Stevan provides a valuable analysis of the green/gold world we are entering. The assumption behind so much of the current debate has been that the current publishing structure should and will continue, but both the economics and the technology suggest radical change. The Finch Report recommended a transition to paid gold open access publishing, accepting an increase in cost during the transition but looking for long-term savings from competition between publishers and a reduction in the cost of library subscriptions. The difficulty in achieving significant savings through publisher-competition is that the core group of STM publishers who own the journals authors most wish to publish in will still own those journals if they are converted to a gold open access model. And savings in the purchase by libraries of those must-have journals will not happen while a large proportion of the content of those journals comes from outside the UK.
The transition that really would reduce the cost to the taxpayer of scholarly publishing is a transition away from “big deals”. It is this transition that the big STM publishers must be most worried about, not the transition to paid gold OA publishing. The “big deal” model was devised to give value for money to libraries which would have bought many of the journals in the package on individual subscription, saving libraries’ administrative costs. The advantage to the publisher was that libraries became locked into the deals and sacrificed journals from small publishers and monographs. This fundamental imbalance in the scholarly communication structure will not be resolved by a transition to paid gold open access journals. It will not be long before the big publishers offer “big deals” for the payment of APCs, locking universities into that model. It is in this context that Stevan’s point about the consequence of global green OA becomes very relevant. Global green OA will show up the absurdity of providing access to vast numbers of journal articles in packages sold at inflated prices. Green OA is a single-article model, made powerful by the common action of a large number of individual authors and their institutions. While the starting-point for green OA is the single-article, value could be added through collections of related articles, turning the current journal-focussed model on its head. The model is enabled by current and future technology and its economic value is derived from being embedded in the research community. The academic community is as capable as any publisher of making a journal article a “version of record”, and while publishers could still have a role in servicing repository content, the radical structural change would be that control would remain with the research community instead of being signed away to commercial enterprises the research community is unable to influence. Will this radical change come about? Only if the research community really pushes for it. Otherwise whether paid gold OA becomes the norm or subscriptions continue, the taxpayer will continue to pay the price of a flawed research dissemination structure. Fred Friend Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk From: Stevan Harnad Sent: Monday, November 26, 2012 6:20 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Don't Price Your Gold OA Harvest Till Your Green OA Seeds Are Sown (and Sprouted) On 2012-11-26, at 10:22 AM, Richard Poynder wrote: “We estimate that a full transition to OA could lead to savings in the region of 10-12% of the cost base of a subscription publisher.” BernsteinResearch investment analyst Claudio Aspesi The key question: if that estimate is accurate, will those savings be passed on to the research community? http://bit.ly/QFOPeI I think that what Richard is worrying about here is whether the cost-cutting that a transition from subscription publishing to Gold OA publishing would make possible (e.g., curtailing the print edition) would be reflected in lower Gold OA charges to the author/institution or they would simply be absorbed by the publisher (Aspesi's (2012) test case being Elsevier), leaving Gold OA charges higher than they need to be. I join this speculation and counter-speculation only reluctantly, for two reasons: (1) I think there are significant transition factors that none of the economic analyses has yet fully taken into account, and hence that the potential savings are still being considerably underestimated. (2) I also think this focus on predicting the costs of Gold OA just reinforces the excessive preoccupation with estimating the costs and benefits of pre-emptive Gold OA rather than the costs and benefits of OA itself, and what is needed, practically, for facilitating a transition to OA itself, rather than just a direct transition to Gold OA in particular. Post-Green Gold will cost far less than the pre-emptive pre-Green Gold that the economic analyses keep estimating. We keep counting the "savings" from generic Gold OA publishing without reckoning how to get there, and whether the transition itself might not be a major determinant in the potential for savings (from OA as well as from Gold OA). I am not an economist, so I will not try to do anything more than to point out the main factor that I believe the economic analyses are failing to take into account: If Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories is mandated globally by institutions and funders, this will have two major consequences: I. First, not only will globally mandated Green OA provide universal OA (and all of its benefits, scientific and economic) alongside subscription publishing, at minimal additional cost (because (a) repositories are relatively cheap to create and maintain, (b) most research-active institutions have created them already, and (c) have done so for multiple purposes, OA being only one of them). II. Second, mandating Green OA globally (unlike pre-emptive Gold OA) also puts competitive pressure on subscription publishers to cut obsolete costs, because the universal availability of the Green OA version makes it much easier for cash-strapped institutions to cancel their journal subscriptions. Not only can the print edition and its costs be phased out under cancelation pressure from global Green OA, but so can the publisher's online edition and version of record: The worldwide network of Green OA repositories and their many central harvesters are perfectly capable of generating, hosting, archiving and providing access to the version-of-record. No more PDF or XML needed from the publisher; nor archiving; nor access provision; nor marketing; nor fulfillment. Nor any of their associated expenses. All that's needed from the publisher is the service of managing the peer review (peers review for free) and the certification of its outcome with the journal's title and track-record. That's post-Green Gold OA publishing. Compared to that, all the economical estimates of savings are under-estimates. Nor will there be any need for mega-publishers (like Elsevier), publishing vast fleets of unrelated journals; nor for mega-journals (like PLoS ONE), publishing vast flocks of unrelated articles. There are many narrow research specialities, a few wider ones, and a few even wider, multidisciplinary ones. They each have their own peers, and they each need their own peer-reviewed journals, and, depending on the size of the field, perhaps several journals, forming a pyramid of quality standards, the most selective (hence smallest) at the top. There may have been economies of scale for multiple journal production, in the Gutenberg days. But in the PostGutenberg era, with post-Green Gold OA journals, providing only the service of peer review, there will be no need for generic refereeing being mass-marketed by generic editorial assistants for mega-publishers or mega-journals, where no one other than the referee (if well-selected) knows anything about the subject matter. So besides scaling down to the post-Green OA essentials, post-Green Gold OA journals will also revert to the independent, peer-based titles that they were before being bought up for by the post-Maxwellian publisher megalopolies. The online-era economies will come from restoring journals' own natural speciality scale rather than from agglomerating them into generic multiple money-makers. Aspesi, C (2012) Reed Elsevier: Transitioning to Open Access - Are the Cost Savings Sufficient to Protect Margins? BernsteinResearch November 26 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. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2012) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest. Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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