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This is an interesting and important summary of Stevan Harnad's main theses. It calls for a few comments. Jean-Claude Guédon Le vendredi 15 mai 2009 à 18:21 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit : *** Apologies for Cross-Posting *** Pre-Emptive Gold OA. [snip] the conflation of Gold OA with OA itself, wrongly supposing that OA or "full OA" means Gold OA -- Harnad is right here. OA is both green and gold. instead of concentrating all efforts on universalizing Green OA mandates. Harnad is wrong here. If he were right, this would be conflating OA with Green OA and the error would be symmetricla of the one he points out. Conflating the Journal Affordability Problem with the Research Accessibility Problem. Although the journal affordability problem ("serials crisis") was historically one of the most important factors in drawing attention to the need for OA, and although there is definitely a causal link between the journal affordability problem and the research accessibility problem (namely, that if all journals were affordable to all institutions, there would be no research access problem!), affordability and accessibility are nevertheless not the same problem, and the conflation of the two, and especially the tendency to portray affordability as the primary or ultimate problem, is today causing great confusion and even greater delay in achieving OA itself, despite the fact the universal OA is already fully within reach. Distinguishing affordability from accessibility is important and it is correct in my view. The reason is as simple to state as it is (paradoxically) hard to get people to pay attention to, take into account, and act accordingly: Just as it is true that there would be no research accessibility problem if the the journal affordability problem were solved (because all institutions, and all their researchers, would then have affordable access to all journals), it is also true that the journal affordability problem would cease to be a real problem if the research accessibility problem were solved: If all researchers (indeed everyone) could access all journal articles for free online, then it would no longer matter how much journals cost, and which institutions were willing and able to pay for which journals. After universal Green OA, journals may or may not eventually become more affordable, or convert to Gold OA: It would no longer matter either way, for we would already have OA -- full OA -- itself. And surely access is what Open Access is and always was about. Formally, this is perfectly correct. There are many issue that remain open, however. Harnad would call them speculative because they lie beyond the corner, beyond direct empirical view and verification. No one can predict with certainty what will happen to journals in a world where OA materials constitute the vast majority of scientific documentation. Scientifically speaking, this is entirely correct. Looking at the same situation from a strategic perspective, this clarity of vision is more apparent than real. When Harnad says that solving accessibility would mean that affordability would cease, he leaves in the background the issue of the survival of the journals. Yet, in his view, they remain crucial: they form the basis for peer review; they provide the version that can be cited, etc. Some stake holders cannot act as if the corner and what lies beyond does not matter and rely only on what is short range, but also observable and verifiable. Now, the task of OA supporters is to convince the greatest number possible of stakeholders to make OA move. Getting mandates does not depend on researchers only in most cases (although the recent developments at Harvard, Stanford & alii offer some hope in this regard). Journal editors, administrators, granting agencies all have their take on this issue, as do librarians who are crucial partners. With some of them, Harnad's argument will work and have worked. With others, they don't, at least not yet. With yet others, they look scary (e.g. some journal editors who also happen to be researchers). Harnad might respond that only researchers interest him. Fair enough. However, researcher are not exactly as Harnad portrays them. Most researchers are not stellar enough to disregard other dimensions of their environment. On the contrary, they spend a great deal of time trying to manipulate this environment to their advantage. Their very fragility will make them look at Open Access with great trepidation. This, I believe, is one of the root causes behind the slow progress of mandates. Inertia and fear. Berating such people does not do much good. It is this absolutely fundamental point that is still lost on most OA advocates today. And it is obvious why most OA advocates don't notice or take it into account: Because we are still so far away from universal OA of either hue, Green or Gold. Green OA Can Be Mandated, Gold OA Cannot. But here there is an equally fundamental difference: Green OA self-archiving can be accelerated and scaled up to universality (and this can be done at virtually zero cost) by the research community alone -- i.e., research institutions (largely universities) and research funders -- by mandating Green OA. This is formally correct. The devil is in the details. Getting mandates is hard work. All of us who try pushing such mandates in various environments know it. So, yes, let us push for mandates as vigorously as we can, but let us not delude ourselves: this is going to be a long and arduous task. In contrast, Gold OA depends on publishers, costs money (often substantial money), and cannot be mandated by institutions and funders: All they can do is throw money at it -- already-scarce research money, and at an asking-price that is today vastly inflated compared to what the true cost would eventually be if the conversion to Gold OA were driven by journal cancellations, following as a result of universal Green OA. For if universal Green OA, in completely solving the research access problem, did eventually make subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of recovering publishing costs, then (a small part of) the windfall institutional savings from the journal cancellations themselves -- rather than scarce research funds -- could be used to pay for the Gold OA. Actually, this is wrong. Gold OA does not depend on publishers exclusively. There is an assumption that runs deep among many people arguing both for and against OA, it is that it is some some of business fundamentally. This is indeed true of many journals, but this is not universally true. For one thing, in many countries, journals are heavily subsidized, either directly or in nature. In fact, the subsidies in nature are sometimes criticized by commercial publishers as providing unfair competition... In some countries, OA journals are simply and entirely bankrolled by the government because the government that also pays for scientific research simply calculates that publishing is an intyegral part of the researhc process. This is the argument behind the support for SciELO in more than a dozen countries. What is true is that mandating publishing in gold journals is not an obviously good thing. Researchers seek not only the greatest accessibility to obtain the greatest visibility; they also seek the greatest prestige possible. Now, prestige has been elaborated in curious ways in the last four decades. Counting citations has come to be called impact and great impact has been equated with prestige. Those journals that could enter into the citation counting game (i.e., for a long time, the journals selected by a private company that tracks citations) could provide quantitative reasons behind their prestige. However, those who could not enter in that group could not use similar arguments to bolster their own claims. Again, SciELO provides an interesting example in that they quickly decided to create their own metrics because they were meeting such difficulties in being accepted by the SCI people. So instead of focusing all efforts today on ensuring that all institutions and funders worldwide mandate Green OA, as soon as possible, many OA advocates continue to be fixated instead on trying to solve the journal affordability problem directly, by wasting precious research money on paying for Gold OA (at a time when publication is still being fully paid for by subscriptions, whereas research is sadly underfunded) and by encouraging researchers to publish in Gold OA journals. This is being done at a time when (1) Gold OA journals are few, especially among the top journals in each field, (2) the top Gold OA journals themselves are expensive, and, most important of all, (3) publishing in them is completely unnecessary -- if the objective is, as it ought to be, to provide immediate OA. For OA can be provided through immediate Green OA self-archiving. Worst of all, even as they talk of spending what money they have to spare on Gold OA, the overwhelming majority of institutions and funders (unlike FWF) still do not mandate Green OA! Only 80 out of at least 10,000 do so as yet. Here again, the costs presented here relate to situations where money is offered to schemes such as Springer's (in)famous "open choice". I agree that this is not the best way to go and I harbour a great deal of skepticism with regard to so-called "author pays" business plans. However, the SciELO scheme must not be forgotten. There everything is free, for authors as well as readers. This is the right way to go for Gold journals. What must be seen here is that supporting OA rests on a variety of convergent interests. For the Brazilian government (or the State of Sao paulo), this support is warranted because it provides accessibility, and it gives a tool to promote local or national research. This is another example of how research does not live in a vacuum. Governments want also to promote the research they finance and the labs where that research is carried out. Visibility, such as the one provided by IR's, is not enough. Publishing in prestigious foreign journals often proves difficult for reasons that are not exclusively related to issues of quality. Governments want also to have access to journals that grant prestige while accepting results from locally funded research. To put it very succinctly (and probably cryptically), scientific research often conflates two variables: quality (which relies on thresholds of acceptability) and excellence (which relies on competition). Journals are instruments largely oriented toward competition; yet a large part of scientific research aims at producing quality results but cannot entertain the ambition of competing among the best. Science needs both elements, but the rhetoric surrounding it often focuses exclusively on excellence, not quality. "Gold Fever." That is why I have labelled this widespread (and, in my view, completely irrational and counterproductive) fixation on Gold OA and journal affordability "Gold Fever": trying to pre-emptively convert journals to Gold OA -- to buy OA, in effect -- at a time when all that is needed, and needed urgently, is to mandate Green OA, and then to let nature take care of the rest. Let nature take care of the rest is, of course, what lies beyond the corner... (Universal Green OA will eventually make subscriptions unsustainable and induce publishers to cut costs, jettison the print edition, jettison the online PDF edition, offload all archiving and access-provision onto the distributed network of Institutional and Central Repositories, downsize to just providing the service of peer-review alone, and convert to the Gold OA model for cost recovery -- but at the far lower price of peer review alone, rather than at the inflated pre-emptive asking prices that are being needlessly paid today, without the prerequisite downsizing to peer review alone). One might ask why the research communities need "journals" to organize peer review. Before Robert Maxwell's reforms of peer review, learned societies and their idiosyncratic hierarchies organized peer review. The journals reflected the society, not the reverse. In other words, to see or describe Green OA as only a partial or short-term solution for OA is not only (in my view) inaccurate, but it is also counterproductive for OA -- retarding instead of facilitating the requisite universal adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates: Green OA is a partial (and crucial) part of OA. Gold journals provide other supporting elements to the whole OA movement. If universal Green OA were just a partial or short-term solution, for precisely what problem would it be just a partial or short-term solution? For universal Green OA is a full, permanent solution for the research accessibility problem; that in turn removes all of the urgency and importance of the journal affordability problem -- which can then eventually, at its own natural pace, be solved by institutions cancelling subscriptions once universal Green OA has been reached (since all research is thereafter freely accessible to all users universally), thereby inducing journals to downsize and convert to Gold. Instead trying to promote the Gold OA publication-charge model now, pre-emptively, is not only unnecessary and wasteful (spending more money, at an arbitrarily high asking price, instead of saving it), but it distracts from and blurs what is the real, urgent need, and the real solution, which is to mandate Green OA, now, universally. That -- and not pre-emptively paying Gold OA's arbitrary current asking price -- is what needs to be done today! I agree that promoting the publication-charge model is limited and probably wrong. Again, I bring up the SciELO model to this publication-charge approach. See: "Gold Fever" and "Trojan Folly." OA Books? The third most important distraction and deterrent to universal Green OA is to conflate OA's primary target -- journal articles, which are all, without exception, in all disciplines, author give-aways, written solely for the sake of research uptake and impact, not for royalty income -- with books, which are not OA's primary target, are not written solely for research uptake and impact, have immediate cost-recovery implications for the publisher, book by book, are not nearly as urgent a matter as journal-article access for research, and will, like Gold OA, evolve naturally of their own accord once universal Green OA has prevailed. When one speaks of books, one ought to be precise. We are speaking about monographs that are the dominant research currency in all the humanities and many social sciences. We are talking about books that are often subsidized in many countries. We are talking about books that sell only a few hundred copies at best nowadays, and they are sold relatively slowly in many cases. We are talking about books where royalties appear to be little more than a throw back to a "commercial" situation that no longer dominates. Soon, most of these books will be produced exclusively on demand, or sold in electronic formats for new kinds of e-book readers. In short, we are talking about the most prestigious form of research results for very large segments of the academic community (some put it at over 50%). Scholars do not write monographs for royalties. If faced with the issue of being published, but without royalties, these authors will all accept because they need this monograph for promotion, grants, and prestige. In short, despite the thin royalty/commercial layer surrounding them, these publications enjoy a "social life" (Duguid) similar to articles in scientific journals. This is the reasoning behind the development of OA monographs such as OHP and OAPEN (for the sake of openness, I must state that I am associated with both endeavours). Pushing for OA monographs is not a retardant for OA in general. it is yet another way to make OA issues relevant to different categories of researcher that, otherwise, might not see the virtue of Open Access. As for the relative urgency of OA articles compared to monographs, it is all well and good to assert it when one sits pretty in a discipline totally converted to articles, but this does not respond to the needs of historians, philosophers and literature researchers. But for now, conflating OA with book access is simply another retardant on the urgent immediate priority, which is Green OA mandates (of which -- as we should keep reminding ourselves -- we still have only 80 out of 10,000, while we keep fussing instead, needlessly, about Gold OA, journal affordability, and book OA). (Having said that, however, it must be added that of course the funder has a say in attaching conditions to the publication of a book whose publication costs the funder subsidizes! But then the greatest care should be taken to separate those special cases completely from OA -- whose primary target is journal articles -- and Green OA mandates, whose sole target is journal articles.) I will leave the issue of data dormant here, although I believe it is another front that must be manned . The issue is very important. However, it is sufficiently different to warrant a distinct treatment. Data-Archiving. Like book OA -- and in contrast to OA's urgent, primary target: refereed-journal-article OA -- data OA is not yet a clearcut and exception-free domain. Please see these postings on data-archiving. [snip] Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum Jean-Claude Guédon Université de Montréal