Open Choice is a Trojan Horse for Open Access Mandates

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

                ** Apologies for Multiple Posting **

Dear OA advocates:

This is a note of caution about the spate of publishers currently 
announcing that they are offering Open Choice -- i.e., the option 
for authors to buy OA, at various asking prices, for their 
individual article.

On the surface, this sounds like a positive development: 
Publishers experimenting widely with OA publishing at last.

But please don't forget the OA mandates that have been proposed 
and are pending in the US, UK, EC, Australia, Germany, France, 
Norway.

Those are all OA self-archiving mandates, and they are already 
long-delayed, mostly because of opposition from the publishing 
lobby.

Please be aware that the publishing lobby will now be using the 
paid-OA option that they are offering as yet another means of 
trying to delay or divert the adoption of the OA self-archiving 
mandates.

If the US, UK, EC, Australia, Germany, France, Norway felt they 
had the extra money to mandate and fund paid OA instead of 
self-archiving today, and promptly did so, that would be fine.

But that outcome is highly unlikely, for many reasons (the chief 
of which being that 100% of the cash for funding publication is 
currently tied up in paying subscriptions, so the extra money 
would have to be found from elsewhere, in advance!).

Moreover, a consensus on a policy of mandating OA via 
self-archiving, at no extra cost, even though it has been so long 
in coming (mainly because of publisher opposition) is far less 
likely, and likely to be far longer in the coming, if it instead 
becomes a paid-OA mandate, conditional on finding and agreeing to 
invest all that extra cash in advance -- particularly at a time 
when all publication costs are being paid, hence there is no call 
for extra cash.

The publishers' promise that as paid OA catches on they will 
scale down subscription prices is a hollow one: It is tantamount 
to saying, to an individual customer: "Buy more of my product and 
the effect will trickle down in the form of a lower price for 
everyone, including you." Nonsense: individual authors, if they 
paid for the OA option for their own articles, would simply be 
subsidising an infinitesimal reduction in the price of 
subscriptions for institutional libraries the world over.

And the research community and public need 100% OA now.

I think Open Choice is a Trojan Horse, and that we should be very 
careful about our reaction to it, as it risks eliciting years 
more of delay for OA (under the guise of "preparing the way").

>From publishers who do not oppose the self-archiving mandates, 
Open Choice is fine: it is an indication of good faith, and 
willingness to test the waters of Open Access Publishing. But 
from publishers lobbying against the adoption of self-archiving 
mandates, and touting Open Choice as an alternative -- or, worse, 
pressing for the mandating of paid-OA rather than self-archiving 
-- it is a clever, but somewhat cynical way of delaying still 
longer the immediate mandating of OA, as now proposed all over 
the world.

Stevan Harnad