Comment on Poynder on "Mistaking Intent For Action" (COPE)

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

RICHARD POYNDER: Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity: 
Mistaking intent for action? Open and Shut, 26 September 2009 
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2009/09/compact-for-open-access-publishing.html

COMMENT: It would be churlish of me to criticize Richard 
Poynder's friendly article, with most of which I can hardly 
disagree. So please consider the following a complimentary 
complement rather than a cavil:

(Hyperlinked version of this comment: 
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/634-guid.html )

Annual institutional subscriptions for annual incoming journals 
do not morph in any coherent or sensible way into annual 
institutional "memberships" for individual outgoing articles.

This is true of the multi-journal "Big Deal" subscriptions with 
journal-fleet publishers, and it is even more obvious with single 
journals: Are 10,000 universities supposed to have annual 
"memberships" in 25,000 journals on an annual pro-rated quota 
based on the number of articles each institution's researchers 
happen to have published in each journal last year? Or is this 
"membership" to be based on one global (and oligopolistic) 
"mega-deal" between a mega-consortium of publishers and a 
mega-consortium of institutions? (If this makes sense, why don't 
we do all our shopping this way, putting a whole new twist on 
globalisation?) Or is it just to save our familiar intuitions 
about subscriptions? Wouldn't it make more sense to scrap those 
intuitions, when they lead to absurdities like this?

Especially when they are unnecessary, as we can see if we remind 
ourselves what OA is really about. Open access is about access: 
about making all journal articles freely accessible online to all 
users. It is not about morphing institutional-subscription-based 
funding of publishing into institutional-membership-based funding 
of publishing. Indeed, it isn't about funding publishing at all, 
since it is not publishing that is in a crisis but institutional 
access.

Here's another way to look at it: The "serials crisis" is the 
fact that institutions cannot afford access to all the journal 
articles they need. They have to keep canceling more and more 
journals, thereby making their access less and less. If all 
institutions had free online access to all those journal articles 
then that would not make the journals any more affordable at 
current prices, but it would certainly make canceling them less 
of a big deal, because their content would be free online anyway.

And that is precisely the state of affairs that universal Green 
OA self-archiving mandates would deliver virtually overnight.

So why are institutions instead wasting their time and money 
fussing over how to fit the round peg of institutional 
subscriptions into the square hole of institutional memberships 
today, via pre-emptive Gold OA funding commitments that generate 
a lot of extra expense for very little extra access -- instead of 
providing Open Access to all of their own journal-article output 
by mandating Green OA self-archiving today?

That "the access and affordability problems are part and parcel 
of the larger serials crisis" is altogether the wrong way to look 
at it. The OA problem is access, and affordability is part and 
parcel of that problem today only inasmuch as alternatives to 
journal subscriptions increase access today -- which is very 
little, and at high cost, insofar as Gold OA is concerned 
(today).

So instead of waiting passively for journals to convert to the 
Gold standard, and instead of throwing scarce money at them 
pre-emptively to try to make it worth their while, why don't 
institutions simply make their own journal article output Green 
OA, today? That will generate universal (Green) OA with 
certainty, today.

If and when that universal Green OA should in turn eventually go 
on to generate journal cancellations to the point of making 
subscriptions unsustainable for covering the costs of 
publication, then that will be the time for journals to cut 
obsolete products and services for which there is no longer a 
market (such as the print edition, the PDF edition, archiving, 
access-provision and digital preservation, leaving all that to 
the global network of Green OA institutional repositories), along 
with their associated costs, and convert to Gold OA for covering 
the costs of what remains (largely just implementing peer 
review).

Unlike today -- when paid Gold OA is at best a useful 
proof-of-principle that publishing can be sustained without 
subscriptions and at worst a waste of scarce cash based on a 
premature and incoherent hope of morphing directly into universal 
Gold OA -- after universal Green OA each institution will have 
more than enough money to pay those much reduced publication 
costs (on an individual article basis, not via an institutional 
membership) from just a small fraction of its annual windfall 
savings from having cancelled all those subscriptions in which 
that money is tied up today.

Hence it is mandating Green OA that will rewire the "disconnect" 
between user and purchaser that Stuart Shieber deplores, putting 
paid to the inelastic need and demand of institutions for 
subscriptions because of their inelastic need and demand for 
access. The reconnect will not come from ("capped") Gold OA 
Compacts (like and SCOAP3 but from the cancelation pressure that 
universal Green OA will eventually generate -- once the demand 
for the obsolescent extras currently co-bundled with peer review 
fades out as the planet goes Green.

In other words, even if it is the affordability problem rather 
than OA that exercises you, the coherent way to morph from 
institutional subscriptions to universal Gold OA is via the 
mediation of universal Green OA mandates, not via a pre-emptive 
leap directly from the status quo to Gold via funding 
commitments, regardless of the price. Along the way, we will 
already have OA, solving the access problem, which is what OA 
itself is all about.

Stevan Harnad