I have advocated this for a while now (but am not aware of any university or library that's taken it up): Charge authors of your university who insist on publishing in a subscription journal either

 * a nominal amount that is based on an estimate of the average
   per-article revenue of subscription journals/publishers (about
   $5000), or
 * the actual subscription amount paid by the university to a
   publisher, divided by the number of articles by authors from the
   university, published in the journals of that publisher.

These charges should be collected from the authors' grants, be put in an open access fund, and then be used by the university/library to support authors willing to publish in APC-supported open access journals.

(For those who really don't like the 'gold' strategy and favour the 'green' one above all: you could use the open access fund to defray the cost of your open repositories and of all the effort needed to ensure that every single paper from your university or institution is properly and 'findably' deposited.)

There will no-doubt be practical difficulties with this, but perhaps it can be considered as the seed of an approach?

Jan Velterop

On 03/01/2016 12:39, Christian Gutknecht wrote:
Well, I think Thomas is right. As long libraries do not shift money from the subscription side to the Gold OA side, the transformation will be very very slow.

Take the University of Zurich for example. I’ve just disclosed for the first time ever what they are paying for Elsevier, Springer and Wiley and put that in relation with the institutional publication behavior in this blog post: http://wisspub.net/2016/01/03/zahlungen-der-universitaet-zuerich/

The University of Zurich has a strong mandate since 2008 with probably one of the best staffed OA team (7 persons) in Europe. But regarding publications from 2014, only 23% (242 out of 1062) from all articles published articles within journals from Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Journals are freely accessible via the IR. In 2014 too, the University of Zurich paid 3.4 Mio CHF/USD to Elsevier, Springer and Wiley only for Journal subscriptions.

The situation becomes even more absurd, when you learn that in 2014 there were 176 publications authored by the University of Zurich that were published by PLOS (which by the way already is the half of what the University of Zurich publishes with Wiley!). But there is only little institutional funding for APCs explicitly limited to humanities. So all authors who wish publish with PLOS have to throw in additional money by their own research budget, because the library claims to have no additional money for large scale Gold OA funding. Fortunately for the sake of OA, Swiss authors are willing to pay with the own budget that because the financial situation isn’t that bad. But think about the chance and the boost for OA, if the University of Zurich would shift all or at least a part of the money from the journal subscriptions and create a publisher neutral Open Access funds.

So I think we can and should promote more Green OA and care about a better compliance. But if we really want to speed up the transition to Gold OA we really should consider to give the subscription money a new purpose and use it in a coordinated way to force the publishers to change their business model. And as I heard this was Berlin 12 about.

Best regards

Christian Gutknecht





Am 31.12.2015 um 19:15 schrieb Stevan Harnad <har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk <mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk>>:


On Dec 31, 2015, at 10:59 AM, Thomas Krichel <kric...@openlib.org <mailto:kric...@openlib.org>> wrote:

 Stevan Harnad writes

1. Actually, no one really knows why it is taking so long to reach the
optimal and inevitable outcome -- universal OA --

 oh I know. It's because libraries are spending money on subscriptions.
 And as long as they do, OA remains evitable.

That’s about as useful as saying that "I know why there is poverty:
because the rich are rich and the poor are poor."

Not only is it not possible to treat “libraries” as if they were a monolith
any more than it is possible to treat “authors” as a monolith,
but it is completely out of the question for a university library
to cancel subscriptions while its users have no other means to
access that content.

(Please don’t reply that they do cancel what they cannot afford: that is
not relevant. Libraries subscribe to as much content that their users need
as they can afford to subscribe to.)

The only way to make subscriptions cancellable is to first mandate
and provide (universal — not just local) Green OA <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>.

SH

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