From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:19:20 -0400

(This is the second half of the exchange begun in part one, picking up
exactly where that left off.)

**Ellen Duranceau of MIT intervened thus:

With this debate underway, I’ve been trying to picture a reasonable
workflow that would assess the rate of immediate green OA via
publisher’s self-archiving policy and use it effectively in a
collections process.  I have been unable to come up with any scenario
that seems solid enough to even experiment with, let alone deploy, in
a research library.

For this exercise, I’m leaving aside any broader goals of wider
distribution of publicly funded research, etc., or any philosophical
factors, and am just focusing on providing sufficient service to one’s
own community.

First, we have the problem that a wide sampling from any given journal
would be required, since author practices in self-archiving vary.
This sampling would also have to be repeated regularly, and take in
several sample years, since practices will vary over time.

Whoever performs this sampling would also have to be trained in
recognizing the version of articles, since presumably one wants the
peer-reviewed version available to one’s faculty and researchers and
students.  This would require, in many cases, comparing the manuscript
with the version of record (which, please note, is only available to
you if you subscribe).

After all the sampling is done and a spreadsheet created, one would
then have to calculate what percentage of the journal was openly
available (and whether that percentage was acceptable – this would
have to be a very high number, presumably), and after what time
period.  This would not be an easy feat, as one has to have numbers
representing the total number of articles in order to make the
comparison, and as far as I’m aware, this would involve manually
tabulating the number of articles in each issue (again possibly
through sampling).  Then this information would have to be used in
conjunction with other important data such as usage level, faculty
interest and feedback, cost, etc.  (Let’s leave aside for the moment
that this whole approach would only be responsible if one had buy-in
from the community one is serving.)

If the decision were taken to cancel the journal, assuming here that
the decision rested in part on the availability of OA manuscripts,
then one would also have to have a cycle of returning to those titles
to be sure a certain acceptable percentage was still available.   This
would be necessary because author practices vary and there is no
reason at all to assume that because for one year, a good percentage
of a journal was OA, that will be true the next year.  So perhaps a
continuous sampling would be required.  We are now talking about a
dramatic impact on staff resources, so some other work would need to
be stopped or slowed.

Then, if one wants to continue to sample post cancellation, as would
seem to be necessary, in many cases one would need the version of
record to compare with, to be sure one is looking at the peer-reviewed
version.  Yet this version would not be available once the
cancellation had taken place.  So staff would be operating without
solid information in future sampling, as it can be difficult to tell a
preprint from a postprint without the version of record as a
comparison point.

Now we add in the practical reality that if any number of libraries
followed this labor-intensive workflow and reassigned staff from other
tasks to do it, within a year or two, the publishers would simply
change their green OA policy for authors, removing it entirely or
adding an embargo.

So then the library has the problem of having to track these publisher
policy changes --- that in itself would require a labor-intensive
workflow I won’t try to lay out, as there is no reliable and targeted
signaling process for such changes—and then re-subscribe.   That could
be tricky, as possibly the necessary funds would have already been
diverted.  Even if funds were available, it would be exceedingly labor
intensive to re-subscribe and decide about and act upon filling any
gaps in access, which could create confusion if left as gaps, as well
as updating relevant metadata so useful services like SFX linking.
Perhaps one would fill the gaps/restore the access via pay-per-view,
but now we are talking about having to do another analysis about
whether that is cost-effective.

(Let’s also recall that while the journals were cancelled, SFX buttons
weren’t taking users from finding resources like Compendex, Inspec,
Web of Knowledge, etc. to journal articles.  Known article searches
may have been functioning, but index-based searching that links to the
actual documents to assist those new to a topic area would have been
limited to subscribed titles.)

When looking at how to operate in this evolving ecosystem, I imagine
we all agree it’s important to use funds and staff resources wisely,
and to look beyond a quarter or a year in thinking about the impacts
of decisions.  Without considering any philosophical or social goals
(no matter how mission-relevant, or noble), and looking just at the
practical need of providing key research articles to a community, I do
not see a viable workflow that seems worth testing even on a trial
basis.

This is probably part of the reason you do not hear about libraries
cancelling journals based on availability of OA manuscripts.  I would
also guess that if the numbers were run, there would not be any
journals to cancel,  as author practices in this area are not
consistent.

Ellen Duranceau


**To which Rick Anderson responded:

Ellen, the very detailed and time-intensive process you outline below
is one that would arguably be necessary in order to perform an
ongoing, comprehensive analysis of article availability under a Green
OA regime, but I think it's much more than would be necessary in order
to make reasonable cancellation decisions in many cases.  As I said
before, the criteria we use to make subscription and cancellation
decisions are multidimensional and each criterion is on a continuum —
but each one's position on every continuum doesn't always have to be
carefully analyzed in order to make good decisions.

So, for example: if I learn that Biology Journal X has gone Green with
a 12-month embargo, I can forward that information to our collection
development manager.  He can look up the title and see that we have a
freestanding subscription and that it costs $2000/year.  Because is
familiar with both our budget situation and our institution's
curricular focus, he can then make a quick decision:  is $2000 a
high-enough price to justify putting Biology Journal X on a "to be
reviewed" list, given the centrality (or lack thereof) of that journal
to our institutional needs?  If so, then it goes on the list and our
serials review team will be prompted to look at it later on (one year
later, two years later, whatever).  The review could consist of
sampling several issues from the period under review and searching
their contents to see what percentage of the articles are publicly
available.  This would be kind of drudgey work, but we have people who
can do it at a low cost during down times at service desks.

The cheaper and more locally-relevant the journal, the less likely we
would be to undertake this kind of review (and the less likely we'd be
to cancel it as a result).  The more expensive and more peripheral the
journal, and the higher the percentage of publicly-available articles
in it, the more likely would be review and cancellation.

All of the above applies only to newly-Green journals going forward,
of course. Reviewing the current field of Green journals for likely
cancellation candidates is a more daunting task — one that I'm
scheduled to discuss with my CD staff today.  But I'm pretty confident
that we'll be able to come up with an approach that will return good
value for cost.  And if we can't, then we won't do it.


**In her own response to Duranceau, Heather Morrison said:

Good points, Ellen.  One to add, inspired by Rick:  high-cost journals
tend to be part of big deals.  Even if a library did all this work to
identify journals with free content, publishers would not decrease the
cost of the big deal and if libraries try to cancel the big deal,
Rick's experience shows that publishers simply charge more for other
journals that cannot be cancelled.

In other words, there are solid reasons why green OA does not result
in library cancellations.


**In a last (for now) intervention, responding in part to Duranceau,
Harnad said:

(1). I hope we have now laid to rest the absurd notion of cancelling
journals because they do *not* embargo Green OA.

(2) As to monitoring what proportion of articles published in the
current year are OA (and how soon):  This is a huge ongoing *global*
undertaking, and several teams (including ours) are working on it.

(3) The notion of doing (2) *locally*, with a view to cancelling
journals once a target percentage of their contents is Green OA, is
extremely premature, hence extremely unrealistic, but, worse than
that, it is extremely counterproductive.

(4) It is counterproductive because it creates an air of imminent
cancellation when in fact* there is no cancellation (and very little
OA) in sight.*

(5) Hence all it does is spook publishers -- not with the actual
growth of OA, but with librarians hopeful but purely notional
preparations for journal cancellation, should OA ever really begin to
grow.

(6) And for OA to really begin to grow, we need effective Green OA mandates.

(7) And although I want to stress that it is not *essential* for the
effectiveness of Green OA mandates, it is very helpful for Green OA
mandates if publisher Green OA embargoes are zero or minimal.

(8) Yet it is precisely the publisher impulse to adopt non-zero Green
OA embargoes, and lengthen them, that is needlessly encouraged by
librarians giving in to their own self-defeating impulse toward
*abrogatio praecox*.

Journal users need immediate access, not access after a 6-12-24 month
embargo or longer.

As we will soon report, the percentage of *immediate* Green OA in
almost all institutional repositories is still extremely low (under
10%) -- even in most of the 1% of them that have Green OA mandates.
(Chances are that the percentage of immediate Green OA on other
websites is even lower.)

The exceptions are the few institutions that have adopted the
strongest Green OA mandate -- the mandate model that is now
recommended by BOAI-10, HEFCE and BIS:  Immediate-Deposit (not
immediate-OA) required as a condition for eligibility for performance
review, research assessment and funding, coupled with the Almost-OA
eprint-request Button to tide over individual user requests during any
embargo.

Once deposited, papers are just one click from being made OA; and all
the individual clicks to provide Almost-OA apply mounting pressure to
set access as OA once and for all.

This mandate would work even if all publishers embargoed OA, because
immediate-deposit is mandatory whether or not there is a publisher
embargo on setting access to the deposit as OA.

Currently the immediate-deposit mandate can generate 60% immediate-OA
and 40% Almost-OA.

But if librarians spook publishers with their hopeful but empty
notional gestures toward abrogatio praecox, they can drive that closer
to 0% immediate-OA and 100% Almost-OA, which means loss of
immediate-OA in exchange for absolutely no gain in cancellations.

Your call...

*Stevan Harnad*


**In a last (for now) intervention, Rick Anderson said:

To the degree that Green policies are a) widespread, b) mandatory, c)
effective and d) embargo-free, won't that make it much easier for
libraries to see which subscriptions they no longer need to keep?  It
seems to me that if you want to encourage adoption of Green policies,
your best bet is for them to be spottily observed, optional, and
embargoed, thus making it maximally difficult for libraries to see
which titles they can cancel.  Unless, that is, your actual goal is to
drive publishers out of business — but that would be counterproductive
given that Green models depend on traditional publishers continuing to
publish journals in traditional ways, which in turn requires a
continued stream of traditional subscription revenue.

One solution to this conundrum might be for libraries to continue
subscribing to journals whose content has become comprehensively and
immediately available for free, thus keeping traditional publishing
alive with what amounts to charitable giving.  But I'm not sure that
sounds like a very healthy or sustainable system in the long term.


**Finally, one comment from Graham Triggs to the postings on
liblicense-l last night:

It is indeed.  And if librarian's cancellation decisions are based on
unthinking criteria that self-destruct -- namely, if a journal allows
Green OA, cancel it -- it needs to be pointed out that this would be
an excellent way to ensure that journals decide not to allow Green OA.
 And thereby slow the growth of Green OA. And thereby undermine the
basis of the cancellation decision.

-End of Part 2-