Open Access @

[This is a heavily edited transcript of a talk that I gave on January 3, 2013, at a panel on open access at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA, the main scholarly society for linguistics, and publisher of the journal Language), co-sponsored by the Modern Language Association (MLA).]

Thank you for this opportunity to join the others on this panel in talking about open access. I will concentrate in particular on the relationship between open access and the future of scholarly societies. I’m thinking in particular of small to medium scholarly societies, which have small publishing programs that are often central to the solvency of the societies and to their ability to do the important work that they do. In one sense it should be obvious, and I think it’s been made obvious by the previous speakers, that open access meshes well with the missions of scholarly societies. LSA’s mission, for instance, is “to advance the scientific study of language. LSA plays a critical role in supporting and disseminating linguistic scholarship both to professional linguists and to the general public.” [Emphasis added.] So I’ll just assume the societal benefit of open access to researchers and to the general public alike. For the purpose of conversation let’s just take that as given.

Nonetheless, many scholarly societies, and the faculty that support them, are worried that open access – at least as they understand the concept – could exacerbate the serious financial distress that many of those societies are already under, and even undermine their very existence and thereby their ability to carry out this mission. I’ve heard faculty worry that even “green” open access (self-archiving of articles in open-access repositories) could undermine the economics of journal publishing in such a way that their scholarly societies could be endangered.

I want to argue that there is a real threat that many scholarly societies accurately perceive in their publishing programs, but that we must be careful not to misdiagnose this problem. In fact, a general move to open access would be the best outcome for scholarly society publishers. If the entirety of journal publishing magically metamorphosed somehow to an open-access system, scholarly society publishers would be much better off. From a strategic point of view then, the best course of action for scholarly societies and for the faculty and researchers who support them would be to promote a shift to open access as widely and as quickly as possible. Now, the threat that societies perceive is an economic threat, so my remarks will be almost entirely economic in nature; I’m just warning you. My talk certainly will have no linguistic import at all.

Economic properties of the subscription market

Let me turn first to some basic truths about the subscription journal market that I’ve come to realize are important in understanding what the underlying economic issues are.

Journal access is a complementary good

The first is that different journals — viewed as products, as goods being sold — are in economists’ terms complements, not substitutes. Substitute goods are products like Coke and Pepsi. If you have one it decreases the value of the other to you, as they fulfill similar functions. Complements are products like a left shoe and a right shoe – that’s the most extreme case. If you have one it increases the value to you of the other. There are less extreme cases of economic complements – printers and toner cartridges, peanut butter and jelly, pencils and erasers.

What about scholarly journals? Suppose you’re a patron of a library that subscribes to a bundle of, let’s say, Elsevier journals, including the journal Lingua. Does the library subscription to that journal make you more or less interested in reading, say, Language? (We’re holding cost aside. When thinking about complements or substitutes, it’s just about the value to the consumer, not the cost.) Of course, you’re not less inclined to read Language just because the library subscribes to Lingua. In fact you may be more inclined, because some Lingua articles will cite Language articles. You read the Lingua article, you want to to read the Language article it cites. So that would lead you to track down those articles and read them if the library had a subscription. And vice versa: a subscription to Language can increase the value of a subscription to Lingua. So journals are economic complements, not substitutes.

Inefficiency in the subscription market

This has important ramifications. Non-substitutive goods don’t compete against each other and complementary goods in fact support each other in the market. If consumers suddenly buy a lot more Coke, Pepsi is worried. But if peanut butter sales skyrocket, the jelly manufacturers are elated. So the complementary subscription of individual journals means that there’s limited market competition between journals, and limited competition leads to inefficiency in the journal market. (That’s not to say that there isn’t competition between publishers. But as we’ll see, the primary form of that competition is in competing to acquire journals.)

Figure 1: Average journal prices in a range of fields, differentiated by commercial and non-profit publishers. Left is based on prices as dollars per page. Right is based on dollars per citation, to normalize for quality. Data are from Bergstrom and Bergstrom, Journal pricing across disciplines, 2002.

We can see ample evidence of this kind of inefficiency. One clear form of evidence for inefficiency is wide price disparities. The graph in Figure 1 shows average journal prices in a whole range of fields. The data is from a study by Bergstrom and Bergstrom, and they differentiated the cost of the journals by whether the publisher is commercial or non-profit. The dark blue represents the commercial publishers, the light blue the nonprofit publishers. Notice that the commercial publishers on average charge about five times more for their journals than non-profit publishers, as measured by price per page. Now you might think there is a good explanation for this disparity: perhaps these aren’t comparable products. Perhaps the commercial publishers are selling a much better product, higher quality journals, and it’s therefore more expensive to develop them, and that’s what accounts for the price differential. So we can normalize for that by using a proxy for quality. One widely used proxy for quality, admittedly not a great one but at least widely touted by journals themselves through the ubiquitous “Impact Factor”, is the number of citations the journal receives. The second graph in Figure 1 thus shows price per citation. Measured this way, commercial journals are fifteen times more expensive than non-profit journals from the same field. Now, linguistics was not one of the fields examined in this study. But the same holds true here as well. For example, the subscription rate for LSA’s journal Language, published by a non-profit of course, is $3.31 per citation, whereas Elsevier’s Lingua is $32.30 per citation – almost exactly ten times more expensive.

This kind of price differential is a clear sign of market failure, especially as it has been sustained over decades. You just do not get this kind of price disparity preserved over long periods of time in well functioning markets. Go to the various grocery stores in your neighborhood and see if you can find apples at different grocery stores at a price differential of a factor of ten. It does not happen. Such price disparities are a clear sign of inefficiency.

Journal access is a monopolistic good

Figure 2: Elsevier revenues, profit, and profit margin, 2002–2011. Data are from Mike Taylor, The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers, 2012.

The second basic truth is that the good being sold in the subscription market is access, and access is a monopolistic good. The monopoly is enabled by copyright, founded in the government’s ability as codified in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution to provide an exclusive right to the creator of a work for a limited period of time. Subscription publishers acquire exclusive rights to the articles they publish — typically by acquiring copyright, sometimes by acquiring an exclusive license, which is a distinction without a difference — and this allows publishers in theory and in many cases in practice to extract monopoly rents in selling access to the articles. We see evidence of this as well. For example, in Figure 2, I show a graph of the revenues, profits, and most importantly the profit margin, for the publisher Elsevier over the last decade. It’s quite a good business with annual revenues of over $2 billion, but that’s not the big point. The big point is the extraordinary 35–40% profit margins. It’s not just Elsevier. Many large commercial publishers have maintained these kinds of profit margins over a long period of time. An interesting thing to look at is the steady increase in the margins even during the financial crisis starting in 2009 when, for instance, many university endowments and library budgets dropped precipitously. Harvard’s endowment went down by 30% but Elsevier did just fine, and the other large publishers as well. So maintaining those kinds of profit margins again is a sign of the ability to extract monopoly rents.

Journal access is a bundled good

The third basic truth is that pricing is controlled not at the level of the individual journal but at the level of a bundle of journals. The large publishers have portfolios of hundreds to thousands of journals. They can therefore apply prices to a bundle of journals, not a single journal. They can show vastly different prices to different buyers and use the bundles to incentivize buyers, the libraries, to pay larger fees. The upshot of this point, that pricing happens at the bundle level and not the journal level, is that a library can find it extremely difficult to control its expenditures by canceling individual journals because the publisher can just price the smaller bundle at essentially the same cost as the larger bundle.

I’ll tell you a personal story. Some years ago, Harvard was one of the first universities to cancel the “big deal” with Elsevier. I don’t want to pick on Elsevier. They’re not bad people. They’re a wonderful group of folks. Lots of the large publishers of journals work this way and it’s not because they’re evil or anything like that. I just mention the Elsevier case as a convenient story. Harvard was one of the first universities to cancel its “big deal” and went a la carte on the journals. In the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, my own school, we had been subscribing to around 130 Elsevier journals in engineering and applied sciences as I recall. We took the opportunity to cancel about 100 of these journals, leaving something like 30 journals, hoping to recoup some costs. And we did. The first year we recouped about 20%. The following year the total cost was back where it had been before the cancellations, and it has increased steadily from there. From the library’s point of view, you can’t win by canceling journals, because the product is not the journal, it’s the bundle.

Edlin and Rubinfeld, in a Law Review article about possible anti-trust implications of this bundling, say “The immediate effect of [bundled pricing] has been to move competition from individual journals to large bundles of journals. … Creating a large bundle of journals to compete with Elsevier or Kluwer seems almost insurmountable. … There are indications that [bundled pricing] is hindering entry. Librarians … say that they would spend more money for journals from smaller and alternative publishers if they could achieve proportionate savings from reductions. By selling electronic bundles, publishers have erected a strategic barrier to entry at just the time that the electronic publishing possibility has made it increasingly possible for alternative publishers to overcome the existing structural barriers.” The fact that competition is at the level of bundles, not at the level of journals, is very important.

The result: market dysfunction

Figure 3: Scholarly journal expenditures percentage increase 1986–2010 compared to consumer price index. Data from Association for Research Libraries.

When we put all these properties of the journal market together, the end result is market dysfunction and a steady long-term hyperinflation in journal expenditures by libraries. Figure 3 shows a graph of serials expenditures over the last couple of decades, the dark blue line. The light blue line is the consumer price index, a proxy for the ambient rate of inflation. You can see that serials expenditures in research libraries have been going up at something like three times the rate of inflation for decades. Exponential real growth in the cost of journals is an unsustainable state of affairs.

I return to the issue of inefficiency. Why is it that the non-profit publishers are so much more efficient than the commercial publishers? Not in every case of course but on average the difference is really striking. There are a couple of possible reasons. One is that the non-profits tend to be scholarly societies who may be motivated not by profit maximization but by service to the field. I think that’s true to a certain extent. But also the non-profits tend to be small publishers with few journals – maybe one, two, three, five, ten journals. Since bundle size governs market power, non-profits have less ability to grow margins. And scholarly societies rightly complain that they’re being squeezed. From the point of view of libraries, if you have to cancel something you can recoup revenue if you cancel the journals from a small publisher. You can’t recoup revenue if you cancel journals from the large commercial publishers. As a library, what are you going to do? Cancel scholarly society journals, just as the societies have been rightly complaining about.

But notice that the problem that scholarly societies face, a problem that will only increase in a status quo future, is based not on open access but on inherent properties of the subscription market that they participate in. For scholarly societies, the status quo is not a good alternative. Doing nothing is a failing strategy.

Open-access journals as a preferable system

The idea of open-access journals is that they provide access to the articles for free. How can this be a better system for scholarly societies, given that much of the societies’ revenues may come from the publishing program?

Open-access journals don’t charge for access, but that doesn’t mean they eschew revenue entirely. Open-access journals are just selling a different good, and therefore participating in a different market. Instead of selling access to readers (or the readers’ proxy, the libraries), they sell publisher services to the authors (or to the authors’ proxy, their research funders).

In fact there are now over 8,500 open-access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Some of them have been mentioned already on this panel: Linguistic Discovery, Semantics and Pragmatics. The majority of existing open-access journals, like those journals, don’t charge author-side article-processing charges (APCs). But in the end APCs seems to me the most reasonable, reliable, scalable, and efficient revenue mechanism for open-access journals. This move from reader-side subscription fees to author-side APCs has dramatic ramifications for the structure of the market that the publisher participates in.

Economic properties of the open-access journal market

The open-access APC market has quite different properties from the subscription market. Recall the basic truths about the subscription market. Journals are complements, not substitutes. There’s limited market competition. The product being sold is a monopolistic good. Pricing is controlled at the bundle level. What are the corresponding properties of the publisher services market, the market that open-access journals participate in? In that market, the purchaser of the good is the author or the author’s proxy, not the reader or reader’s proxy. And from the point of view of an author, two journals are not complements but substitutes. You can publish your article in the Journal of Linguistics or Lingua or better yet in Language. But having published it in one, you have no incentive to publish it in the other. In fact, you’re not allowed to publish in both, making journals perfect substitutes. There is no value to the second journal once you’ve published the article in the first journal, from the point of view of the author trying to get a publication.

So journals compete for authors in a way they don’t for readers, and this competition leads to much greater efficiency. Open-access publishers are highly motivated to provide better services at lower price to compete for authors’ article submissions. We actually see evidence of this competition on both price and quality happening in the market. I won’t go through examples but have written about it previously.

Second, publisher services on the author side are not a monopolistic good. Anyone can provide those services. In fact because the service is a knowledge good, there are exceptionally low barriers to entry. Kai von Fintel and David Beaver can just unilaterally set up Semantics and Pragmatics; maybe they’ll be successful and maybe they won’t. In this case, it turned out pretty well. The low barrier to entry further enhances competition and improves the efficiency of the market.

Finally, pricing is controlled not at the level of the bundle of journals. You don’t care about the bundle of the publisher when you’re an author submitting to a journal. You care about the journal. Actually, pricing is not even at the journal level, but at the level of the individual article. So price competition happens at that level as well, with journals competing for individual articles on price as well as quality.

In summary, the open-access APC market is a more efficient market than the closed-access subscription market for reasons of basic economics. That’s not just my opinion. Claudio Aspesi, senior analyst at Sanford Bernstein studying the finances of publishing companies, has estimated that a transition to open access would lead to Elsevier cutting its margins by 41–89%.

Comparative cost of open-access journals

Let me say something about the overall cost for the two kinds of models. The APCs that open-access journals charge range from $0 to around $3,000. The median turns out to be zero. But for those open-access journals that do charge a fee, the mean is around $1,200, and reasonable sustainable fees seem to be shaking out in the $1,000 to $1,500 range. Let’s call it $1,500. Since article processing fees are essentially the totality of revenue that open-access journals receive, the APC is a reasonable figure for average revenue per article. There are open-access publishers who are profitable in that range, including commercial open-access journals.

What’s the corresponding number for subscription journals? What is their average revenue per article? The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable reported total 2008 revenue for scholarly publishing at $8 billion on 1.5 million articles, the vast bulk of that revenue coming from subscription fees. Average revenue per article for subscription journals is, by that measure, over $5,000 an article. Remember that this averages over all of the journals — the high quality and the low alike.

So what’s happening is that authors one way or another are paying. Either you’re paying an APC to an open-access journal or you’re paying with your copyright to a subscription journal, which the publisher then monetizes, turning it into about $5,000 per article. It turns out that if we moved from a subscription journal world to an open-access world, the institutions of the world would go from paying, on average, $5,000 an article to about $1,500. Let’s suppose the $1,500 estimate is unreasonably low. Let’s suppose that really the average APC would be what the most high-end open-access journal, PLoS Biology, now charges – that’s $2,900; call it $3,000. If every article moved from the subscription model to an open-access APC model at the high end of cost – we would still be saving 40%. And more importantly, we would be better executing the scholarly society mission by providing the broadest possible dissemination.

Scholarly societies as open-access publishers

Who wins in this kind of market – a non-monopolistic, competitive market of substitutes where the processing fees are considerably less than the current cost per article for subscription journals? The publisher who wins in that market is the publisher who can provide the best services, including imprimatur, at the lowest price to the author, that is, the publisher who is most efficient. Scholarly society publishers would have a huge lead in this market, because they are manifestly more efficient than commercial publishers by a large factor. If the scholarly journal market were structured as the open-access journal market rather than the subscription journal market, scholarly society publishers would be the big winners. And scholarly societies are beginning to realize that open access could be a boon not only to their mission – that much should be uncontroversial – but also to their solvency. Perhaps for this reason, some 600 scholarly societies, including the LSA, are already publishing open-access journals.

At the root, the reason that scholarly societies benefit from playing in the open-access APC market rather than the closed-access subscription fee market is the difference in the goods being sold. When the good is a journal bundle, the companies with the biggest bundles, the large commercial publishers, win. When the good is publisher services for an individual article, the publishers that can deliver those services for an individual article most efficiently, the non-profit publishers, win. Sure, there are economies of scale, but empirical evidence shows that the scholarly societies are already far better able to efficiently deliver services despite any scale disadvantage.

The problem for open access: the transition

Now, all that sounds great, but I don’t want to be too positive. As I said at the outset, there is a real worry that society publishers should have about the open-access APC market. But it’s not that they’d be at a competitive disadvantage in that market; I think that they’d have a huge advantage. And it’s important to remember that they’re already at a huge disadvantage in the subscription journal market; status quo is a failing strategy. Rather the problem is this. Open-access journals are at a disadvantage in their competition for authors against subscription journals. That is, the problem arises across the two markets. When the only kind of journals are open-access journals, scholarly societies have the upper hand. When there are both kinds of journals in the market, both subscription journals and open-access journals, the open-access journals are at a competitive disadvantage because (from the author’s point of view) publishing is free in a subscription journal. (Of course, it’s not really free; it’s just that the research libraries of the world are underwriting the very high $5,000 cost per article.) By contrast, in an open-access APC journal, the author personally could be out let’s say $1,200 or $1,500 or whatever. This is a problem not just for scholarly societies but for all publishers exploring the possibility of going fee-based open access.

To make a transition possible, what we, as supporters of scholarly societies, should be working on is placing open-access journals on a level playing field with subscription journals. There’s a principle at stake here, and the principle is this: Dissemination of research results is an inherent part of the research process. This is something that publishers themselves are frequently pointing out — that they are part of the research process. Consequently, the funders of that research should underwrite dissemination of the results. Who are the funders of the research? In science, technology, and medicine, public and private funding agencies are the primary research funders. By this principle then, the funding agencies giving the grants in those areas would be on the hook to pay the $1,000 or $1,200 or $1,500 or $2,900 publication fees. Most funding agencies already will pay for publication costs for open-access journals (though not in an ideal way, which I’ve written about in the past). What about fields where there aren’t funding agencies handing out large grants? In the humanities and social sciences, universities are the de facto primary research funders. Faculty members in universities are doing research in those fields as part of their employment as researchers. As the primary research funders in the humanities and social sciences, in linguistics in particular, the universities that employ us should be on the hook to disseminate the research results that their researchers generate.

This is the principle behind an effort called the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. It was set up by a group of five universities initially — Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley — to place the open-access revenue model on a more level playing field with the subscription model. Since then another dozen or so institutions have signed on. The Compact says that these universities commit to providing a mechanism for underwriting reasonable publication fees for articles written by their faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals. From the point of view of these signatory institutions, and the many other institutions that don’t happen to be signatories but have similar funding policies, if you structure your journal as an open-access journal charging a publication fee, you don’t need to worry that the authors will be personally out of pocket to pay those fees; the university will pay on their behalf.

Next steps

Given that the open-access publication fee market would be preferable from the point of view of scholarly societies and their members, what should scholarly societies be doing from the strategic point of view? What is in the best interest of us as supporters of scholarly societies? Happily the best interest of scholarly society publishers is the best interest of the scholars themselves, namely as rapid a transition to open access as possible. So scholarly societies should be doing what they can to speed that transition, and I’m glad to say that the LSA and the MLA are working in that direction. I wish all scholarly societies would do so as well.

Of course, the ideal action for a scholarly society is to convert all of its journals to open access. By doing so, they help set expectations among authors that we don’t restrict access to articles, thereby hastening the day that closed-access journals find it impossible to compete for authors.

But some scholarly societies may still find it too worrisome to take such a bold move, not because they disagree with my conclusion that they fare better in an open access world, but because they fear not making it through the transition to that world. I’m sympathetic to that worry. Still, there are important actions that societies can take short of converting all of their journals to open access, actions that will still greatly contribute to changing the expectations of scholars that research results should be and are being made accessible. Scholarly societies can:

• Experiment with open access for at least some of their journals (as LSA is doing with Semantics and Pragmatics), thereby gaining exactly the experience with open-access publishing that will be invaluable in the future.
• Along the same lines, commit to open access for any new journals.
• For the legacy non-open-access journals, provide delayed open-access to articles, making them available with a broad license after, say, six months or one year. The LSA has already taken this important step. Once conditions are right, the delay can simply be dropped.
• Explicitly allow self-archiving of articles published in their journals, the green open access that I alluded to at the start of the talk. Doing so sends a strong signal that the society supports open access. At the same time, there is “no persuasive evidence that increased access threatens the sustainability of traditional subscription-supported journals, or their ability to fund rigorous peer review.” TheLSA does this, and the MLA recently announced that they are modifying their publication agreement along these lines, and even allowing distribution of the final published version after one year.
• Recognize, accommodate, and promote university and funder open-access policies. Accommodation requires only the addition of a single sentence to a publisher’s publication agreement. The pertinent sentence taken from the Science Commons addenda is this:
  

  Where applicable, Publisher acknowledges that Author’s assignment of copyright or Author’s grant of exclusive rights in the Publication Agreement is subject to Author’s prior grant of a non-exclusive copyright license to Author’s employing institution and/or to a funding entity that financially supported the research reflected in the Article as part of an agreement between Author or Author’s employing institution and such funding entity, such as an agency of the United States government.

  (My guess is that it should be possible to generate an English version of such a sentence as well.)

• Support pro-open-access legislation such as the Federal Research Public Access Act. At the least, scholarly societies should disavow anti-open-access statements made on their behalf by publishing consortia, as the MLA did in its statement opposing the Research Works Act.
• Leverage the society’s membership to push for open-access underwriting by funding agencies and by universities such as envisioned by the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity.

To the extent that we can get a transition to a primarily open-access publishing system to happen, scholarly societies, their members, and the general public will all be much better off, which is a happy confluence of interest. Thank you very much.

Written evidence to House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on Open Access

Stevan Harnad

I. Overview of OA

1.   Open Access (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed research journal articles. (There are about 28,000 such journals, in all fields and languages.)

2.   Most research journals recover their publication costs through institutional subscriptions.

3.   No institution can afford to subscribe to all or most or even many of the 28,000 journals, only to a small fraction of them, a fraction shrinking because of rising journal costs.

4.   As a result, all researchers today, at all institutions, are denied access to articles published in those journals whose subscriptions are unaffordable to their institutions.

5.   As a result, the research that is funded by public tax revenue, and conducted by researchers employed by publicly funded institutions (universities and research institutes) is not accessible to all of its primary intended users – the researchers who can use, apply and build upon it, to the benefit of the public that funded it.

6.   The Internet and the Web have made it possible to remedy this access-denial problem, which had been a legacy of the Gutenberg era of print on paper, and its associated costs.

7.   Researchers can continue to publish their research in subscription journals, but they can self-archive their final, peer-reviewed drafts in their institutional repositories, free for all online, as a supplement, for all users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access to the journal in which the article was published (and, as an added bonus, free also for the tax-paying public that funded the research).

8.   Author self-archiving is called “Green OA.”

9.   Sixty percent of journals (including most of the top journals in most fields) already endorse Green OA self-archiving by authors, immediately upon publication (no embargo).

10.   The remaining 40% of journals request an embargo or delay on providing OA for 6-12 months or more. (The publisher rationale for the embargo is that it protects journal subscription revenues that Green OA might otherwise make unsustainable.)

11.   There is as yet no evidence at all that immediate, un-embargoed Green OA self-archiving reduces subscriptions, even in fields, such as physics, where it has been practiced for over 20 years and has long reached close to 100%.

12.   The second way to provide OA is for the journal rather than the author to make all of its articles freely accessible online immediately upon publication.

13.   OA journal publishing is called “Gold OA.”

14.   About 20% of the world’s 28,000 journals are Gold OA journals, but very few of them are among the top journals in each field.

15.   Most Gold OA journals continue to cover their costs from subscriptions (to the print edition) but the top Gold OA journals have no print edition and instead of charging the user-institution for access, through subscription fees, they charge the author-institution for publishing, through publication fees.

16.   There are also hybrid subscription/Gold journals, who publish non-OA articles and continue to charge institutional subscription fees, but offer authors the option of paying to make their individual article OA if they pay a Gold OA fee.

17.   Paying Gold OA fees is a problem for authors and their institutions because as long as most journals are still subscription journals, institutions have to continue subscribing to whatever journals they can afford that their users need.

18.   Hence paying for Gold OA today increases the financial burden on institutions at a time when subscription costs are already barely affordable.

19.   Paying for Gold OA while subscriptions still need to be paid is not only an extra financial burden, but it is also unnecessary, because Green OA can be provided for free while worldwide subscriptions are still paying the cost of publication.

20.   If and when Green OA becomes universal (i.e., at or near 100%, in all fields, worldwide), and if and when that, in turn, makes subscriptions unsustainable (with institutions cancelling subscriptions because the free Green OA versions are sufficient for their needs), then all journals can convert to Gold and institutions will have the money to pay the Gold OA costs out of their annual windfall subscription cancelation savings.

21.   There is every reason to believe that Gold OA costs after universal Green OA will be much lower than they are today: the print edition and its costs as well as the online edition will be gone, the worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories will provide access and archiving, and journals will only need to manage peer review (all peers already review for free) and perhaps provide some copy-editing.

22.   It remains to explain how to achieve universal Green OA, so as (1) to provide universal OA, first and foremost, and then (2) to induce a transition to universal Gold OA at an affordable price if and when Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, and (3) to release the institutional subscription funds in which the potential money to pay for Gold OA is currently locked.

23.   The way to achieve universal Green OA is for institutions (universities and research institutes) and research funders to mandate (require) that all research that they fund, and that they employ researchers to conduct, must not only be published, as now (“publish or perish”), but the peer-reviewed final drafts must also be deposited in the researcher’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication.

24.   Optimally, access to the deposit should be made OA immediately; in any case any OA embargo should be as short as possible.

25.   However, if necessary, an embargo of 6 months or even 12 months or longer can be tolerated in the case of the 40% of articles published in journals that do not yet endorse immediate Green OA.

26.   The repositories make it possible for authors to provide “Almost-OA” to the deposits that are under OA embargo by automatically forwarding reprint requests from would-be users to the author, who can then decide, with one click, whether or not hey wish to email the deposited reprint to the requester.

27.   Researchers have been fulfilling reprint requests from fellow-researchers for over a half century, but in the online era this can be greatly facilitated and accelerated through universally mandated repository deposit.

II. UK OA Policy

28.   In 2004, the UK Parliamentary Select Committee recommended that UK universities and UK funding councils mandate Green OA self-archiving.

29.   With this, the UK became the world leader in OA and OA policy.

30.   Green OA self-archiving has since been mandated by both funding councils and universities in the EU, Canada, and Australia, including the National Institutes of Health, Harvard, and MIT in the US (over 250 Green OA mandates worldwide to date).

31.   Green OA mandates have been growing worldwide, guided by the UK model; to accelerate mandate adoption all that is needed is a few practical upgrades to the UK model (such as upgraded compliance mechanisms and fuller integration of institutional and funder mandates).

32.   But in 2012, instead of building on its 8-year success in worldwide OA leadership, the UK took an abrupt U-turn on OA, with the recommendations of the Finch Committee.

33.   The Finch Committee declared Green OA a failure, and recommended downgrading it to just preservation archiving.

34.   In place of mandating Green OA (which is almost cost-free, while publishing is still being paid for worldwide via institutional subscriptions) the Finch Committee recommended paying even more for publishing, by redirecting scarce UK research funds to paying for Gold OA, over and above what the UK is already paying for subscriptions.

35.   One can only conjecture as to the causes underlying this inexplicable about-face when Green OA mandates are growing worldwide:

36.   The cause may have been subscription-publisher lobbying of BIS against Green OA or Gold-OA-publisher lobbying for Gold OA.

37.   There was perhaps also some pressure from a vocal minority of OA advocates arguing that there is an urgent immediate need for something stronger than the free online access mandated by Green OA (the additional re-use rights conferred by a CC-BY license) for which this minority claimed that it is worth paying Gold OA fees.

38.   The outcome has been significantly to weaken instead of strengthen the RCUK OA policy:

39.   RCUK researchers may still choose between paying for Gold OA or providing cost-free Green OA, but RCUK expresses a preference for Gold and does not permit researchers to choose Green if their chosen journal’s OA embargo exceeds 6-12 months.

40.   This policy has the perverse consequence of giving subscription publishers a strong incentive (1) to add a hybrid Gold option just in order to collect the extra UK revenue, and (2) to adopt and extend Green OA embargoes beyond the UK’s allowable 6-12 months, to make sure that UK researchers must choose the paid Gold option rather than the cost-free Green one.

41.   The rest of the world cannot, need not, and will not follow suit with this profligate. perverse, and completely unnecessary UK policy change.

42.   In Europe, the Americas and Asia, low-cost Green OA mandates will continue to grow, while the UK loses its leadership role in worldwide OA, needlessly squandering increasingly scarce research funds, paying publishers even more in order to make UK research output (and UK research output alone -- 6% of worldwide research output) OA, while the rest of the world makes its (94%) research output OA at next to no extra cost.

The Australian economist, John Houghton, has analyzed OA policy in country after country. The House of Lords Select Committee is urged to look at the outcome of those analyses, which is that it is far cheaper to mandate Green OA first, rather than to pay pre-emptively for Gold unilaterally. That not only provides OA, but it paves the way to affordable, sustainable Gold OA:Houghton, J. & Swan, A. (2013) Planting the Green Seeds for a Golden Harvest: Comments and Clarifications on "Going for Gold" D-Lib Magazine Volume 19, Number 1/2
Conclusion: Instead of following the Finch Committee’s counterproductive recommendation to require and subsidise Gold OA, RCUK should adopt two important practical upgrades to strengthen the prior RCUK Green OA mandate: (1) integrate institutional and funder Green OA mandates so they can mutually reinforce one another and (2) implement an effective Green OA compliance mechanism, making institutions responsible for monitoring and ensuring compliance with both institutional and funder deposit mandates.

Appendix:

Comments on the Committee's specific topics:"support for Universities in the form of funds to cover article processing charges, and the response of universities and other HEIs to these efforts"If there are UK funds to spare to subsidise Gold OA, fine, make them available -- but mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving in all cases (ID/OA) and do not require researchers to choose a Gold OA journal unless they wish to."embargo periods for articles published under the green model"The shorter the better, but always require immediate deposit (ID/OA) in the author’s institutional repository, even for embargoed articles, and implement the “Almost OA” Button during the embargo."engagement with publishers, universities, learned societies and other stakeholders in the development of research council open access policies and guidance"Publishers should endorse immediate Green OA, but ID/OA mandates are compatible with embargoes.

Universities should mandate Green OA too.

Funder and university mandates should be convergent, requiring deposit in the institutional repository, with the institution monitoring and ensuring compliance.

Deposits or their metadata can then be harvested to any desired central repositories.

Repository deposit should be designated the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance review or national research assessment.

Learned Society publishers, like all publishers, should endorse immediate Green OA, but ID/OA mandates are compatible with embargoes.

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, publishers can convert to Gold OA and institutions can pay for it out of the windfall subscription cancelation savings freed by the Green-OA-induced cancelations."challenges and concerns raised by the scientific and publishing communities, and how these have been addressed."The UK scientific community has rightly expressed considerable concern about (1) not being allowed to publish in their journals of choice, and about (2) having to pay for Gold OA.

The solution is to mandate Green OA and not to require Gold OA except if the author wishes it.

The UK subscription publishing community is being paid in full for publication, via worldwide subscriptions today.

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscription publishing unsustainable, publishers can convert to Gold OA and institutions can pay for it out of the windfall subscription cancelation savings freed by the Green-OA-induced cancelations."international issues"The rest of the world need not, cannot, and will not follow the Finch Committee’s recommendation to pay pre-emptively for Gold instead of mandating Green OA.

It would be best if the UK returned to the direction it set in 2004; otherwise it is simply using UK research funds to provide (Gold) OA for the UK and the world at a much higher cost than necessary, and at the cost of inducing perverse effects in publishers (such as subscription publishers offering hybrid Gold in order to attract double payment for UK’s Gold subsidy, and adopting and increasing OA embargoes in order to ensure that UK researchers must pay extra for Gold OA).



Figure 1. The percentage of Green and Gold OA in the UK (2007-2011, Web of Science). Note that most OA is Green OA. From: Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012b) Green and Gold Open Access percentages and growth, by discipline. In: 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), Montreal, CA, 05 - 08 Sep 2012. 11pp.




Figure 2. The effect of Green OA mandates (comparing nonmandated vs mandated OA provision: 2002-2009). Data from Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Brody, T, Carr, L and Harnad, S (2012a) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. Presented: Open Access Week 2012

The dons are absolutely right that dictating where they may or may not publish, and coercing them to pay to publish is an assault on academic freedom:"Open access plans are 'attack on academic freedoms'" (Guardian Observer, & Telegraph, January 26)But they are absolutely wrong that the fault lies with Open Access (OA), or with mandating OA.

The fault lies entirely with the way the UK government -- RCUK, under the influence of the foolish and ill-informed recommendations of the Finch Committee -- has proposed to mandate OA.

The Finch Committee has recommended weakening instead of strengthening the RCUK's existing, 5-year-old OA mandate -- which had allowed authors to continue publishing wherever they wished, and merely required them to make their final drafts OA within 12 months of publication by self-archiving them free for all online ("Green OA").

Declaring the prior Green OA mandate a failure, the Finch Committee proposed instead to dictate to authors which journals they were permitted to publish in: only in journals that make their own published articles OA ("Gold OA"), with a CC-BY license, immediately upon publication, or in journals that formally endorse their authors providing Green OA within 6-12 months of publication. In addition, some scarce research money was to be diverted from research to pay publishers even more money, over and above what is already being spent on subscriptions, in exchange for Gold OA.

Authors naturally became incensed at the government dictating where they might or might not publish. (Nor did they appreciate money being diverted from dwindling research funds to pay publishers even more.)

Enough complaining. The error is easily corrected:

Let authors publish wherever they wish. Require them to deposit their peer-reviewed final drafts in their OA institutional repositories immediately upon publication.

Sixty percent of journals already endorse immediate Green OA. For the 40% that want OA embargoed, make the deposit Closed Access instead of OA during the embargo.

The repository has a Button for redirecting individual users' reprint requests for Closed Access articles to the author, who can authorize the emailing of the reprint to the requester with one click if he wishes. This is not OA, but it is "Almost-OA" and is sufficient to tide over researchers' access needs until embargoes die their inevitable and well-deserved natural deaths.

Meanwhile, 100% of articles are immediately deposited, 60% are immediately OA, 40% are Almost-OA, and authors retain their full right to choose their journals and not pay for Gold OA if they do not wish to.

They are strongly encouraged to make the deposit OA as soon as possible, but this is not a constraint on their freedom of choice of journals.

This is a strengthened version of RCUK's prior Green OA mandate, without the Finch folly (nor the premature and unnecessary CC-BY requirement, which is not needed in most fields, not as urgent as free online access in any field, and only makes it gratuitously harder to mandate OA).

All this upgrade needs in order to make it optimal is: (1) Funder mandates and institutional mandates should both stipulate convergent institutional deposit (not divergent, competitive deposit: institution-external repositories like EuPMC can harvest from the institutional ones).

(2) Institutions and funders should both stipulate that repository deposit is the only means of submitting publications for institutional performance review or national research assessment.

(3) Institutions should be designated to monitor and ensure that their researchers comply with both institutional and funder deposit mandates.This optimized Green OA mandate is no more of an assault on academic freedom than the mandate to "Publish-or-Perish" is -- in fact, it is merely a natural extension of P-or-P, for the online age.

The Physics Research Promotion Center of Taiwan has expressed its interest in joining the SCOAP3 consortium, representing the contribution of Taiwan. With this new participation, the SCOAP3 partnership now includes several hundreds libraries in 31 countries. Collectively, these partners have pledged 85% of the SCOAP3 budget envelope of 10 million Euros/year. A network of National Contact Points is now supporting these libraries and consortia in calculating expected reductions in their current subscription contracts which will contribute to financing SCOAP3, which will be reconciled with calculations of publishers of subscription journals to be converted to Open Access under the SCOAP3 model. SCOAP3 is looking forward to enlarge this opportunities to other partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia.(author unknown)

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