Re: Institutional Mandates and Institutional OA Repository Growth

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

On Wed, 19 Sep 2007, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> Ah, yes, and if you'll remember our prior discussion about open 
> access, Stevan, I warned that just this "success" might be the 
> "tipping point" to drive a host of commercial and society 
> publishers out of the business of journal publishing. One 
> "tipping point" causes another? Witness, as partial proof, the 
> reaction of STM publishers represented by the PRISM initiative. 
> I read that as a warning that, if the government forces a 
> change in their business model, they may just walk away from 
> the business. I assume you wouldn't consider that a bad thing 
> at all, but my question would be what kind of structure will 
> take its place and what expectations will universities have of 
> their presses to pick up the slack?
What is remarkable, Sandy, is how actual empirical facts (very 
few) are being freely admixed, willy-nilly, with fact-free 
speculations for which there is, and continues to be zero 
empirical evidence, and, in many cases, decisive and familiar 
counterevidence, both empirical and logical.

Nothing has changed since our prior discussions except that there 
have (happily) been some more Green OA mandates (total adopted: 
32, plus 8 more further proposed mandates). 
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

There has been no "tipping point." Just *talk* about tipping 
points, and that talk about tipping points has been going on for 
years.

There has been no one driven out of business, nor any empirical 
evidence of a trend toward being driven out of business. Just 
*talk* of being driven out of business, and that talk about being 
driven out of business has been going on for years.

And as to the "partial proof" in the form of the STM/PRISM 
"reaction" -- that very same reaction (with the very same false, 
alarmist arguments) has been voiced, verbatim, by the very same 
publisher groups (STM, AAP, ALPSP), over and over, for over a 
decade now. And they have been debunked just as often (see long 
list of links below). But that certainly hasn't been enough to 
make the publishers' anti-OA lobby cease and desist. Do you 
consider the relentless repetition, at louder and louder volume, 
of exactly the same specious and evidence-free claims, to be 
"proof" of anything, partial or otherwise?

And the phrase "the government forces a change in their business 
model" is just as false a description of what is actually going 
on when it is spoken in your own well-meaning words as when it is 
voiced by PRISM and Eric Dezenhall: The government is *not* 
forcing a change in a business model. The funders of 
tax-payer-funded research -- and, increasingly, universities, who 
are not "the government" at all! -- are insisting that the 
researchers they fund and employ make their peer-reviewed 
research freely available to all would-be users online, in line 
with the purpose of conducting and funding and publishing 
research in the first place.

This quite natural (and overdue) adaptation to the online age on 
the part of the research community -- Green OA -- may or may not 
lead to a transition to Gold OA publishing: no one knows whether, 
or when it will. But what is already known is that OA itself, 
whether Green or Gold, is enormously beneficial to research, 
researchers, their institutions and funders, the vast R&D 
industry, and the tax-paying public that funds research and for 
whose benefit it is funded, conducted and published. (OA is also 
a secondary benefit to education and the developing world.)

So the "tipping point" for Green OA itself is an unalloyed 
benefit for everyone but the peer-reviewed journal publishing 
industry, whether or not it leads to a second tipping point and a 
transition to Gold OA.

Reality today, to repeat, is a growth in Green OA mandates, not a 
tipping point (let alone two), not a subscription decline, not 
publishers going out of business, not government pressure toward 
another publishing model.

You ask "what kind of structure will take its place and what 
expectations will universities have of their presses to pick up 
the slack?" I presume you are referring to the multiple 
hypothetical conditional: *if* Green OA mandates reach the 
tipping point that generates 100% Green OA, and *if* that in turn 
generates journal cancellations that reach the tipping point that 
generates a transition to Gold OA? The answer (which I have 
provided many times before) is simple: The "structure" will be 
Gold OA, funded out of (a part of) the institutional cancellation 
savings. 
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm

And this is not about publishing in general, commercial, society, 
university, or otherwise. It is only about peer-reviewed journal 
publishing, and their hypothetical transition to Gold OA under 
cancellation pressure from mandated Green OA.

Stevan Harnad