Perhaps Stevan, I should have added that our Document Delivery improves our level of use of OA too. The Document Delivery people make a check that the requested article is not available OA before they place a per-article order. They know all the tricks. If found to be OA the requester is advised of the location by email and enlightened about services such as DOAJ, BASE and Google Scholar. We don't then give them the article, but make them get it themselves. Thus we increase the skills and use of OA by our researchers (in reading articles) and hope some of this rubs off on author behaviour. It also automatically focuses on the more active researchers.
I agree about your Green and Gold characterization, because clearly this is still in default a toll-access route, though a pay-per-article rather than a pay-per-journal or bundle subscription. In person I would argue with you about it being as much almost-OA as The Button, and certainly much more reliable. This is an important factor for researchers. However, I do not see any value in arguing that by email. You are of course absolutely correct that viewed from Australia and New Zealand (and China and Japan), Button requests are almost never instant because of time-zones. With only 3% of the world's scientific literature being Australian, it cannot be otherwise, even with 100% Green. However, I will note that the policy encourages online usage by researchers, and because it diverts money away from subscriptions towards the service, it contributes to make the 'Kuhnian revolution' that we all desire in the thinking of librarians and academics and the management of their budgets. The service is funded by extra cancellations, of course - we don't have any extra money. You can therefore rely that is run efficiently, of course. It is then a small step to using the same or similar funds for APCs, and the researchers need never notice! Well not much - they would have to forward the APC invoice to the Library to pay. We also begin to think more about article-quality rather than journal-quality, and that surely is a good thing, for research,, peer-review functions, scientometrics, and OA. Just thinking ahead, sensibly, really. A modest step, but it seems to work well. Arthur From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tuesday, 17 September 2013 2:25 PM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Disruption vs. Protection On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Arthur Sale <a...@ozemail.com.au> wrote: At a severe risk of offending Stevan, I write to say that my University has practised an almost-OA policy for at least 15 years that falls into neither the Green nor Gold category.... we offer a free (to the researcher) automated document delivery service to any researcher... for an article we do not subscribe to. No offence at all! But individual article access via pay-to-view <https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=q9A3UsyqMcjgyQHitICAAw#q=amsci+(subscri ption+license+pay-per-view)+harnad> (e.g., interlibrary loan) -- like subscription access and license access -- are simply variants of the toll access, in contrast with which "open access" was coined and to remedy which the OA movement was launched. It's toll access no matter who is paying the access tolls. And OA means toll-free online access. There's nothing "almost-OA" about any kind of toll access. The button is almost-OA because although it may not be immediate, and although it may not be certain, it is certainly toll-free. But none of this has anything to do with the Green/Gold distinction, which is about whether the toll-free access is provided by the author (Green) or the journal (Gold). (I'm sure Arthur won't do it, but I hope no one else will come back with "but the Gold OA APC is a toll, so Gold OA is toll-access too." For pedants we could write out "toll-access" as "access-toll to the user or to the user's institution." When an author (or his institution) pays to publish (whether Gold-OA or non-OA) the payment is not a user access toll. Everyone agrees that the true expenses of publishing have to be paid by someone. But only subscription/licence/pay-per-view pays them via access tolls, denying access if the toll are not paid. Gold OA does not. And for Green OA, subscriptions -- while they remain sustainable -- have already paid the publication costs, so Green OA is just supplementary access, for those whose institutions can't afford the subscription toll. -- What the "true expense" of publishing is is another matter. By my lights, we won't know till universal Green OA has prevailed. And I'm betting they will turn out to be just the cost of implementing peer review.) There is a delay sure, but it is the same delay as the Request-A-Copy button, and more certain. Agreed that paid pay-per-view is more certain than the button (just as paid subscription access and paid licensed access are). Bur I would not be sure they're both equally delayed: In principle, a user could click a request and the author could click to comply within one minute of one another, if they are both at their keyboards. (Unlikely if one is in Oz!) I'd also say that the uncertainty as to whether the author will comply is rather small... These issues are complex. The subscription decisions we make in libraries are binary (either your subscribe or you don't), but the criteria we have to use in making those decisions are not binary-we're typically considering multiple criteria (relevance, price, cost per download, demonstrated demand, etc.) that exist on a continuum. One thing is for certain, though: the more a journal's content is available for free, and the quicker it becomes available for free, the less likely it is that we'll maintain a subscription. I think that's the only rational position to take when there are so many journals out there that our faculty want, and that we're not subscribing to because we're out of money. Agreed. But the point of contention was not about cancelling journals based on what percentage of their content was Green OA but about cancelling journals if their publishers do not embargo Green OA. Stevan Harnad
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