Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Fytton Rowland wrote:

> Stevan's reply to Brian is precisely what one would have expected him to
> say, given his previous statements.  Like Stevan, I agree that
> peer-reviewed "journals" should stay, though exactly what a "journal" will
> look like in the middle-distance future is arguable.  The majority of
> journals, as he also points out, are toll-access still.
> 
> However, Brian had specifically talked about "in the long run".  The
> issue, which Stevan usually specifically excludes talking about, but
> others of us may want to think about, is this: What happens if we are all
> merrily self-archiving our published papers, and thus no-one needs to buy
> journals any more, so they go out of business and thus can't organise the
> peer-review and editing processes any more?  Stevan tends to say "let's
> self-archive and worry about the other thing if it happens".  Others of us
> may wish to do slightly more pro-active crystal-ball gazing.

Actually, I tend to say I have stopped speculating about hypothetical
future contingencies in the interests of present certainties, but if
forced, I would repeat the speculation I have already made, and with which
I have already replied to this question many, many times before. Here
it is again in longhand (instead of just a link, which people apparently
tend to ignore):

Source: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2

4.2 Hypothetical Sequel:

Self-archiving is sufficient to free the refereed research literature
(steps i-iv, section 4.1). We can also guess at what may happen after
that, but these are really just guesses. Nor does anything depend on their
being correct. For even if there is no change whatsoever -- even if
Universities continue to spend exactly the same amounts on their
access-toll budgets as they do now -- the refereed literature will have
been freed of all access/impact barriers forever.

However, it is likely that there will be some changes as a consequence of
the freeing of the literature by author/institution self-archiving. This
is what those changes might be:

v.  Users will prefer the free version?

    It is likely that once a free, online version of the refereed
    research literature is available, not only those researchers who
    could not access it at all before, because of toll-barriers at their
    institution, but virtually all researchers will prefer to use the
    free online versions.

    Note that it is quite possible that there will always continue to be
    a market for the toll-based options (on-paper version, publisher's
    on-line PDF, deluxe enhancements) even though most users use the
    free versions. Nothing hangs on this.

vi.  Publisher toll revenues shrink, Library toll savings grow?

    But if researchers do prefer to use the free online literature,
    it is possible that libraries may begin to cancel journals, and as
    their windfall toll savings grow, journal publisher toll-revenues
    will shrink. The extent of the cancellation will depend on the
    extent to which there remains a market for the toll-based add-ons,
    and for how long.

    If the toll-access market stays large enough, nothing else need
    change.  

vii.  Publishers downsize to become providers of the peer-review 
      service plus optional add-on products? 

It will depend entirely on the size of the remaining market for the
toll-based options whether and to what extent journal publishers will have
to down-size to providing only the essentials: The only essential,
indispensable service is peer review.

viii.  Peer-review service costs funded by author-institution out of
       reader-institution toll savings?

    If publishers can continue to cover costs and make a decent profit
    from the toll-based optional add-ons market, without needing to
    down-size to peer-review provision alone, nothing much changes.

    But if publishers do need to abandon providing the toll-based
    products altogether (for lack of a market) and to scale down instead
    to providing only the peer-review service, then universities, having
    saved 100% of their annual access-toll budgets, will have plenty of
    annual windfall savings from which to pay for their own researchers'
    continuing (and essential) annual journal-submission peer-review costs
    (10-30%); the rest of their savings (70-90%) they can spend as they
    like (e.g., on books -- plus a bit for Eprint Archive maintenance).

[Note added today: Those costs will be precisely the costs of what we have
now come to call "Open Access Journals" ("gold") -- Except that today we
are simply arbitrarily assuming what the essential products, services and
costs should and would be, whereas above it is the market that decides
what is essential and what can be dispensed with in a green world (i.e.,
100% OA through self-archiving), as well as how much the true costs are.
In other words, gold journals are premature: OA itself, provided by green
self-archiving, will sort out what the essentials and their costs really
are, and what options continue to have a market. Today there is even still
a market for the paper edition! It is clearly premature to speculate about
what people will want and be willing to continue paying for in a 100%
green (self-archived) world. We just need to go ahead and do it, to find
out. My own interest is in getting that 100% OA provided as soon as
possible, for the sake of research and researchers, not in continuing to
do next to nothing, while instead second-guessing the future! I think part
of this paralysis comes from continuing to conflate the journal
pricing/affordability problem with the journal-article access/impact
problem: They are not the same problem, even though the first helped draw
our attention to the second. Nor do they have the same solution.]

See "Publishers' Future" and "Waiting for Gold" FAQs:
    http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#17.Publishers
    http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31.Waiting

    Relevant Prior American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum Subject Threads:

    [SNIP]

Stevan Harnad