Re: Springer and Helmholtz Association sign agreement for open access membership
Might Stevan be implying that OA forums should not be promoting
financial/commercial sustainability of OA? Is it OA he is for, or is it
commercial activity he is against? Or is he a denialist when it comes to the
contribution of commercial ventures to OA?
Jan Velterop
Stevan Harnad wrote:
I wonder if it is a good idea for Open Access forums to become the
publicity vehicles for commercial deals?
Stevan Harnad
Scaling to Global OA: Parallel Local Green/Gold Is OK, But Gold Alone
First, No Way
SUMMARY:
Trying to morph incoming institutional non-OA journal-fleet
subscriptions into outgoing institutional Gold OA journal-fleet
"memberships" is incoherent and cannot scale across journals and
institutions; alongside an institutional Green OA mandate, however,
it is innocuous: The Green mandates will ensure the real, leveraged,
scalable, unstoppable progress toward global OA. Without an
institutional Green OA mandate, pursuing local Gold OA "memberships"
is not only futile but a retardant on real progress toward global
OA, creating instead an illusory local sense of progress that
further distracts from and obscures what really needs to be done
locally to generate global OA.
The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green
Open Access Now
ABSTRACT: Among the many important implications of Houghton et
al’s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs
and benefits of providing free online access (“Open Access,”
OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles
one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a
forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed
research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make
it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying
Houghton et al’s modelling and analyses, but they are for the
most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes
their strongest practical implication particularly striking:
The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an
order of magnitude greater than all the other potential
combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and
compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more
significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already
rests entirely in the hands of the research community
(researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas
OA publishing depends on the publishing industry. Perhaps most
remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies
that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of
the economics of publication rather than the economics of
research.
OA McMemberships, Dismemberment and MC Escher
SUMMARY:
Gold OA institutional "membership" is incoherent and does not scale.
It only gives the illusion of making sense if you think of it
locally, and myopically. Annual institutional subscriptions to
journals containing the annual outgoing refereed research of all
other institutions do not morph into annual institutional
memberships for publishing each institution's own outgoing refereed
research. There are 25,000 journals and 10,000 institutions! Is
every single institution to commit and contract in advance to pay
for its authors' (potential) fraction of annual submissions to every
single journal? Is that a "membership" or a distributed
dismemberment? And is every journal to commit and contract in
advance to accept every institution's annual fraction of
submissions? (Is that peer review?) This is a global oligopolistic
illusion that would fit publishers just about as well as it would
fit McDonalds, except there are at least 25,000 different journals
to "join", and institutions each have thousands of author-consumers
with diverse dietary needs, varying day to day and year to year.
Gold Conversion: A Prisoners' Dilemma?
SUMMARY:
Given the undeniable, irreversible and growing clamour for Open
Access (OA) worldwide, journal publishers face two Prisoners'
Dilemmas.
(1) The first concerns whether to continue business as usual, to
mounting opprobrium from the academic community as well as the
tax-paying public, or to convert directly to Gold OA now, at the
risk that institutional subscriptions at current prices for incoming
journals may not transmute stably into institutional "memberships"
for outgoing article publication costs at the same institutional
price. If publishers convert from institutional subscriptions to
institutional Gold OA "memberships" today, they counter the
opprobrium and lock in current subscription rates for a year (or
whatever duration-deal is agreed with institutions), but they risk
institutional memberships defecting after the duration elapses, with
cost-recovery fragmented to an anarchic individual author/article
level that may not be enough to make ends meet.
(2) The second Prisoners' Dilemma facing publishers is that if they
instead counter the opprobrium by converting to Green OA now (as 62%
of them already have done), Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates may
still force their conversion to Gold eventually, but because
access-provision and archiving (and their costs) will by then be
performed by the distributed network of mandated Green OA
Institutional Repositories, the revenues (and expenses) of journal
publishing then may be reduced from what they are now. (Perhaps this
can all be integrated into just a single Prisoners' Dilemma -- or
perhaps it is not a Prisoners' Dilemma at all: just the optimal and
inevitable outcome of the powerful new potential unleashed by the
online medium for the communication of peer-reviewed scholarly and
scientific research.)
On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision
Horse
SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA
self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce
available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the
university's potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees
are currently committed to paying their annual journal
subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of
publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA
publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will
only provide OA for a small fraction of a university's total
research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for
all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless
the journals' contents are otherwise accessible to a
university's users. (In addition, the very same scarcity of
funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal
articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA
payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university
funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are
making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming
monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold
OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable.)
Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed
drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all
would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal
OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to
universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to
cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay
the publishing costs of Gold OA.
Springer's Already on the Side of the Angels: What's the Big Deal?
SUMMARY: The Association of Universities in the Netherlands
(VSNU) has made a deal with Springer that articles by VSNU
authors will be made OA. But Springer is already on the side
of the angels on OA, being completely Green on immediate,
unembargoed author OA self-archiving. Hence all VSNU authors
are already free to deposit their refereed final drafts of
their Springer articles in their institutional repositories,
without requiring any further permission or payment. So what
in addition is meant by the VSNU deal with Springer? that the
Springer PDF rather than the author's final draft can be
deposited? That Springer does the deposit on VSNU authors'
behalf? Or is this a deal for prepaid hybrid Gold OA? In the
case of Springer articles, it seems that what the Netherlands
lacked was not the right to make them OA, but the mandate
(from the VSNU universities and Netherlands' research funders
like NWO) to make them OA. There are some signs, however, that
this too might be on the way...
University of California: Throwing Money At Gold OA Without Mandating
Green OA
On 2010-08-23, at 8:22 AM, Peter Suber wrote:
[Forwarding from Renate Bayaz at Springer. --Peter Suber.]
PRESS RELEASE
Springer and Helmholtz Association sign agreement for open
access membership
Cooperation makes open access publishing easier for scientists
Berlin / New York / London, 23 August 2010
Following the launch of SpringerOpen (www.springeropen.com),
the Helmholtz Association has signed a new agreement for an
open access membership. This agreement covers article
processing charges for authors from the participating
Helmholtz research centres for articles published in
SpringerOpen and BioMed Central journals.
SpringerOpen journals are peer-reviewed open access journals in
emerging and interdisciplinary fields that complement both the
established Springer journal portfolios and BioMed Central’s growing
list of over 200 life science and biomedicine journal titles.
SpringerOpen journals are e-only and publish articles under the
Creative Commons Attribution license. According to this license,
Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights.
Both SpringerOpen as well as Biomed Central journals charge article
processing fees to the author which make the journals’ content
immediately and freely available. The membership offering,
introduced by BioMed Central, allows institutions to directly
support the payment of these fees and facilitate the uptake of open
access across their authors. Currently, authors from more than 340
institutions in 39 countries benefit from these memberships taking
on full or partial payment of article processing fees.
“We feel that the Springer open access journal portfolio is a good
match for the spectrum of the six main Helmholtz research areas
(Energy, Earth and Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure
of Matter, and Aeronautics, Space and Transport). We are pleased to
enter into this partnership opening new chances to develop an open
access forum for research results of our scientists. The agreement
is part of our mission to establish long-term mechanisms securing
reasonable publication charges for open access journals,” says Dr.
Bernhard Mittermaier, Head of the Central Library of
Forschungszentrum Jülich.
“We are delighted to see that the Helmholtz Association expresses
its support for SpringerOpen. SpringerOpen expands the option to
publish in fully open access journals to all scientific areas and it
is encouraging to see the scientific community reacting so quickly,”
says Bettina Goerner, Manager Open Access at Springer.
The Helmholtz Association (www.helmholtz.de) contributes to solving
major challenges facing society, science and industry with top
scientific achievements in six research areas: Energy, Earth and
Environment, Health, Key Technologies, Structure of Matter, and
Aeronautics, Space and Transport. With 30,000 employees in 16
research centres and an annual budget of approximately 3 billion
euros, the Helmholtz Association is Germany’s largest scientific
organisation. The Helmholtz Association was one of the initial
signatories of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in 2003.
Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) is a leading
global scientific publisher, delivering quality content through
innovative information products and services. The company is also a
trusted provider of local-language professional publications in
Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. In the science,
technology and medicine (STM) sector, the group publishes around
2,000 journals and more than 6,500 new books a year, as well as the
largest STM eBook Collection worldwide. Springer has operations in
about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and more than 5,000
employees.
BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) has been part of Springer
Science+Business Media since 2008. Founded in 1999, the STM
publisher has pioneered the open access publishing model. All
peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made
immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow
redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is the largest open access
publisher in the world.
Contact: Renate Bayaz, Tel +49-6221-487-8531,
renate.bayaz_at_springer.com
Received on Mon Aug 23 2010 - 17:19:42 BST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0
: Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:50:13 GMT