[GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?

[Christian Gutknecht]

Stevan, 

I guess the record in RoarMap about the policy of the University of Zurich is 
not correct at that point. The deposition of at least the metadata of a 
publication in the IR is required to get included in the annual report, which 
is the foundation of research evaluation. It’s however correct that the 
distinction of of the accessibility on ZORA (Fulltext freely available or not) 
is not part of the research evaluation. But I do not know any university that 
only counts publications that are freely available at the repository.

Also counting records where the full text is restricted but only available with 
a request-a-copy button as Almost-OA on the same level as OA is not valid for 
me. With „Request a copy“ there’s always a certain chance that you never will 
get the full text. Especially for older records you cannot expect the author to 
answer your request, because he/she may already have left the university.

Regarding the suggested approach of Jan to charge authors publishing in 
subscription journals, I think this would be a bad option. Any requirement that 
tells authors where to publish (even indirectly by imposing charges) will be 
rejected as a not tolerable influence of the academic freedom. I mean some 
academics already protesting with this argument, if the university requires 
them to make their full text available on the IR.

But I really like the idea to let researchers feel that subscription is an 
outdated model. And an easy way to do that without upsetting them too much, is 
to cancel subscriptions and get rid of the Big Deals. With the free money the 
library then can create two kind of funds: One is the Gold OA fund (incl. 
hybrid options but with a cap) and one is the fund for costs resulting getting 
access to documents that are not longer available via subscription (like costs 
for pay-per-view, document delivery, individual subscription of a really 
important journal). I think most libraries would find out that researchers 
would get along quite well with this option. Because librarians constantly 
overestimate the importance of their subscriptions and especially the Big Deals 
where they buy/rent a lot of stuff that is never used by their community. As 
Thomas mentioned it’s really easy these days to get to the papers by simply 
asking the author. Also Researchgate and academia.edu close the gap where IRs 
fail to provide access. 

The advantage in this approach is that libraries clearly set the incentive to 
Gold OA without the need of additional budget. It doesn’t say, don’t publish in 
subscription journals, it’s just says that subscription is something that isn't 
supported by default anymore. And changing the default really can make the 
difference, as there will immediate (Hybrid) Gold OA. 

To be honest, I rather have a flip RIGHT NOW with the existing "grotesquely 
inflated total expenditure“, then going on like this for years where we spend 
the money anyway to the Closed Access publishers and get nothing in return. 
It’s not that I’m not concerned about the costs in the Gold OA world. But the 
current situation is with the subscription business is already so bad, it can’t 
get worse.

Best regards

Christian

PS: Okay, it can get worse: Paying for Hybrid Gold and keeping the 
subscriptions like it’s currently done in UK is really not sustainable. But 
that was clear from the beginning. Maybe it becomes better when offsetting 
agreements are set in place. 



> Am 03.01.2016 um 18:31 schrieb Stevan Harnad :
> 
> Penalizing an institution's authors for publishing their own articles in 
> subscription journals will not help that institution's users gain access to 
> the subscription journal articles of authors from all other institutions, 
> hence it will not reduce the institution's subscription budget, just increase 
> the total institutional spend by the author spend. (Hence Jan's is yet 
> another unstable, unscalable solution, the only stable, coherent one being 
> for all authors, at all institutions, to be mandated to provide Green OA 
> .)
> 
> To assess the effectiveness of the University of Zürich 
>  Green OA mandate (which has only one of the 
> two conditions  for the most effective 
> mandates : immediate deposit is required, 
> but deposit is not a precondition for research evaluation) what needs to be 
> counted is not the annual proportion of OA deposits but the annual proportion 
> of immediate-deposits -- because Zora  implements 
> the automated Request-a-Copy Button  to 
> provide Almost-OA 
> 
>  for embargoed deposits.
> 
> Once (effective) immediate-deposit mandates 

[GOAL] Re: "Yawanna know wush wrong with this damn planet...?."

[Christian Gutknecht]

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 :
> 
> 
>> On Dec 31, 2015, at 10:59 AM, Thomas Krichel > > 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 
> .
> 
> SH
> 
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[GOAL] Re: "Yawanna know wush wrong with this damn planet...?."

[Velterop]

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 >:



On Dec 31, 2015, at 10:59 AM, Thomas Krichel > 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 
.


SH

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[GOAL] Quo vadere?

[Stevan Harnad]

Penalizing an institution's *authors* for publishing their own articles in
subscription journals will not help that institution's *users* gain access
to the subscription journal articles of authors *from all other
institutions*, hence it will not reduce the institution's subscription
budget, just increase the total institutional spend by the author spend.
(Hence Jan's is yet another unstable, unscalable solution, the only stable,
coherent one being for all authors, at all institutions, to be
mandated to provide
Green OA

.)

To assess the effectiveness of the University of Zürich
 Green OA mandate (which has only one of
the two conditions  for the most effective
mandates : immediate deposit is
required, but deposit is not a precondition for research evaluation) what
needs to be counted is not the annual proportion of OA deposits but the
annual proportion of immediate-deposits -- because Zora
 implements the automated Request-a-Copy Button
 to provide Almost-OA

for embargoed deposits.

Once (effective) immediate-deposit mandates are universal (or
almost-universal), it will be universal (or almost-universal) Green OA plus
Almost-OA that will make journal subscriptions cancellable at last, thereby
not only forcing the publisher downsizing, cost-cutting and conversion
to Fair-Gold
OA
,
but also providing institutions and their authors with the windfall
subscription cancelation savings out of which to pay the small remaining
fair-gold costs (i.e., just peer review alone) many times over.

A "flip
"
to today's Fools-Gold, even if it had been possible (which it is not) would
simply have flipped today's grotesquely inflated total expenditure from
subscription fees to publication fees (before it all flopped the very next
day).

(But I have reconciled myself to merely keep pointing the way to the
optimal and inevitable outcome without fretting about how long it will take
the research community to do the only sensible thing.)

Your Zen Archivangelist

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 8:27 AM, Velterop  wrote:

> 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