** Cross-Posted ** On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Frederick Friend <ucyl...@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
Is it not amazing how, even in these difficult economic times, > governments can find extra cash to smooth over the mistakes in their own > policies! The extra £10 million for 30 UK universities to pay APCs to > publishers is a political gesture to counter the opposition to the UK > Government’s mistaken endorsement of the Finch Report proposals. Never mind > that the money could have been spent far more effectively in supporting > open access repositories! Never mind that the effect will be inflationary, > enabling publishers to raise the level of charge for APCs! Never mind that > the UK Government made exactly the same mistake 25 years ago in giving > university libraries £10 million to pay for the higher cost of journal > subscriptions, generosity which only poured petrol on the flames of journal > inflation and within a couple of years left libraries no better off! Never > mind that the UK Government has not thought through what to do when the £10 > million is used up and we are left with a publisher-led open access > infrastructure costing the UK taxpayer much more than an improved > repository OA infrastructure would do! In brief this extra money is a > short-term gesture still leaving the UK open access infrastructure worse > off then it was pre-Finch. > > For the UK Government announcement see > http://news.bis.gov.uk/Press-Releases/Government-invests-10-million-to-help-universities-move-to-open-access-67fac.aspx. > > Fred Friend > Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL > http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk > Fred is so right. At first, researchers will applaud: "More money for us [sort of]! Hurrah!" Then they will think: "But that money could have been spent on funding more research, of which there is already too little to go round…." And then they will realize that: - they are being steered toward journals they don't want to publish in, - forced to pay for an OA that they could have had with just a few gratis Green keystrokes, - forced to reach into their grants (or pockets!) when the 10M pounds run out, (since the UK, although it produces only 6% of the articles published annually worldwide, produces a lot more than what 10M will pay for at 1K per paper for Gold OA publishing fees: do the arithmetic, even assuming that the world only publishes a million refereed research journal papers per year, and then see how far £10M takes you for the UK's 60,000 papers at (say) £1K for Gold OA fees per paper: an order of magnitude shortfall) - and not only that they are gaining no more OA to the other 94% of research from the rest of the world, to which they need OA, - but that the UK's shift from mandating cost-free Green OA self-archiving to paying publishers extra for pricey Gold OA is actually making it harder for the rest of the world to mandate and provide the cost-free Green OA that everyone needs... The BIS's largesse would just be another case of (mostly) wasted funds (which should not be our main concern) if it weren't coupled with the completely gratuitous and self-injurious undermining of a virtually cost-free means of achieving the same local end -- and also achieving far more, globally, in an affordable, scaleable and sustainable way. But all of this would be fixed, if one 9-word clause were expunged from the new RCUK OA policy: the one forcing researchers to choose Gold over Green. For then this BIS largesse would just be a hand-out to pay for Gold OA (voluntarily) for 1000 UK research papers: 1/60th of the UK's annual research output. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/930-Simple-9-Word-Strike-Out-Tweak-to-Fix-RCUK-Open-Access-Mandate.html I will be discussing this (and how to make Green OA mandates more effective) in Oxford on Tuesday: http://digital-research.oerc.ox.ac.uk/programme/tues-am-keynote Stevan Harnad
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