[GOAL] RE : SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary,Unscalable Unsustainable
This is avery good example of one constant flaw in Stevan Harnad's reasoning. It has to do with point 5. It may be true that the high-energy physics community would have achieved more for OA if it had put all of its weight behind green OA. I will go further: in my own opinion, in agreement with Stevan Harnad, it would have been better if they had done so. The point, however, is that they did not. And this is what Stevan Harnad has difficulties dealing with: some people hold viewpoints different from one's own, yet track common objectives. One cannot expect to change them. At least, changing peoples' minds often prove very difficult and very costly. I could say with a smile that if Stevan Harnad, with his relentless determination, has not succeeded, who will? And would it have not been better for Stevan Harnad to use all that extraordinary energy bolstering his own approach rather than trying to change others? Green OA might be farther ahead if he were not so intent on lining up all the ducks (or rather herding academic cats in this instance) all the time. And it would bring yet another advantage: it would help keep the OA community closer together. We should always bear in mind that much more unites us than separates us. Being a little more inclusive may bring in slightly messier forms of reasoning, but this is compensated by a greater collective strength. So, yes! There are design problems with the SCOAP project, but it is going forward and it will be going forward whatever anyone tries to do to stop it or derail it. I, for one, would never want to do this. Why? Because, at the end of the day, SCOAP3 will prove to be a positive contribution to the OA movement, even if it should ultimately prove unstable. And instability does not necessarily mean failure; it may mean morphing into something else, like a junction between ArXiv and SCOAP. The flow of history is not based on logic (alas); it is based on remixing available resources through meandering paths. Message d'origine De: goal-boun...@eprints.org de la part de Stevan Harnad Date: mer. 26/09/2012 09:31 À: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Objet : [GOAL] SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary,Unscalable Unsustainable 1. High Energy Physics (HEP) already has close to 100% Open Access (OA): Authors have been self-archiving their articles in Arxivhttp://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions (both before and after peer review) since 1991 (Green OA). 2. Hence SCOAP3 http://scoap3.org/ is just substituting the payment of consortial membership http://bit.ly/sc3memb fees for publishing outgoing articles in place of the payment of individual institutional subscription fees for accessing incoming articles in exchange for an OA from its publisher (Gold OA) that HEP already had from self-archiving (Green OA). 3. As such, SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription price agreement, except that it is inherently unstable, because once all journal content is Gold OA, non-members are free-riders, and members can cancel if they feel a budget crunch. 4. Nor does membership scale to other disciplines. 5. High Energy Physics would have done global Open Access a better service if it had put its full weight behind promoting (Green OA) mandates to self-archive by institutions and research funders in all other disciplines. 6. The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions. 7. Institutions can then cancel subscriptions and pay for peer review service alone http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271348/, per individual paper, out of a portion of their windfall cancelation savings, instead of en bloc, in an unstable (and overpriced) consortial membership. ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary, Unscalable Unsustainable
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Lars Bjørnshauge elbjoern0...@gmail.comwrote: [SH] wrote: The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions. My comment/question: and this will all of a sudden happen one fine day of the 12th of March 2025 or 2035 or 2045 and then we can start discussing implementing Gold OA? The time to convert to Gold OA is when subscriptions can be cancelled. Subscriptions cannot be cancelled until/unless the peer-reviewed journal content is otherwise available. Mandating Green OA globally makes that content otherwise available. Green OA can be mandated as soon as institutions and funders mandate it. Pre-emptively paying for Gold OA merely distracts attention from the need to mandate Green OA. HEP already had Green OA (without the need to mandate it). SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription license agreement, in which (unnecessary) conversion to Gold OA transforms subscription into membership. Postings like the one I react to here will not make it easier to advocate for Green OA, but rather make it easier to advocate for Gold OA. It is alas all too easy to advocate for Gold OA (as we see with Finch/RCUK). Pre-emptively paying for Gold OA merely distracts attention from the need to mandate Green OA. (This is without even entering into the many questions about the stability and sustainability of a consortial subscription agreement transformed into a consortial membership agreement: free-riding, defection, the status of the print edition at non-consortial institutions, scalability to multidisciplinary institutions, inflated prices for obsolete co-bundled products and services, funds locked into other (non-Gold) subscriptions, etc.) No, for the many reasons I've raised, there's good reason not to rush into pre-emptive (i.e. pre-global-Green) Gold OA today, except as a proof of principle (which has already been done) -- and especially in a field that already has OA. The priority needs to be global mandating of Green OA. That's the fastest, surest -- and cheapest -- way to reach 100% OA in all fields. Stevan Harnad 2012/9/26 Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com 1. High Energy Physics (HEP) already has close to 100% Open Access (OA): Authors have been self-archiving their articles in Arxivhttp://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions (both before and after peer review) since 1991 (Green OA). 2. Hence SCOAP3 http://scoap3.org/ is just substituting the payment of consortial membership http://bit.ly/sc3memb fees for publishing outgoing articles in place of the payment of individual institutional subscription fees for accessing incoming articles in exchange for an OA from its publisher (Gold OA) that HEP already had from self-archiving (Green OA). 3. As such, SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription price agreement, except that it is inherently unstable, because once all journal content is Gold OA, non-members are free-riders, and members can cancel if they feel a budget crunch. 4. Nor does membership scale to other disciplines. 5. High Energy Physics would have done global Open Access a better service if it had put its full weight behind promoting (Green OA) mandates to self-archive by institutions and research funders in all other disciplines. 6. The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions. 7. Institutions can then cancel subscriptions and pay for peer review service alone http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271348/, per individual paper, out of a portion of their windfall cancelation savings, instead of en bloc, in an unstable (and overpriced) consortial membership. ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Lars Bjørnshauge SPARC´s Director of European Library Relations mobile phone: +45 53 51 06 03 Skype-Id: lbj-lub0603 Twitter: elbjoern0603 e.mail: l...@arl.org - elbjoern0...@gmail.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] RE : [BOAI] Fwd: A response to the perception that OA through repositories is not an alternative to comprehensive OA through journal publication
Perhaps to tweak Fred's analysis a bit, I would say: 1. Obviously repositories are sustainable, highly sustainable: they are as sustainable as the libraries that support them. They are one of the two main roads to achieve OA. 2. OA journals face a sustainability issue only if they are taken to be in a category where cost-recovery is unavoidable. In other words, more is asked of journals than of repositories that are supported by libraries. More is also asked of journals than is asked of research itself. Research itself is subsidized and is basically unsustainable in strict economic terms. If journals are considered to be part of the research process (as they are), then the sustainability issue is there only because some journal producers choose to put themselves in this kind of position, be they for, or not-for, profit. Otherwise, they are and can be wrapped into research budgets. At the end of the day, OA journals form the other road to achieve OA. 3. Making one road compete with the other is silly: social actors in various positions simply do the best they can with the perception they have, given their position. Our task is not to divide and compete; our task is to aggregate and harmonize to the extent possible. We all share the OA objective; so let us complement each other, support each other, and work in a distributed way. Jean-Claude Guédon Message d'origine De: boai-forum-boun...@ecs.soton.ac.uk de la part de Stevan Harnad Date: mar. 25/09/2012 18:17 À: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Cc: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum; Lib Serials list Objet : [BOAI] Fwd: A response to the perception that OA through repositories is not an alternative to comprehensive OA through journal publication Another timely and insightful posting from Fred Friend. -- Forwarded message -- From: Frederick Friend ucyl...@ucl.ac.uk Date: Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 6:04 PM Subject: A response to the perception that OA through repositories is not an alternative to comprehensive OA through journal publication To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk *A RESPONSE TO THE PERCEPTION THAT OA THROUGH REPOSITORIES IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO COMPREHENSIVE OA THROUGH JOURNAL PUBLICATION * It is time for supporters of OA through repositories to respond to the unfair comparisons being made between repositories and OA journals as a long-term route to open access. The comparisons appear to be made in terms of sustainability of the two routes to open access, the quality of content available through the two routes, and the push for a comprehensive solution. What follows is not written from an anti-publisher nor an anti-OA journal viewpoint, but is intended to make a case for a fair and even-handed approach. *1.* *SUSTAINABILITY* The view that the journal route to OA is more sustainable than the repository route to OA flies in the face of objective studies of costs of various research communication models, which conclude that repository deposit and access provide a more cost-effective route to OA than publication in journals. How can a more expensive solution be more sustainable than a cheaper option in the long-term? Even supporters of open access journals seem to accept that additional funding is required for open access journals converted from subscription journals, and this view has been accepted by the UK Government in the announcement of an extra £10 million to support open access on the journal model. Can the supporters of open access journals please come clean and say for how many years such an extra sum will be required before OA journals become sustainable? How is such a subsidy to be justified to the UK taxpayer when a cheaper OA alternative is available? The hope that open access journals will be cheaper and therefore more sustainable than repositories appears to be based upon a hope of low author publication charges. Some open access publishers certainly set low publication charges, but the journals with low charges are by and large not those journals in which authors choose to publish as first choice. The most important journals are owned by publishers with a reputation for charging high subscription prices and those publishers are likely to continue a high-price policy into the OA era in order to maintain their profits or surpluses. In theory competition for authors should lower the cost of author publication charges but in practice the power in the author-publisher relationship lies with the publishers of the most important journals. Authors are more desperate to publish in such journals than the publishers are to secure authors. Suggestions have been made that the repository route to OA is unsustainable but no evidence has been produced to support that contention. The large repositories - such as arXiv - have been in operation for many years and have proved themselves to be sustainable. The institutional repositories are smaller and have not been around as
[GOAL] Re: SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary, Unscalable Unsustainable
Hear, hear! Jan On 26 Sep 2012, at 16:04, Guédon Jean-Claude wrote: This is avery good example of one constant flaw in Stevan Harnad's reasoning. It has to do with point 5. It may be true that the high-energy physics community would have achieved more for OA if it had put all of its weight behind green OA. I will go further: in my own opinion, in agreement with Stevan Harnad, it would have been better if they had done so. The point, however, is that they did not. And this is what Stevan Harnad has difficulties dealing with: some people hold viewpoints different from one's own, yet track common objectives. One cannot expect to change them. At least, changing peoples' minds often prove very difficult and very costly. I could say with a smile that if Stevan Harnad, with his relentless determination, has not succeeded, who will? And would it have not been better for Stevan Harnad to use all that extraordinary energy bolstering his own approach rather than trying to change others? Green OA might be farther ahead if he were not so intent on lining up all the ducks (or rather herding academic cats in this instance) all the time. And it would bring yet another advantage: it would help keep the OA community closer together. We should always bear in mind that much more unites us than separates us. Being a little more inclusive may bring in slightly messier forms of reasoning, but this is compensated by a greater collective strength. So, yes! There are design problems with the SCOAP project, but it is going forward and it will be going forward whatever anyone tries to do to stop it or derail it. I, for one, would never want to do this. Why? Because, at the end of the day, SCOAP3 will prove to be a positive contribution to the OA movement, even if it should ultimately prove unstable. And instability does not necessarily mean failure; it may mean morphing into something else, like a junction between ArXiv and SCOAP. The flow of history is not based on logic (alas); it is based on remixing available resources through meandering paths. Message d'origine De: goal-boun...@eprints.org de la part de Stevan Harnad Date: mer. 26/09/2012 09:31 À: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Objet : [GOAL] SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary,Unscalable Unsustainable 1. High Energy Physics (HEP) already has close to 100% Open Access (OA): Authors have been self-archiving their articles in Arxivhttp://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions (both before and after peer review) since 1991 (Green OA). 2. Hence SCOAP3 http://scoap3.org/ is just substituting the payment of consortial membership http://bit.ly/sc3memb fees for publishing outgoing articles in place of the payment of individual institutional subscription fees for accessing incoming articles in exchange for an OA from its publisher (Gold OA) that HEP already had from self-archiving (Green OA). 3. As such, SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription price agreement, except that it is inherently unstable, because once all journal content is Gold OA, non-members are free-riders, and members can cancel if they feel a budget crunch. 4. Nor does membership scale to other disciplines. 5. High Energy Physics would have done global Open Access a better service if it had put its full weight behind promoting (Green OA) mandates to self-archive by institutions and research funders in all other disciplines. 6. The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions. 7. Institutions can then cancel subscriptions and pay for peer review service alone http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271348/, per individual paper, out of a portion of their windfall cancelation savings, instead of en bloc, in an unstable (and overpriced) consortial membership. ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] RE : RE : SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary,Unscalable Unsustainable
One quick point in response to Dana Roth: The vocabulary of business model can be misleading because it treats a consortial effort of libraries as if it had to function like a business. libraries do pretty poorly as businesses - they are all subsidized. This said, the SCOAP financial scheme appears fragile to me. Jean-Claude Guédon Message d'origine De: goal-boun...@eprints.org de la part de Dana Roth Date: mer. 26/09/2012 12:58 À: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' Objet : [GOAL] RE : SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary,Unscalable Unsustainable Doesn't common sense argue against adopting a business model based on donations? Dana L. Roth Millikan Library / Caltech 1-32 1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540 dzr...@library.caltech.edu http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Guédon Jean-Claude Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 8:04 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] RE : SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary,Unscalable Unsustainable This is avery good example of one constant flaw in Stevan Harnad's reasoning. It has to do with point 5. It may be true that the high-energy physics community would have achieved more for OA if it had put all of its weight behind green OA. I will go further: in my own opinion, in agreement with Stevan Harnad, it would have been better if they had done so. The point, however, is that they did not. And this is what Stevan Harnad has difficulties dealing with: some people hold viewpoints different from one's own, yet track common objectives. One cannot expect to change them. At least, changing peoples' minds often prove very difficult and very costly. I could say with a smile that if Stevan Harnad, with his relentless determination, has not succeeded, who will? And would it have not been better for Stevan Harnad to use all that extraordinary energy bolstering his own approach rather than trying to change others? Green OA might be farther ahead if he were not so intent on lining up all the ducks (or rather herding academic cats in this instance) all the time. And it would bring yet another advantage: it would help keep the OA community closer together. We should always bear in mind that much more unites us than separates us. Being a little more inclusive may bring in slightly messier forms of reasoning, but this is compensated by a greater collective strength. So, yes! There are design problems with the SCOAP project, but it is going forward and it will be going forward whatever anyone tries to do to stop it or derail it. I, for one, would never want to do this. Why? Because, at the end of the day, SCOAP3 will prove to be a positive contribution to the OA movement, even if it should ultimately prove unstable. And instability does not necessarily mean failure; it may mean morphing into something else, like a junction between ArXiv and SCOAP. The flow of history is not based on logic (alas); it is based on remixing available resources through meandering paths. Message d'origine De: goal-boun...@eprints.org de la part de Stevan Harnad Date: mer. 26/09/2012 09:31 À: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Objet : [GOAL] SCOAP3 Gold OA Membership: Unnecessary,Unscalable Unsustainable 1. High Energy Physics (HEP) already has close to 100% Open Access (OA): Authors have been self-archiving their articles in Arxivhttp://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions (both before and after peer review) since 1991 (Green OA). 2. Hence SCOAP3 http://scoap3.org/ is just substituting the payment of consortial membership http://bit.ly/sc3memb fees for publishing outgoing articles in place of the payment of individual institutional subscription fees for accessing incoming articles in exchange for an OA from its publisher (Gold OA) that HEP already had from self-archiving (Green OA). 3. As such, SCOAP3 is just a consortial subscription price agreement, except that it is inherently unstable, because once all journal content is Gold OA, non-members are free-riders, and members can cancel if they feel a budget crunch. 4. Nor does membership scale to other disciplines. 5. High Energy Physics would have done global Open Access a better service if it had put its full weight behind promoting (Green OA) mandates to self-archive by institutions and research funders in all other disciplines. 6. The time to convert to Gold OA is when mandatory Green OA prevails globally across all disciplines and institutions. 7. Institutions can then cancel subscriptions and pay for peer review service alone http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271348/, per individual paper, out of a portion of their windfall cancelation savings, instead of en bloc, in an unstable (and
