> What I disagree with Stevan on is the primacy of 'green' over 'gold'. He > regards that more or less as a given, even an axiom; I don't.
The primacy of green over gold is not an axiom. It is based on reasons and evidence   The overall portion of OA globally is 20.4%, 8.5% gold and 11.4% green for 2009 according to the recent study by Bjork et al.   So, the edge is slightly to Green, but the score is pretty close at 11-8. The more important score is 80-20 in favour of subscription access, which is just terrible from a sectoral point of view. At this point, freely available research is harder to get at than TV, movies and music. Since 2006, there has been an exponential rise in mandates and no difference in the proportion of green to gold OA (it was 11-8 then too).  So, this is very disappointing, we are still waiting for the increase in mandates to show a strong increase in proportion of global OA.  So long as a good proportion of research is under lock and key, it is hard to see any drop in the costs to libraries, since people need not 20% of the articles in the journal, but all of them. Going back to the 20th century, hardly any of that literature is OA. So as a proportion of the 50 million articles that exist (Jinha, 2010 "Article 50 million"), still a very small proportion are accessible free on the internet and since libraries need to give their researchers all of it, publishers can charge them according to that demand.  I don't see yet any drop in the subscription costs to libraries, which was sort of the economic point of green OA.   Where I go to school, I already had access to all the green OA articles because my university already subscribes to all the journals that they are published in. Green OA is a duplication of access. Where OA counts the most is in the developing world, who have gone from nearly zero to nearly 20% access to global research in 10 years and where it is the green and gold routes combined that make a difference.    The axiom is that there is an absolute advantage to accessing any article, and an absolute disadvantage to not being able to access it, by whatever route that takes place. (1) Most authors (80%) are not providing OA of their own accord today -- either Green or Gold OA. Authors should archive, whether you have been mandated to or not. The first thing is to make it easy to do, like recycling. The second to 'mandate' it, like recycling. But the best thing to do would be to teach it as part of the basics of publishing articles. Grad students need to get this in their education. Then, not only would it be habitual for the next generation, if profs and departments are teaching it, they are more likely to be doing it. It should become part of the culture. The argument is, if you're an author, archive. (2) Green OA costs the author nothing (and the institution next to nothing per article) The argument for the author is the same, archiving costs nothing. Get off your ass and do it.  (3) Gold OA (BMC, PLOS) costs extra money per article (from the author, institution or funder) Not necessarily. You can publish a journal without charging authors or readers.   The majority of gold OA journals don't charge authors.  But wait a minute! Subscriptions cost much more money, don't they? The whole point of OA, I thought, was that subscription journals cost too much money to readers (and since all authors are readers, authors), and institutions (and university libraries are mostly funded by the government in the first place).  And subscriptions to a world of journals where 11.9% of the work is greenOA archived costs about the same as subscribing to a world where none of it is. Except you have to build repositories and pay people who sit on committees to establish OA policies. So far, neither green or gold OA are saving libraries much money. They are not having much of an impact on the big universities in the West whose researchers already had near comprehensive access to research. Sure, once in a while there is a complaint that this or that journal was cancelled, but really, it has never been that big an issue. As a global issue though, it's HUGE.  The argument to journals again is, don't charge readers, don't charge authors. The argument to authors/readers, is don't pay out-of-pocket to publish, and don't pay out-of-pocket to access. Do we need a union? (4) Authors are even less likely to do what they are not already doing of their own accord if it costs extra money It oughn't cost the researcher their own money. Either the Gold OA journal doesn't charge or the money comes from the same source as it does for subscriptions, whether by author funds, as part of research grant or when their institution pays a subscription for their authors to publish rather than for the readers to read. Few would pay out of pocket for Gold OA, just as few would shell out $40 to buy a single article from a publisher.  The argument to authors/readers, is that you shouldn't have to pay out of pocket for any of this, it's inefficient and inequitable and downright annoying.  (5) Most journals (90%) are not Gold OA. The whole point to supporting gold OA is to change that. The argument to institutions is to mandate. The argument to publishers is that the best thing to do is to publish wihout charges to readers or authors (I call it OA360).  Gold OA is not a better or worse argument, just has a different audience. It's the best option for publishers because subscriptions are a losing battle, if not now, then soon and especially if green OA is successful. If you are a university library, you're probably interested in supporting both as a long-term plan. So far, you're not seeing that much return, but you're doing your part for the sake of the planet, and it's a good strategy for the future. (6) Green OA can be mandated Gold OA could be mandated by deregulating copyright. The government could get out of the business of enforcing copyright laws which force them to pay to get back research they already funded, and whereby publishers can really only enforce copyright by suing people who are reading research. Do we want to sue people for illegally downloading research? Researchers are more polite about copyright, unfortunately, than music downloaders, and reading research isn't much fun, which explains why we don't have a big illegal research article downloading problem. But it occurs in the developing world, and it will only grow so long as subscriptions are around. I don't think it's wrong to illegally download research, especially if you're a doctor trying to save a life. (7) Gold OA can only be subsidized Subscriptions are a massive subsidy to a publishing industry that is out of date much larger than the subsidy to gold OA. What's wrong with shifting the subsidy to gold OA? Why not pay journals (or peer-review services) to publish OA for everyone instead of paying them to publish to some. (8) Most of the potential money to pay for Gold OA is currently tied up in subscriptions Exactly. Green OA doesn't help with that at the moment, because in any particular journal, there is no way of knowing which articles will have been archived, so you still need to subscribe to the whole journal if you're a library. If you're a library you can't anticipate which article your patron needs. The argument for libraries is to push for copyright deregulation, allowing your patrons the freedom to copy any article of scholarship at will. Then you can help your patrons get research from the global library, instead of spending your time and money on stupid products that publishers sell you on top of the content, that is supposed to help you find the content but doesn't work very well because it's not comprehensive or even very good. (9) Gold OA costs include much more than just peer review costs today Yes, and because the 'market' for journal research is such a captive one, journals waste everyone's money. We don't even need journals anymore, what we need is peer-review services. Call them journals if you want, waste paper printing them if you want. They are websites with html and pdf documents. The only value in them beyond that is peer-review, and the content which are both provided free of charge. Honestly. The websites are not even very good, and they seem to get worse the larger and more profitable the publisher is. (10) Green OA provides the infrastructure (repositories, access-provision, archiving) that allows publishing costs to be reduced to just peer review costs  I agree. But if you are a journal publisher, the best argument is still Gold OA. If we recall when all this began, there was a 'serials crisis'. Libraries cancelled subscriptions and everyone wanted to reduce the amount of money going out to publishing and increase the amount of access. If you want to reduce the amount of overall cost of access, that is a reduction in the amount of revenues that can be got by publishers. That's a zero-sum game. If authors habitually get your journals to do the work of peer-review and then make the articles available for free anyway (minus some final copy-edit polish that no one ultimately cares about), what is the point of subscriptions?  There is a point at which success of green OA means the decline of subscription publishing, otherwise green OA hasn't really achieved anything for library budgets.  So, likely the deal between libraries and publishers (or peer-review services) will switch to the BMC model, which charges institutions a fee, which is fine because the authors don't pay. What if you are an author at an institution that can't afford it, or a non-institutionalized author? What should be mandated for the sake of equity and freedom of speech, is that peer-review is blind to whether the author has any money. If the article is accepted and there are no funds accessible to the author, the journal should publish it anyway. Really, how hard is it to post an article to a website?    For all these reasons, Green OA needs to come before Gold OA; and it needs to be mandated, for free, before institutions and funders commit their scarce funds to paying for Gold OA: Funds are not scarce, it's a question of having a wasteful and inequitable system. If we can afford this stupidity, how can we say funds are scarce? uOttawa spends $7million dollars a year to access the pretty much the exact same body of research (18,000 online titles) that uConcordia subscribes to. Funds are scarce outside the large institutions of the West, where people can't afford subscriptions or article fees to access research that is not OA. So, if gold OA is supported, that's good. If there is a green OA mandate, that's good. They are not mutually exclusive and the overall cost-benefit analysis to institutions must take into account that neither gold nor green OA has saved them much money, and both are long-term plans. Would be wise then to support both, since as Harnad says, we're going to need gold OA if green OA has any success in the zero-sum game of subscription costs and library budgets.  What is urgent for research and researchers today -- and immediately attainable via Green OA self-archiving mandates -- is OA, not publishing reform or re-use rights. (Moreover, mandating Green OA today is the fastest and surest way to achieve OA today, but also to achieve Gold OA and Re-Use Rights tomorrow.  What would be better is to affirm a universal right to access research, and have the business model work on and around that basis.  It would save a lot of time if we made scholarly articles all an exception to the copying part of copyright (everyone would be free to copy it).  Isn't all use of scholarly articles always for personal study?  I find it annoying that scholarly writing is so terribly dull, but it seems to me that few people would read scholarship for amusement, people read it for study, always. It's scholarship. So the reform should be that peer-reviewed scholarship is not alllowed to be restricted for commercial sale (for which the authors receive no royalties and no benefit), and always allowed to be copied. Then use the money that is paid into subscriptions to compensate the losers in this reform, allowing them to change the business model to Open Access 360. First things first. Grasp what is within your immediate reach (Green OA). If you instead over-reach, you will miss what is already in your grasp, and just keep delaying the optimal and inevitable even longer. What is immediately within your grasp changes with regard to whether you are an author, institution, government or publisher. If you're a publisher, it's immediately within your grasp to stop restricting content with digital locks in order to charge for it and license it Creative Commons instead.  If you are a team of terribly good lawyers, you could probably even achieve the deregulation of copyright for scholarly works and put an end to both the outdated system of subscriptions, and our current inefficient mixed system of subscriptions, mandates and author funds. From a rational point of view, one article is not more valuable than another, it depends who you are and what your interest is. One researcher is not deserving of more privileges than another. The system ought to be completely seamless. Without a legal reform, it will take another hundred years to liberate the works of the Big Science period of post-WWII and pre-OA which are typically copyright transferred. With a change in law, you'll get there quicker in the end. Without a change in the law, thought there is no difference in the value of an OA article and non-OA article, the researcher without privileges and who cannot pay would have to break the law to access the non-OA article. What if it was a doctor trying to save a life? Should they be allowed to access the article, or not?  As the author, you should archive it. As the institution, you should mandate it. As a library, you should ensure one way or another that your patron has access to it, your patron is a doctor! As the publisher, you should not restrict the content, lives are at stake. As the lawmaker, you should have made it illegal to restrict access to the article, or legal for the doctor to access it, whichever way you want to look at it. As the doctor, you should access it regardless of copyright and save the life. As the taxpayer, you should pay once for the research and be able to access the article. As the patient, you should be in the hands of people who have seamless access to all the research articles that concern you.  (it is not as if medicine is actually more important than other sorts of research, it's just more dramatic and direct as an example.)  Arif Jinha Stevan Harnad > Andrew A. Adams wrote: >> >> I'm not wishing to start or continue an argument with Jan, but to post >> some >> philosophical musings prompted by his comment that he dislikes "mandates". >> >> I disagree that mandates are always wrong. The so-called "publish or >> perish" >> "mandate" has severe negative consequences for academic, that most here >> will >> know about (least publishable unit, skewing research progress, >> particularly >> in fields that require significant groundwork before a flurry of >> publications >> of results, etc etc etc. >> >> However, the "mandates" placed by institutions on their staff and on staff >> and institutions by funders are not always negative. It seems quite right >> to >> me that funders mandate that the work they fund has its results >> disseminated >> widely. This means that they require (or, mandate) that papers be produced >> and, when published, be made available as widely as possible. Without >> them, >> some staff would indulge in potentially world-changing research which had >> its >> impact delayed or denied. Academic freedom, like many other freedoms, is >> not >> unbounded, and comes with responsibilities. One of those responsibilities >> is >> to disseminate the results of one's work widely, balancing the need/desire >> to >> do further work with the necessity of transmitting the results already >> done. >> >> >> >> -- >> Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp >> Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and >> Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics >> Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ >> >> >
