On 2012-07-29, at 3:48 AM, Richard Poynder wrote:

List members may be interested in a discussion on Google+ of the new OA policy announced by Research Councils UK. The discussion includes contributions from (amongst others) Stevan Harnad, Peter Suber and Cameron Neylon.

 
The discussion can be read here: http://t.co/h6p1Lb6F
Long URL: https://plus.google.com/app/plus/mp/130/#~loop:aid=z12cfnlocquuv3ojq04chnsrcsanjl2xr4w&view=activity
 
The interview with Stevan that triggered the discussion is available here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/oa-advocate-stevan-harnad-withdraws_26.html

I was not consulted by -- nor do I have direct access to -- either the Finch or the RCUK committee, so I have no choice but to try to persuade policy makers to see reason via open skywriting. 

I do not wish to point a finger at anyone in particular. I have no idea who the individuals or the interests were that actually led to these two disastrous outcomes, but I have no doubt that unless quickly fixed, their consequences will indeed be disastrous for OA. 

I am only one individual, but I'll warrant I've spent more time thinking about and fighting for OA than any of the individuals involved in these decisions, so unless I am to regard 20 years of struggle as an idle whiling of my lifetime, I must speak up now.

Here are some pertinent excerpts from the discussion for which Richard has provided the link above:

Peter Suber:

...In general I'm with Stevan on this. The RCUK policy and the Finch recommendations fail to take good advantage of green OA. Like Stevan, I initially overestimated the role of green in the RCUK policy, but in conversation with the RCUK have come to a better understanding. In various blog posts since the two documents were released, I've criticized the under-reliance on green. I'm doing so again, more formally, in a forthcoming editorial in a major journal. I'm also writing up my views at greater length for the September issue of my newsletter (SPARC Open Access Newsletter).

For more background, I've argued for years that green and gold are complementary; I have a whole chapter on this in my new book . So we want both. But there are better and worse ways to combine them. Basically the RCUK and Finch Group give green a secondary or minimal role, and fail to take advantage of its ability to assure a fast and inexpensive transition to OA.

Richard Poynder:

+Cameron Neylon wrote: "Stevan has generally argued from a public good perspective - more research available for researchers to read is a public good - rather than a technological or industrial policy perspective. RCUK and Finch are coming from a much more innovation and industry focussed perspective." 

I am not sure what industry Cameron is referring to here. Certainly, if Stevan is correct then the publishing industry has a great deal to gain from RCUK and Finch. However, I suspect he means that CC-BY can turn research papers into raw material that new businesses can use (by, for instance, mining their content). That's fine, but at what price?

Cameron Neylon:

+Richard Poynder You ask about costs. Realistically the transitional costs should be somewhere between nothing and maybe £15M pa for a few years. The £50M is in many ways a rather silly figure. But the real answer is that the worst case scenario is  we do 1.5% less research for a few years - and frankly that is in the noise. It's such a small figure in the overall research budget that it seems silly to worry about that when we know that there are much bigger inefficiencies that can be addressed by OA.

But even if it did cost £50M to deliver OA to all RCUK funded outputs from April next year, wouldn't that be a bargain? We can start to save several hundred million on subscriptions, start to address the nearly £1B of lost economic activity due to SMEs not having access, we can get efficiencies in the research process of maybe 10%, maybe 50%, maybe 100%. Even if that costs £200M over four years and if its restricted to the UK I'd say its still a bargain.

And that's what the RCUK policy, even in its current form delivers. Authors have precisely two choices. Go to a journal that offers a gold option and take it. Or go to a journal that offers a green option with no more than 6 month embargoes. It reduces author choice but so does any effective mandate. It's working for Wellcome so I think it can be made to work here as well. But bottom line the policy delivers OA to the UK's RC funded output from April 2013 with at worst a six month embargo. The only real risk is that publishers form a cartel to agree to charge high prices. And that cartel is already broken by a range of OA publishers who charge much less than the average.

What I find frustrating is that I actually agree that it would be a more effective policy would be to offer the option to go green if Gold is too expensive - at least in the short term. I'm arguing for this - the PLOS position supports this because I argued for it internally - and I'm talking to folks about the details of implementation and arguing for it with the relevant people. But the firebombing of comment threads, the shouting at people who should be our allies is making my job harder and strengthening the hand of the publishers to ask for more money, on weaker terms, because they can represent the OA movement as being unreasonable, shouty, and fragmented.

What would be helpful is clear rational argument that supports the principle direction of both Finch and RCUK towards OA as fast as possible, but offers advice on the implementation - rather than outright rejection or acceptance. Making the economic case for green based on real numbers and offer it as advice, not as a shouting match, to the people who are on our side. Telling those in government and RCUK who are expending significant political capital to drive the OA agenda that they are idiots is not helpful. Claiming that green is free is not helpful. Showing how it is a cost effective as a strategy, engaging with those people and giving them the detailed modelling of how costs would pan out, is. Offering to help game out the different ways policy might have an impact, is. But doing it constructively, not combatively, and NOT IN ALL CAPS!

And finally there needs to be more listening and understanding of other's positions and perspectives. Stevan says above he speaks for the interests of researchers but he doesn't represent mine. Access to the literature isn't a problem for me, I can get any paper I want if I put my mind to it, albeit (possibly) illegally. Discovery of the right literature is a problem, aggregation of data is a problem. Similarly you dismiss the potential for enhancing innovation in your reply to me, but that is the government perspective. If you don't engage with that then they will give up and move on, and we will probably get some half baked licensing or public library scheme. 

We need to stop claiming we talk for people and starting talking with people. There are many different interests served by OA, some served perfectly well by Green or Gratis and some that are not. For those of us with needs not served, Green could be a dangerous distraction, just as Gold looks this way for those who believe Green is the fastest route to universal access.

But it doesn't have to be this way - we can use the strengths of both approaches and each in our own way push on both routes as far and as fast as we can. There's no need for this to be competitive. Paying for Libre in no way diminishes the value of Gratis and nor does having Gratis diminish the value in continuing to push for Libre. And both Green and Gold approaches can be complementary in keeping transitional costs under control. We can have both, arguably we need both, so lets get on with enabling both and let the market and communities decide which route works for them.

I wrote a long comment originally and lost it in an inadvertent click. Then thought this was good because I should write something shorter...then wrote something longer

"Transitional Costs": It is not at all clear to me what Cameron's speculations about transitional costs of "between nothing and maybe £15M pa for a few years" are based on. 

(I'm also not sure how "the worst case scenario is we do 1.5% less research for a few years - and frankly that is in the noise" would wash with researchers, even if it were right on the money.) 

Does anyone seriously imagine that if the UK, with its 6% of world research output, mandates Gold OA then all journals will obligingly convert to pure-Gold OA to accommodate the RCUK mandate? 

Assuming the answer is No (and that Cameron does not imagine that all UK authors will therefore drop their existing journals and flock to the existing Gold OA journals), the only remaining option is hybrid Gold. 

It is certainly conceivable (indeed virtually certain) that under the irresistible incentive of the current RCUK mandate virtually all journals will quickly come up with a Hybrid Gold option: What is also conceivable is that some journals will offer a discounted hybrid Gold option ("membership") to authors at universities that subscribe to that journal: Maybe even free hybrid Gold for those authors, as long as their university subscribes again the next year.

But that isn't a transition scenario, it's a local subscription deal. It locks in current subscription rates and revenues and provides Gold OA for authors from subscribing institutions. How many papers? And what about authors from non-subscribing institutions? And how does this scale, globally and across time? 

Subscriptions are sold and sustained on the demand by an institution for the whole of a journal's contents. But an institution's published papers per journal vary from year to year and from institution to institution. What is an institution's incentive to keep subscribing at a fixed rate? Especially if -- mirabile dictu -- the global proportion of Gold OA articles were to go up? (Reminder: You don't need a subscription to access those Gold articles!)

Publishers can do this simple reckoning too. So it is much more likely that the "quick" Hybrid Gold offered by most journals under RCUK pressure will not be based on free Gold OA for subscribers, but on charging extra for Gold OA. How much? It's up to the journal, since the mandate is just that if Gold is offered, it must be picked and paid for, if the journal is picked.

So the likelihood is that journals will charge a lot. (They already charge a lot for Gold OA.) The price per article is likely to be closer to 1/Nth of their gross revenues per article for a journal that publishes N articles per year. If they get that much per RCUK article, then that will bring in 6% more than their prior gross revenue annually.

We can speculate on how much publishers might reduce this 1/N, in order to hedge their bets, on the off-chance that it could also catch on in some other countries whose pockets full of spare research funds are not quite as deep as the UK's -- but why are we speculating like this? No one knows what will happen if UK authors are forced to pay for Gold and journals happily offer them hybrid Gold at an asking-price of the journal's choosing.

What's sure is that this kind of "transition" doesn't scale -- because other countries don't have the spare change to pay for OA this way -- and especially because it is still evident for those who are still thinking straight that OA can be provided, completely free of any extra cost whilst subscriptions are paying for publication, by mandating Green OA rather than paying pre-emptively for a "transition" to Gold OA.

And certainly not paying in order to enjoy the legendary benefits of Libre OA -- for authors who can't even be bothered to provide Gratis OA unless it is mandated! (At least every researcher today, both as author and user, has a concrete sense of the frustration of gratis-access denial as a non-subscriber: How many researchers have the faintest idea of what they are missing for lack of getting or giving libre OA re-use rights?)

I would also appreciate an explanation from Cameron of how, if the UK pays for Gold OA for every one of the articles it publishes, it can "save several hundred million on subscriptions"? Does Cameron imagine that UK institutions only subscribe to journals in order to gain access to their own research output? (Or has Cameron forgotten about hybrid Gold OA, again?)

Is it? And if Wellcome pays to make all its funded research Gold OA, does that take care of Wellcome authors' access to research other than Wellcome-funded research?

Is that so? Are you not forgetting Hybrid Gold again? And authors' disinclination to give up their journal of choice in order to have to pay scarce research money for a Gold OA that they had to be mandated to act as if they wanted?

Being mandated to do a few extra keystrokes (to provide Green OA) as a condition of receiving research funding is one thing (and a familiar one), but having to give up your journal of choice and to shell out scarce research money (or possibly even some of your own dosh) is quite another.

Putting an arbitrary price-limit on the Gold fee is no solution for the profound flaw in the current RCUK policy. How much more than cost-free is "too expensive"? And why?

Thinking things through first might make it easier -- maybe even consulting those who might have thought them through already. ;>)

But while subscriptions are paying the cost of publishing in full, and fulsomely, it is, whether helpful or not, a fact.

I believe that's precisely what Alma Swan and John Houghton did:

and their modelling and recommendations were ignored in the Finch and RCUK recommendations. Their recommendation was to mandate Green, not to pay pre-emptively for Gold. And they showed that the benefit/cost ratio was far higher for Green than Gold in the transition phase. 

(Post-Green Gold is another story, but we have to get there first; and the calculations confirm that mandating Green -- not paying pre-emptively for Gold while still paying for subscriptions -- is the way to get there from here.)

I offer to help.

Till now I have not been consulted in advance, so I have had no choice but to give my assessment after the policy (both Finch and RCUK) was announced as a fait accompli. My assessment was extremely negative, because both policies are just dreadful, and their defects are obvious.

But RCUK, at least, is easily reparable. I've described how. I'm happy to explain it to any policy-maker willing to listen to me.

(And if RCUK is fixed, that will indirectly fix Finch.)

Cameron, your response does not scale, nor is it representative.

The only reason discovery of the right literature is a problem is that most of it is not yet OA! You can't "discover" what is not there, or not accessible. That's why we need Green (Gratis) OA mandates.

Cameron, you know as well as I do that "the government" could not explain what the slogan "potential for enhancing innovation" means to save its life! "The government" gets fed these slogans and buzzwords and "perspectives" by its advisors and lobbyists and spin-doctors.

Yes, it's near-miraculous that "the government" express any interest in OA at all. But it's up to those who actually know what they are talking about to go on to explain to them what it means, and what to do about it. 

And anyone who still has his feet on the ground (rather than levitating on gold dust or rights rapture) knows that what is needed first and foremost, and as a necessary precondition for anything further, is Gratis OA (free online access), globally. 

We're nowhere near having that yet. 

And if RCUK persists in its present fatally flawed form, we'll have (at the very best) UK Gold OA (raising worldwide OA by 6% from about 22% to about 28%) plus a local, unscalable policy. 

(More likely, we will simply have a failed mandate, non-compliant authors, a lot of money and time wasted, and the UK no longer leading the worldwide OA movement, as it had been doing for the past 8 years.)

You seem to be conflating Libre and Gold here Cameron, but never mind: 

Gratis is for those who need free online access. 

Libre is for those who need free online access plus certain re-use rights. 

Green is for those who don't want to wait for all journals to go Gold and don't have the money to pay for Gold pre-emptively at today's asking prices while subscriptions are still being paid for. 

Gold is for those who are galled by subscription prices (and have other sources of money).

Gratis and Libre come as either Green or Gold, but Green has no extra cost (while subscriptions are being paid); and Libre is much harder to get subscription publishers to agree to. 

Moreover, all four include Gratis as a necessary condition.

So without tying oneself up into speculative and ideological knots (or a transport of gold fever or rights rapture), it looks as if Gratis OA via cost-free Green OA mandates are the way to go for now (with ID/OA and the Button mooting embargoes and minimizing embargo damage).

The rest (Libre, Gold) will come after we've mandated and provided Gratis Green globally. 

To insist instead on Libre Gold, locally, in the UK now, by paying extra for it pre-emptively, is just a way of ensuring that the UK no longer has a scalable global solution for OA at all. And without global Gratis OA at least, the UK's dearly purchased Gold amounts to Fool's Gold, insofar as UK access is concerned. (And remember way back, Cameron: Open Access was about access!)

I'm all for going for both -- as long as cost-free Green Gratis OA is mandated and Libre Gold is a bonus option one can choose if one wishes and has the money to pay for it. 

But not, as RCUK currently has it, where the author may not choose Green if a journal offers Gold. 

That is just fatal foolishness, aka, Fool's Gold.

Stevan Harnad