On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Michael Eisen <mbei...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stevan- > Saying that people should shun gold OA because there are spammers pushing > journals is like saying people should never take prescription drugs because > there are spammers trying to sell cheap prescription drugs, or that nobody > should ever do business with Nigeria. I agree completely. And I didn't say people should shun (real) gold OA. I said fool's gold OA spam was giving OA (both green and gold) a bad name. (I do, however, say, often, that institutions, funders or individual authors spending money pre-emptively on (real) gold OA is premature and a waste of both money and time *unless the institution or funder has first mandated green OA for all articles* -- and the individual authors are providing it...) > But if you're going to use the standard of email inboxes being filled with > nonstop entreaties to pursue a path to open access, surely it is green OA > that would suffer the most :-). Mike, do you really think that my email CCs -- to individuals whose identity I know, and to lists dedicated to OA matters -- in the interests of promoting (and explaining!) OA can be fairly likened to the indiscriminate, industrial-scale spamming of fool's gold OA publishers in the interest of peddling their products? Stevan Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac..uk/15753/ ABSTRACT: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA. Harnad, S. (2010) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community, 21 (3-4). pp. 86-93. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/ ABSTRACT: Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA. Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac..uk/18514/ ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et alâs (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (âOpen Access,â OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the worldâs peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et alâs modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research. Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OAâs âSlumbering Giantâ: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking, 14 (1). pp. 51-68. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac..uk/17298/ ABSTRACT: Universities (the universal research-providers) as well as research funders (public and private) are beginning to make it part of their mandates to ensure not only that researchers conduct and publish peer-reviewed research (âpublish or perishâ), but that they also make it available online, free for all. This is called Open Access (OA), and it maximizes the uptake, impact and progress of research by making it accessible to all potential users worldwide, not just those whose universities can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it is published. Researchers can provide OA to their published journal articles by self-archiving them in their own universityâs online repository. Students and junior faculty â the next generation of research providers and consumers -- are in a position to help accelerate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by their universities, ushering in the era of universal OA.
