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Re: Institutional Mandates and Institutional OA Repository Growth

You make it all sound so simple, Stevan, but there is nothing simple about a transition from Green OA to Gold OA, including the redirection of savings from journal subscriptions to funding Gold OA journals, because as many wise people like Jim O'Donnell have pointed out on this list, universities don't work that way. Wishing it were so does not make it so. And by talking about peer review only, you oversimplify what is involved in journal publishing, which requires skills that go beyond simply conducting peer review and that are not most economically carried out by faculty, who are not trained for such tasks and whose dedication of time to them detracts from the exercise of their main talents as researchers. You are also wrong in interpreting PRISM as just another repetition of the same old tired anti-OA rhetoric. As a member of the publishing community whose press is a member of the PSP (but not an endorser of PRISM), I can tell you that this is not just more of the same. Whether we are getting close to a "tipping point" is of course a matter of conjecture, but then so is the overall benefit from Green OA, which you always state as though it were an established fact rather than a hypothesis with some evidence in support of it yet hardly overwhelming evidence at this point in time.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


On Wed, 19 Sep 2007, Sandy Thatcher wrote:


Ah, yes, and if you'll remember our prior discussion about open
access, Stevan, I warned that just this "success" might be the
"tipping point" to drive a host of commercial and society
publishers out of the business of journal publishing. One "tipping
point" causes another? Witness, as partial proof, the reaction of
STM publishers represented by the PRISM initiative. I read that as
a warning that, if the government forces a change in their business
model, they may just walk away from the business. I assume you
wouldn't consider that a bad thing at all, but my question would be
what kind of structure will take its place and what expectations
will universities have of their presses to pick up the slack?

What is remarkable, Sandy, is how actual empirical facts (very few)
are being freely admixed, willy-nilly, with fact-free speculations
for which there is, and continues to be zero empirical evidence,
and, in many cases, decisive and familiar counterevidence, both
empirical and logical.

Nothing has changed since our prior discussions except that there
have (happily) been some more Green OA mandates (total adopted: 32,
plus 8 more further proposed mandates).
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

There has been no "tipping point." Just *talk* about tipping points,
and that talk about tipping points has been going on for years.

There has been no one driven out of business, nor any empirical
evidence of a trend toward being driven out of business. Just *talk*
of being driven out of business, and that talk about being driven
out of business has been going on for years.

And as to the "partial proof" in the form of the STM/PRISM
"reaction" -- that very same reaction (with the very same false,
alarmist arguments) has been voiced, verbatim, by the very same
publisher groups (STM, AAP, ALPSP), over and over, for over a decade
now. And they have been debunked just as often (see long list of
links below). But that certainly hasn't been enough to make the
publishers' anti-OA lobby cease and desist. Do you consider the
relentless repetition, at louder and louder volume, of exactly the
same specious and evidence-free claims, to be "proof" of anything,
partial or otherwise?

And the phrase "the government forces a change in their business
model" is just as false a description of what is actually going on
when it is spoken in your own well-meaning words as when it is
voiced by PRISM and Eric Dezenhall: The government is *not* forcing
a change in a business model. The funders of tax-payer-funded
research -- and, increasingly, universities, who are not "the
government" at all! -- are insisting that the researchers they fund
and employ make their peer-reviewed research freely available to all
would-be users online, in line with the purpose of conducting and
funding and publishing research in the first place.

This quite natural (and overdue) adaptation to the online age on the
part of the research community -- Green OA -- may or may not lead to
a transition to Gold OA publishing: no one knows whether, or when it
will. But what is already known is that OA itself, whether Green or
Gold, is enormously beneficial to research, researchers, their
institutions and funders, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying
public that funds research and for whose benefit it is funded,
conducted and published. (OA is also a secondary benefit to
education and the developing world.)

So the "tipping point" for Green OA itself is an unalloyed benefit
for everyone but the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry,
whether or not it leads to a second tipping point and a transition
to Gold OA.

Reality today, to repeat, is a growth in Green OA mandates, not a
tipping point (let alone two), not a subscription decline, not
publishers going out of business, not government pressure toward
another publishing model.

You ask "what kind of structure will take its place and what
expectations will universities have of their presses to pick up the
slack?" I presume you are referring to the multiple hypothetical
conditional: *if* Green OA mandates reach the tipping point that
generates 100% Green OA, and *if* that in turn generates journal
cancellations that reach the tipping point that generates a
transition to Gold OA? The answer (which I have provided many times
before) is simple: The "structure" will be Gold OA, funded out of (a
part of) the institutional cancellation savings.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm

And this is not about publishing in general, commercial, society,
university, or otherwise. It is only about peer-reviewed journal
publishing, and their hypothetical transition to Gold OA under
cancellation pressure from mandated Green OA.

Stevan Harnad