Joseph Esposito and I still are not understanding one another: Green OA self-archiving is not, as Joseph has suggested, a *parasite*: It is an *enzyme*, a catalyst, accelerating and facilitating the natural process of transition from today's access for subscribers-only to tomorrow's (online) access (to the author's refereed final draft) for all would-be users. That is far as my own interest, as a researcher, goes. But it is unlikely (as Joseph notes) to end there: universal Green OA is eventually likely to make subscriptions unsustainable, thereby inducing a universal transition to Gold OA publishing, at a much lower price (for peer review alone) per article published, paid by institutions out of their windfall annual subscription cancellation savings, with text-generation, (online-only) access provision and archiving and their costs all offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA institutional repositories.
The moral of the story is that there is no need for the research community to wait for the publishing community to convert to Gold OA of its own accord, and particularly not at Gold OA's needlessly high current asking price, and while the money to pay for it is still locked into subscriptions: Universities and research funders can mandate Green OA self-archiving, now. That will ensure 100% Green OA; and publishing can and will adapt as need be, as a matter of natural course, if and when it becomes necessary. Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15753/ ABSTRACT: 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. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine, 16 (7/8). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/ ABSTRACT: Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA"). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards. Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos, 21 (3-4). pp. 86-93. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/ ABSTRACT: Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA. Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship http://www.openscholarship.org On 2011-08-18, at 8:58 PM, Joseph Esposito wrote: > > In response to a message by Professor Harnad: I believe that > most librarians are very smart. Because they are smart, they > will not purchase things that they can get for free. Therefore > so-called Green OA, which depends on publishers to manage > editorial review and assert brands as indicators of quality, > undermines the basic economics of one kind of journal publishing. > You can self-archive all you want until the journals that support > the publishing process disappear. > > Green OA in the short term misleadingly appears to have little > effect on journal subscriptions (how many journal subscriptions > have thus far been cancelled because of the availability of OA > versions of articles?), and that is because the OA version is > still missing components (e.g., the full run of articles of a > particular journal) that appear only in the formal published > version. But all things being equal, a Green copy would > substitute for a paid copy. The question is how long before all > things will be equal. Publishers have various strategies for > preventing all things for being equal, as has been noted > countless times on this list. > > Of course, there is an interesting challenge in discussing this, > in that you cannot have evidence for a future state. > > The author-pays method pioneered by BMC and ingeniously modified > by PLOS among many others solves this problem--though neither is > a substitute for established publications with traditional > economic models. > > You cannot have OA PLUS peer review PLUS editorial brands PLUS > subscription-based economics. You get two out of three, which > ain't bad. > > But let's not lose sight of the context. It was suggested on > this list that I was somehow opposed to OA. I am not. There are > many varieties of OA. I see no reason to insist on one flavor, > Green. > > Joe Esposito >
