From: "Pikas, Christina K." <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 26 May 2015 13:09:08 +0000

Physics does provide a case study for this. It is impossible to know
how this would vary by discipline.

See: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/openaccess/Suber_15_chap8.html

Quoting:

1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions.

Rising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal
cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t.

2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant.

Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The
evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t
cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between
arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals
is more symbiotic than antagonistic.

Physicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any
other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of
OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other
field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see
the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading
publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS)
and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that
they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact,
the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept
submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.2

3. Other fields may not behave like physics.

We won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields
approach those in physics.

It would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics
has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in
other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the
variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not
among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher
lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access
journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge
the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence
from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it.
They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged
the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could,
either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other
than physics will have a different experience.

An October 2004 editorial in The Lancet (an Elsevier journal) called
on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that
publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of
American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim.
Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to
bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder
provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the
threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”3

For more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research
in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments
and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in
2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA
was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to
decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.4

4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from
publishers’ web sites.

When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article,
many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because
they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because
authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition,
most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as
decreased or canceled subscriptions.

Moreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher
web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No
one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that
is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence
suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it
increases readers and reading.5

5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA.

Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the
natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The
Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access
publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more
progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported
the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in
January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving
compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been
actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”6

This or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority
of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if
they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without
embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would
stop.

6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives
to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals.
......


Christina

Christina K. Pikas
Librarian
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
[log in to unmask]



-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 02:33:26 +0000


>I think the important point here, aside from the double-talk Dr. Wise
>continues to employ even after Steven points out the inconsistency, is
>that there is no evidence at all that libraries have or will cancel
>journal subscriptions because of author self-archiving in institutional
>repositories.

Of course, gathering real-world data from imaginary scenarios is
notoriously tough.

So here¹s my question (and this will be awkwardly phrased, sorry): is
anyone aware of a subscription journal for which most or all of the
content is consistently self-archived in repositories? If there are
ten or twenty such journals out there, it would be very interesting to
see whether and to what degree subscriptions have been affected since
the self-archiving started ‹ and to monitor that trend over time.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections Marriott Library,
University of Utah [log in to unmask]