Re: Five Universities Sign Open Access Funding Compact

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

On 19-Sep-09, at 10:17 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote (in liblicense):

> I applaud these five universities for putting their money where
> their mouth is. This will help obviate one of the perils of the
> Green OA system that Stevan Harnad advocates, viz., the
> proliferation of different versions of articles as publishers
> allow peer-reviewed but unedited articles to be posted while
> reserving the right to distribute the final versions themselves
> exclusively.

Two of the five universities (Harvard and MIT) who have signed
COPE are to be applauded -- for putting their total refereed
research output where their mouth is by mandating that it must
all be made OA (through Green OA self-archiving) today.

Sandy Thatcher can rest assured that the many access-denied
would-be users worldwide who would otherwise not have had access
to a particular item of that refereed research, because their
institutions could not afford subscription access to that item,
do not feel imperiled but "empowered" by the fact that they now
have access to its self-archived final refereed draft (though not
the publisher's PDF) rather than no access at all. Research
progress -- and OA -- are about content, not form.

Nor do those access-denied would-be users care one bit about
"version proliferation." What they care about is access
proliferation, so they can get on with their research using all
the relevant refereed research there is rather than just the
fraction of it that their institutions can afford to subscribe to
today. http://bit.ly/NGMwc

But there is nothing whatsoever to applaud in the case of the
three out of five universities (Cornell, Dartmouth and Berkeley)
who have signed COPE but failed to put their total research
output where either their mouth or their money is -- committing
to use whatever spare cash they have available today to pay
"equitable" Gold OA publishing fees for the small fraction of
their total research output for which Gold OA is available and
affordable today, while failing to mandate Green OA
self-archiving for all the rest.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

Nor is this bad example to other universities -- of unnecessarily
committing scarce cash to pay for Gold OA for a token subset of
their research output without the necessary, urgent and overdue
provision of Green OA to all the rest -- to be applauded or
welcomed, for if followed, it will just serve to keep delaying OA
still longer, instead of reaching for what is already within the
university community's grasp today.

The reason universities are cash-strapped and can only afford to
buy Gold OA for a tiny fraction of their total refereed research
output is that their cash is currently committed to journal
subscriptions that are providing whatever access they can afford
for their own users today.

Committing to spend still more cash for Gold OA, over and above
what they are already spending on subscriptions, amounts to a
symbolic, token pittance; it provides OA for a fraction of their
total research output at a high extra cost, unnecessarily, while
leaving users access-denied for all the rest, instead of
mandating Green OA self-archiving for all of their research
output, at no extra cost.

Nor can the cash that universities are committing to pay for
subscriptions today be liberated, through individual
cancellations, to pay instead for Gold OA -- as long as the
necessary content that ongoing subscriptions are buying in for
the university's own users is not otherwise accessible to them.

What the reader who is thinking realistically rather than
applauding COPE unreflectively will realize at once is that the
only realistic way that the world's 10,000 individual
universities can liberate their current subscription funds to pay
for a transition to universal Gold OA is if universal OA is first
provided to the total research output of all universities. The
means of providing this universal OA today is through the
universal adoption of Green OA self-archiving mandates by most or
all universities, not by the committing of scarce surplus cash to
pay pre-emptively for Gold OA for some small fraction of total
research output. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/

And charity begins at home, with cost-free mandates to provide
Green OA to each university's own total refereed research output,
not with expensive, unnecessary and ineffectual gestures like
COPE, which merely serve to mask and paper over the already long
overdue need to mandate Green OA.

See:

"Please Commit To Providing Green OA Before Committing To Pay For
Gold OA"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/627-guid.html

"Fund Gold OA Only AFTER Mandating Green OA, Not INSTEAD"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/628-guid.html

> But by all rights OA should apply to monographs, too. It makes
> no intellectual sense to isolate book-length works in print
> form in a few hundred libraries while making journal literature
> on the same subjects accessible worldwide for free. So, when
> will these universities, and others, step up to the plate and
> pay author fees for monographs, too?

Maybe if (1) the worldwide university community has the sense to
do what is the very first urgent priority -- to mandate Green OA
self-archiving for the refereed final drafts of all their
research article output today -- then the resultant universal
Green OA will eventually induce (2) the subscription
cancellations, downsizing and transition to universal Gold OA
publication for refereed research journal articles at "equitable"
prices, paid for out of the windfall savings from the
subscription cancellations.

Then this might in turn (3) leave some left-over windfall savings
to pay for Gold OA for monographs too.

But this certainly won't be possible as long as universities lack
even the cash to buy in print monographs for their libraries,
because the potential funds to pay for them are still tied up in
paying for their journal subscriptions...

Having said all this so many times before, all I can offer is
cliches: Charity begins at home. First things first. Don't put
the cart before the horse. Keep your eye on the ball. Don't build
(golden) castles in Spain...

Your weary archivangelist,

Stevan Harnad

> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State Press
>
>> " . . .five schools at the forefront of the open access debate --
>> Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, MIT,
>> and UC Berkeley -- have announced their joint support for 'A
>> Compact on Open-Access Publishing.' The release accompanying the
>> Compact touts the economic advantages of a robust author-pays
>> option for scholarly publishing, and urges the academic community
>> to step up university-wide efforts to make the author-pays model
>> more viable."
>>
>> http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6696797.html
>>
>> Bernie Sloan
> --
> Sanford G. Thatcher
> Executive Editor for Social Sciences and Humanities
> Penn State University Press
> e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu
> Phone: (214) 705-9010
> http://www.psupress.org