If we heed the advice of the Finch Report, the UK will lose its lead in open access publishing… and a great deal of public money. Stevan Harnad writes why he believes that the recommendations of the Finch Report could set worldwide open access back by at least a decade.
The UK’s universities and research funders have been leading the rest of the world in the movement toward Open Access (OA) to research with “Green” OA mandates requiring researchers to self-archive their journal articles on the web, free for all. A report has emerged from the Finch committee that looks superficially as if it were supporting OA, but is strongly biased in favour of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research. Instead of recommending building on the UK’s lead in cost-free Green OA, the committee has recommended spending a great deal of extra money to pay publishers for “Gold” OA publishing. If the Finch committee were heeded, the UK would lose both its lead in OA and a great deal of public money — and worldwide OA would be set back at least a decade.
Open Access means online access to peer-reviewed research, free for all. (Some OA advocates want more than this, but all want at least this.) Subscriptions restrict research access to users at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the journal in which the research was published. OA makes it accessible to all would-be users. This maximizes research uptake, usage, applications and progress, to the benefit of the tax-paying public that funds it.
There are two ways for authors to make their research OA. One way is to publish it in an OA journal, which makes it free online. This is called “Gold OA.” There are currently about 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all disciplines, worldwide. Most of them (about 90 per cent) are not Gold. Some Gold OA journals (mostly overseas national journals) cover their publication costs from subscriptions or subsidies, but the international Gold OA journals charge the author an often sizeable fee (£1000 or more).
The other way for authors to make their research OA is to publish it in the suitable journal of their choice, but to self-archive their peer-reviewed final draft in their institutional OA repository to make it free online for those who lack subscription access to the publisher’s version of record. This is called “Green OA.”
The UK is the country that first began mandating that its researchers provide Green OA. Only Green OA can be mandated, because Gold OA costs extra money and restricts authors’ journal choice. But Gold OA can be recommended, where suitable, and funds can be offered to pay for it, if available.
The first Green OA mandate in the world was designed and adopted in the UK (University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, 2003) and the UK was the first nation in which all RCUK research funding councils have mandated Green OA. The UK already has 26 institutional mandates and 14 funder mandates, more than any other country except the US, which has 39 institutional mandates and 4 funder mandates — but the UK is far ahead of the US relative to its size (although the US and EU are catching up, following the UK’s lead).
To date, the world has a total of 185 institutional mandates and 52 funder mandates. This is still only a tiny fraction of the world’s total number of universities, research institutes and research funders. Universities and research institutions are the universal providers of all peer-reviewed research, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines, but even in the UK, far fewer than half of the universities have as yet mandated OA, and only a few of the UK’s OA mandates are designed to be optimally effective. Nevertheless, the current annual Green OA rate for the UK (40 per cent) is twice the worldwide baseline rate (20 per cent).
What is clearly needed now in the UK (and worldwide) is to increase the number of Green OA mandates by institutions and funders to 100 per cent and to upgrade the sub-optimal mandates to ensure 100 per cent compliance. This increase and upgrade is purely a matter of policy; it does not cost any extra money.
What is the situation for Gold OA? The latest estimate for worldwide Gold OA is 12 per cent, but this includes the overseas national journals for which there is less international demand. Among the 10,000 journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters, about 8 per cent are Gold. The percentage of Gold OA in the UK is half as high (4 per cent) as in the rest of the world, almost certainly because of the cost and choice constraint of Gold OA and the fact that the UK’s 40 per cent cost-free Green OA rate is double the global 20 per cent baseline, because of the UK’s mandates.
Now we come to the heart of the matter. Publishers lobby against Green OA and Green OA mandates on the basis of two premises: (#1) that Green OA is inadequate for users’ needs and (#2) that Green OA is parasitic, and will destroy both journal publishing and peer review if allowed to grow: If researchers, their funders and their institutions want OA, let them pay instead for Gold OA.
Both these arguments have been accepted, uncritically, by the Finch Committee, which, instead of recommending the cost-free increasing and upgrading of the UK’s Green OA mandates has instead recommended increasing public spending by £50-60 million yearly to pay for more Gold OA.
Let me close by looking at the logic and economics underlying this recommendation that publishers have welcomed so warmly: What seems to be overlooked is the fact that worldwide institutional subscriptions are currently paying the cost of journal publishing, including peer review, in full (and handsomely) for the 90 per cent of journals that are non-OA today. Hence the publication costs of the Green OA that authors are providing today are fully paid for by the institutions worldwide that can afford to subscribe.
If publisher premise #1 — that Green OA is inadequate for users’ needs — is correct, then when Green OA is scaled up to 100 per cent it will continue to be inadequate, and the institutions that can afford to subscribe will continue to cover the cost of publication, and premise #2 is refuted: Green OA will not destroy publication or peer review.
Now suppose that premise #1 is wrong: Green OA (the author’s peer-reviewed final draft) proves adequate for all users’ needs, so once the availability of Green OA approaches 100 per cent for their users, institutions cancel their journals, making subscriptions no longer sustainable as the means of covering the costs of peer-reviewed journal publication.
What will journals do, as their subscription revenues shrink? They will do what all businesses do under those conditions: They will cut unnecessary costs. If the Green OA version is adequate for users, that means both the print edition and the online edition of the journal (and their costs) can be phased out, as there is no longer a market for them. Nor do journals have to do the access-provision or archiving of peer-reviewed drafts: that’s offloaded onto the distributed global network of Green OA institutional repositories. What’s left for peer-reviewed journals to do?
Peer review itself is done for publishers for free by researchers, just as their papers are provided to publishers for free by researchers. The journals manage the peer review, with qualified editors who select the peer reviewers and adjudicate the reviews. That costs money, but not nearly as much money as is bundled into journal publication costs, and hence subscription prices, today.
But if and when global Green OA “destroys” the subscription base for journals as they are published today, forcing journals to cut obsolete costs and downsize to just peer-review service provision alone, Green OA will by the same token also have released the institutional subscription funds to pay the downsized journals’ sole remaining publication cost – peer review – as a Gold OA publication fee, out of a fraction of the institutional windfall subscription savings. (And the editorial boards and authorships of those journal titles whose publishers are not interested in staying in the scaled down post-Green-OA publishing business will simply migrate to Gold OA publishers who are.)
So, far from leading to the destruction of journal publishing and peer review, scaling up Green OA mandates globally will generate, first, the 100 per cent OA that research so much needs — and eventually also a transition to sustainable post-Green-OA Gold OA publishing.
But not if the Finch Report is heeded and the UK heads in the direction of squandering more scarce public money on funding pre-emptive Gold OA instead of extending and upgrading cost-free Green OA mandates.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
For the data, see “Finch Fiasco in Figures”: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/905-.html
Great article, thank you for your insights. Your article covers the economics of this debate very well, I wonder if there isn’t also a qualitative debate to be made. While I only have a pedestrian knowledge of these issues I wonder if the Gold OA model wouldn’t also change the ‘interest weighting’ of peer-reviewed articles. If researchers will have to pay for the peer-review processes (without being paid for the publication) then, perhaps, only researchers who will have these fees paid for by sponsors will be published. If that is true, then wouldn’t publications by independent researchers be diminished in relation to those which research in support of business interests. While the peer-review process helps to keep the science in line, what about science that doesn’t (currently) have a profitable application?
Perhaps you might share your thoughts?
GOLD OA COSTS: PRE-EMPTIVE VS. POST-GREEN-OA
Post-Green-OA Gold OA, downsized to just peer review management, will be far less costly then today’s asking price for pre-emptive (Pre-Green-OA) Gold OA.
And on the premise of Green-induced subscription unsustainability, researchers with institutional affiliations will not need to pay these minimal Gold OA costs: They will be covered easily by their institutions’ annual windfall savings from the subscription cancelations. And the cost of peer review will be low enough so that submissions from unaffiliated researchers can be handled either by a special fund for this, or pro bono.
Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.
Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.
Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).
Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21(3-4): 86-93
It’s not correct to hold that all publishers do is manage the peer-review process. There are a range of other practical tasks associated with publication including copyediting, figure redrawing, typesetting, design and layout, preparing various digital formats and feeding them into the appropriate databases – not to mention the job of commissioning and helping to craft timely op/ed content that draws the journal together and puts the research in context for the reader. Beyond this comes generating/broadening readership and quality of submissions through representation of journals at key professional/academic conferences and meetings. What you are talking about is a bunch of articles in a database; a journal is a crafted piece of work that is greater than the sum of its parts, with a reputation, spirit, ethos and history. There are perhaps a handful of flagship journals in the world who could sit back tomorrow and, without a publisher, maintain (and, please note, I do not say “grow”) their reputation, readership and submissions. But what of the rest? Do they just sink? So where goes the publications by and for the super-specialist, the up-and-coming maverick researcher, the articles of local concern? The size and profits of big publishing houses are excessive, and the tax payer deserves access to the research they funded and I question neither of these facts, but Gold OA – not Green – makes sense in so many more ways.
I don’y know where to start… There was a time when publishers did a lot of editing. Nowadays journals expect print-ready layout and figures. As for reputation of a journal: in my field (chemistry/physics) this boils down to one number, the Impact Factor. This is largely self-perpetuating, and otherwise upheld by the unpaid academic editors and unpaid reviewers.
You mention the “up-and-coming maverick researcher”. Where does he/she take that money from? I know people who have £200 spendable research budget per year (doing their research on shared equipment). They produce 5-10 good publications during this time; they just happen not to be on a million-pound grant. Gold OA publishing is only affordable for large groups with a steady stream of Research Council grants, and even there the impact is significant (since the cost rises linearly with the number of postdocs and grad students).
THE GOAL OF GREEN OA IS OA, NOT GOLD OA
The Green OA version is just the author’s peer-reviewed final draft, self-archiving in the author’s institutional repository upon acceptance for publication so that the paper is accessible to all potential users webwide, not just those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it is published.
If journal products and services over and above peer review are indeed important enough to still have a sustainable market with researchers, then universal Green OA will simply co-exist in parallel with standard subscription publishing.
If not, not.
What is the end game? If all the content is available publically, why buy the journal, if the journal makes no revenue through sales they’ll have to charge more for the peer review and other services and thus transform into the Gold model anyway.
My concern in the Gold model is what prevents competition driving down standards, is reputation enough?
WHAT IS THE END GAME?
Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.
Summary: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community’s access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.
Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.
Summary: Some think the most radical feature of PostGutenberg journals will be the fact that they are digital and online, but that would be a much more modest development if their contents were to continue to be kept behind financial firewalls, with access denied to all who cannot or will not pay the tolls. This chapter shows how the optimal and inevitable outcome — for scientific and scholarly research, researchers, their institutions and funders, the vast research and development industry, and the society whose taxes support science and scholarship and for whose benefits the research is conducted – will be that all published research articles will be openly accessible online, free for all would-be users webwide.
Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).
Summary: Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open Access Publishing (“Gold OA”) are premature. Funds are short; 80% of journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving (of authors’ final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for publication) (“Green OA”). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be on a “no-fault basis,” with the author’s institution or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality standards.
Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21(3-4): 86-93
Summary: Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA.
WHAT IS THE END GAME?
Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.
Summary: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community’s access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.
Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.
Summary:
Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).
Summary:
Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21(3-4): 86-93
Summary:
DESPITE THE FINCH REPORT, RCUK STANDS FIRM ON MANDATING GREEN OA
Despite the recommendation by the Finch Committee and UK Science and Universities Minister David Willets (under heavy influence from the publisher lobby) to downgrade repository use to the storage and preservation of data, theses and unpublished work, the UK research funding councils, RCUK, have re-confirmed their policy of mandatory author self-archiving in Green OA repositories:
“The new policy, which will apply to all qualifying publications being submitted for publication from 1 April 2013, states that peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils… must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access.
“Criteria which journals must fulfill to be compliant with the Research Councils’ Open Access policy are detailed within the policy, but include offering a “pay to publish” option or allowing deposit in a subject or institutional repository after a mandated maximum embargo period…”
This is eight years almost to the day in 2004 when the UK Parliamentary Select Committee made its revolutionary recommendation to mandate Green OA:
“This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way.”
At that time, despite the fact that the UK government (under pressure from the publishing lobby) decided to ignore the Select Committee’s recommendation to mandate Green OA, RCUK and many UK universities adopted Green OA mandates anyway. As a result, the UK became the global leader in the tranistion to Open Access.
If heeded, the Finch Committee recommendation to downgrade repository use to the storage and preservation of data, theses and unpublished work would have set back global OA by at least a decade.
Fortunately, the RCUK is again showing its sense and independence. Let us hope UK’s universities — not pleased that scarce research funds, instead of being increased, are to be decreased to pay extra needlessly for Gold OA — will likewise continue to opt instead for cost-free Green OA by mandating it.
If so, the UK will again have earned and re-affirmed its leadership role in the global transition to universal OA.