts and other informal publications can of course be 'free' (i.e. at no cost to the reader other than the cost of an internet connection), but I've always understood that the 'green' status of an article is only achieved when a version or copy of it is formally published in a peer-reviewed journal. I have not heard or seen that gainsaid. In short, it is my contention that anything that informs about or enlightens the publishing or community buy-in of OA, of any colour or shade, is welcome to those interested in OA and thus appropriate for this forum (and OA fora in general). If the moderator doesn't agree, he should consider this forum be re-named "Green Open Access Forum" and its scope narrowed. Jan Velterop Stevan Harnad wrote: On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Velterop <[email protected]> wrote: Might Stevan be implying that OA forums should not be promoting financial/commercial sustainability of OA? Is it OA he is for, or is it commercial activity he is against? Or is he a denialist when it comes to the contribution of commercial ventures to OA? Jan does not seem to have noticed that I said Gold OA should not be paid for or promoted *until/unless Green OA has been mandated.* No, OA is not about promoting financial/commercial sustainability, it is about providing OA. And (Green) OA can be provided for free. Publishers are (understandably) interested in promoting the financial/commercial sustainability of their business. But what is missing today is not the financial/commercial sustainability of the publishing business. What is missing today is OA. And, to repeat, (Green) OA can be provided for free. *If and when* Green OA has been universally mandated, and *if and when* that in turn should prove to make the financial/commercial sustainability of the publishing business a genuine practical problem, rather than the hypothetical pseudo-problem it is now, then you can count on my whole-hearted "affirmationism." Till then, you can count on my denialism: The promotion of pre-emptive Gold OA payment is an obstacle to achieving universal OA. After Green OA is universally mandated, it is not. But Green OA is far from being universally mandated; whereas the hand is already outstretched for pre-emptive Gold OA payment. Pre-emptive paid Gold OA is an obstacle to achieving universal OA until Green OA is universally mandated. Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514/ Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15617/ 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 Stevan Harnad wrote: I wonder if it is a good idea for Open Access forums to become the publicity vehicles for commercial deals? Stevan Harnad Scaling to Global OA: Parallel Local Green/Gold Is OK, But Gold Alone First, No Way SUMMARY: Trying to morph incoming institutional non-OA journal-fleet subscriptions into outgoing institutional Gold OA journal-fleet "memberships" is incoherent and cannot scale across journals and institutions; alongside an institutional Green OA mandate, however, it is innocuous: The Green mandates will ensure the real, leveraged, scalable, unstoppable progress toward global OA. Without an institutional Green OA mandate, pursuing local Gold OA "memberships" is not only futile but a retardant on real progress toward global OA, creating instead an illusory local sense of progress that further distracts from and obscures what really needs to be done locally to generate global OA. The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et alâs (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (âOpen Access,â OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the worldâs peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et alâs modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing industry. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research. OA McMemberships, Dismemberment and MC Escher SUMMARY: Gold OA institutional "membership" is incoherent and does not scale. It only gives the illusion of making sense if you think of it locally, and myopically. Annual institutional subscriptions to journals containing the annual outgoing refereed research of all other institutions do not morph into annual institutional memberships for publishing each institution's own outgoing refereed research. There are 25,000 journals and 10,000 institutions! Is every single institution to commit and contract in advance to pay for its authors' (potential) fraction of annual submissions to every single journal? Is that a "membership" or a distributed dismemberment? And is every journal to commit and contract in advance to accept every institution's annual fraction of submissions? (Is that peer review?) This is a global oligopolistic illusion that would fit publishers just about as well as it would fit McDonalds, except there are at least 25,000 different journals to "join", and institutions each have thousands of author-consumers with diverse dietary needs, varying day to day and year to year. Gold Conversion: A Prisoners' Dilemma? SUMMARY: Given the undeniable, irreversible and growing clamour for Open Access (OA) worldwide, journal publishers face two Prisoners' Dilemmas. (1) The first concerns whether to continue business as usual, to mounting opprobrium from the academic community as well as the tax-paying public, or to convert directly to Gold OA now, at the risk that institutional subscriptions at current prices for incoming journals may not transmute stably into institutional "memberships" for outgoing article publication costs at the same institutional price. If publishers convert from institutional subscriptions to institutional Gold OA "memberships" today, they counter the opprobrium and lock in current subscription rates for a year (or whatever duration-deal is agreed with institutions), but they risk institutional memberships defecting after the duration elapses, with cost-recovery fragmented to an anarchic individual author/article level that may not be enough to make ends meet. (2) The second Prisoners' Dilemma facing publishers is that if they instead counter the opprobrium by converting to Green OA now (as 62% of them already have done), Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates may still force their conversion to Gold eventually, but because access-provision and archiving (and their costs) will by then be performed by the distributed network of mandated Green OA Institutional Repositories, the revenues (and expenses) of journal publishing then may be reduced from what they are now. (Perhaps this can all be integrated into just a single Prisoners' Dilemma -- or perhaps it is not a Prisoners' Dilemma at all: just the optimal and inevitable outcome of the powerful new potential unleashed by the online medium for the communication of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research.) On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the university's potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees are currently committed to paying their annual journal subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will only provide OA for a small fraction of a university's total research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals' contents are otherwise accessible to a university's users. (In addition, the very same scarcity of funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable.) Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay the publishing costs of Gold OA. Springer's Already on the Side of the Angels: What's the Big Deal? SUMMARY: The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has made a deal with Springer that articles by VSNU authors will be made OA. But Springer is already on the side of the angels on OA, being completely Green on immediate, unembargoed author OA self-archiving. Hence all VSNU authors are already free to deposit their refereed final drafts of their Springer articles in their institutional repositories, without requiring any further permission or payment. So what in addition is meant by the VSNU deal with Springer? that the Springer PDF rather than the author's final draft can be deposited? That Springer does the deposit on VSNU authors' behalf? Or is this a deal for prepaid hybrid Gold OA? In the case of Springer articles, it seems that what the Netherlands lacked was not the right to make them OA, but the mandate (from the VSNU universities and Netherlands' research funders like NWO) to make them OA. There are some signs, however, that this too might be on the way... University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without Mandating Green OA On 2010-08-23, at 8:22 AM, Peter Suber wrote: [Forwarding from Renate Bayaz at Springer. --Peter Suber.] PRESS RELEASE Springer and Helmholtz Association sign agreement for open access membership
