On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Rick Anderson wrote: > My question remains: do we want to encourage the development of Gold journals? > If not, if the existence of Gold journals doesn't really matter, then I guess > there's not an issue in my mind.
Yes, we should continue to encourage the development of Gold journals. As one of the people who originally proposed the author-institution cost-recovery model already a decade ago Harnad, S. (1995) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis? Serials Review 21(1) 70-72 (Reprinted in Managing Information 2(3) 1995) http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001691/00/harnad95.quo.vadis.html I can hardly be described as discouraging Gold journals! But I definitely discourage the vastly disproportionate emphasis they are getting today. Our efforts with Gold journals should be roughly in proportion to their potential for immediate OA returns, which is about 5% today. The remaining 95% of our efforts should be on Green self-archiving, with its far higher immediate OA potential. Yet for several years the actual proportions have been closer to the reverse. Only very recently (with the growing realization that OA self-archiving can be mandated by authors' funders and institutions, whereas OA publishing cannot) are we at last beginning to redress the imbalance, although the current balance -- I'd guess it's about 50/50 today -- is *still* not optimal, insofar as the interests and prospects of immediate OA are concerned. Once the OA movement itself began gaining momentum, it was a mistake, and it needlessly lost us time and progress, to have gone almost exclusively for Gold, as we have done now for several years. However, whereas we ought now to be putting most of our efforts into Green (as we should have been doing from the outset), it is still important to go ahead and keep testing Gold too, in all four of its variant forms ([1] retaining the user-institution-end toll-based cost-recovery, but making the online version free, immediately, or [2] within 6-12 months and [3] testing the author-institution-end cost-recovery model, fully, and also in [4] the hybrid optional form proposed by Tom Walker in 1998 at the outset of this Forum, and now offered by National Academy of Sciences, Springer, and others.) The prospect of an eventual transition to Gold is only a hypothesis (whereas the feasibility of immediate 100% OA via Green is a certainty). But the ground for the *possibility* of an eventual transition from Green to Gold can and should be prepared and tested now (using 5% of our efforts and resources), in parallel with 95% of our efforts and resources being focussed on generating immediate OA via Green self-archiving. Trying instead to go directly from the status quo to 100% Gold OA is a nonstarter -- practically, logically, economically and motivationally. Most publishers are quite justifiably uninterested in taking such a risk with an untested cost-recovery model. However, they have not (and they could not have) opposed OA itself. Hence 92% of journals are already Green on author self-archiving (but now the ball is in their authors' court, to prove they are really willing to do what it takes to get the OA they claim to want and need so much). So Green is the sure road to at least 92% immediate OA, if only we concentrate our efforts on it. Meanwhile, the Gold road can continue to be tested, to prepare for the *possibility* of an eventual transition from Green to Gold one day. Whether there will ever be a need for that transition -- rather than peaceful co-existence, with the self-archived author's online OA version merely supplementing the journal's version for those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford it -- is merely hypothetical. But that there is an immediate need for 100% OA today is not at all hypothetical; nor is its reachability via Green. > (I stand by my original statement -- that authors will tend to publish in > the venue that they think will give them the most prestige, regardless > of whether it will give them the most readers -- but then, based on > several things you've said during this exchange, you don't seem to > actually disagree with that statement. It's almost as if you've gotten > lost in a labyrinth of reflexive argumentation, and have lost sight of > the question that instigated the exchange...) Nope, not lost in the least! We should be devoting 95% effort to OA via Green and 5% via Gold, for the reasons just described. The *reason* we need OA at all, however, is that it maximizes research usage and impact (by maximizing potential readership). You had expressed doubt that authors want/need to maximize their potential readership, if it means a trade-off with journal prestige. That would in and of itself have amounted to an expression of doubt that authors want/need OA (if Gold were the only option)! So the way you found yourself in that awkward position was by focusing only on the Golden road to OA, ignoring the Green road, and hence having to suggest that we need to find *another* author rationale for publishing in an OA journal (rather than OA access/impact itself) because the OA journal may not have the highest prestige! But of course if you had not bracketed the Green option you would have seen that the author can have both the prestige *and* the OA maximized access/impact -- via Green! The spurious prestige/OA trade-off is the result of entering this labyrinth (and I suspect that what got you and many others into it was conflating the access/impact problem with the affordability/pricing problem -- which is also what attracted you to gold's glitter at the cost of ignoring the the greenness of the grass available all round). > > Perhaps we're fooling ourselves if we imagine there is something else > > about Gold that authors would or should desire, apart from the OA > > that they can already get via Green! Of course Gold journals should be > > encouraged and supported > > This is the part I don't get. If we're fooling ourselves to think that > there's anything particularly attractive to authors about publishing in > a Gold journal, then why is it a given that we should encourage and > support the development of Gold journals? If Green is good enough for > authors, readers and publishers, then what's the point of fostering > Gold? Vide supra. Gold (5%) would be an end in itself, and preferable to any alternative, if it were the *only* way to get OA, or the easiest, fastest, or surest way. But it's none of those, because there is Green (95%) too. Nevertheless, Gold is worth exploring (5%) to test a possible eventual transition from 100% Green to Gold. Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml