Revised Critique

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

What follows is a (revised and expanded) critique of the "Compact
for Open-Access Equity." (Hyperlinked version of critique:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/627-guid.html
).

The Compact http://www.oacompact.org/compact/ states:

"We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of
the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability
of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a
stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide
open access to their journals' contents. Those universities and
funding agencies receiving the bene?ts of publisher services
should recognize their collective and individual responsibility
for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and
public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their
continuing operation.

"Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the
timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting
reasonable publication charges for articles written by its
faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for
which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.
We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to
join us in this commitment, to provide a suf?cient and
sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the
scholarly literature." /signed/
http://www.oacompact.org/signatories/

My critique is based on points that I have already made many
times before, unheeded. All I can do is echo them yet again (and
hope!):

Regardless of the size of the current asking price ("reasonable"
or unreasonable), it is an enormous strategic mistake for a
university or research funder to commit to pre-emptive payment of
Open Access (OA) journal ("Gold OA") publishing fees today --
until and unless the university or funder has first mandated OA
self-archiving ("Green OA") for all of its own published journal
article output (irrespective of whether the article happens to be
published in an OA or a non-OA journal).

There are so far five signatories to the "Compact for Open-Access
Equity." Two of them have mandated Green OA (Harvard and MIT) and
three have not (Cornell, Dartmouth, Berkeley). Many non-mandating
universities have also been committing to the the pre-emptive
SCOAP3 consortium.

If Harvard's and MIT's example of first mandating Green OA is
followed, and hence Green OA mandates grow globally ahead of Gold
OA commitments, then there's no harm done.

But if it is instead pre-emptive commitments to fund Gold OA that
grow, at the expense of mandates to provide Green OA, then the
worldwide research community will yet again have shot itself in
the foot insofar as universal OA -- so long within its reach, so
urgent, and yet still not grasped -- is concerned.

The fundamental problem is not that of needlessly overpaying for
Gold OA by paying prematurely and pre-emptively and at an
arbitrarily inflated asking price (although that is indeed a
problem too).

The fundamental problem is that focussing on a commitment to pay
pre-emptively for Gold OA today gives institutions the false
sense that they are thereby doing what needs to be done in order
to provide OA for their own research output, whereas this is very
far from the truth:

No institution can or will pay for Gold OA publication of all (or
even most) its research output because

(1) not all (or even most) journals offer Gold OA today,

(2) not all (or even most) Gold OA journals' asking price is
reasonable or affordable today, and

(3) most of the money to pay for Gold OA is still tied up in
institutional journal subscriptions today. But most important of
all is the fact that

(4) OA can be provided for all of an institution's research
output today by mandating Green OA self-archiving, which moots
(1) - (3). (1) - (4) jointly comprise the reason pre-emptive Gold
OA payment is not at all what is needed today. What is needed is
OA itself, and that is what Green OA provides, regardless of
journal funding model (subscription or Gold OA).

Once Green OA has been mandated universally and is being
universally provided by institutions, journals will eventually
adapt, under subscription cancellation pressure, downsizing to
provide peer review alone and converting to Gold OA to cover
costs. Meanwhile, institutions' own windfall subscription
cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay journals for
Gold OA publication at this much-reduced price.

But none of that can happen today, through pre-emptive payment
for Gold OA. And meanwhile research progress and impact keep
being lost, needlessly, because institutions are focusing on
funding Gold OA when what they urgently need to do is mandate
Green OA.

Once an institution has mandated Green OA, it no longer matters
(for OA) what it elects to do with its spare cash. It is only if
an institution elects to focus on spending its cash to pay for
Gold OA instead of mandating Green OA that an institution does
both its research and its pocketbook a double disservice,
needlessly.

The creation of high-quality, self-sustaining Gold OA journals
such as the PLoS and BMC journals was historically important and
timely as a proof-of-principle that peer-reviewed journal
publication is viable even if universal Green OA eventually makes
subscriptions unsustainable. But what is urgently needed now is
not more money to pay for Gold OA but more mandates to provide
Green OA, hence OA itself.

Finding money to pay pre-emptively for Gold OA while
subscriptions still prevail and OA itself does not is an
extremely counterproductive strategy, if access to refereed
research -- rather than publishing reform -- is the real raison
d'etre of the Open Access movement (as it certainly is and always
has been for me).

Gold OA is not the end, but merely one of the means (and by far
not the fastest or surest means) of providing universal OA. Full
speed ahead with (mandating) Green OA; publishing will adapt
naturally as the time comes.