From: FrederickFriend <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2012 08:54:37 +0100

At one point the STM press release refers to gold as "the" practical
route to achieving sustainable open access, and at another point uses
the word "a". The distinction is important because the PEER results
should not be used by governments, funding agencies, institutions and
authors to halt their commitment to repository development. The
current scholarly journals market is dominated by a handful of very
powerful publishers, and that dominance has not been in the interests
of the taxpayer or the research community. These powerful publishers -
having opposed any form of OA for many years - are now lobbying hard
for gold OA, and their strategy could be to move into gold OA fast and
dominate that market through high APCs and restrictive re-use rights.

In democratic societies there are checks and balances to protect the
public interest from the rich and the powerful, and green OA can be
seen as such a check or balance upon the unhealthy domination of the
gold OA market by a handful of large publishers. This is particularly
important in the early days of gold OA before true market competition
has an opportunity to develop and give a larger share of the
"must-have" market to smaller publishers. Green OA will also remain
important as the basis for new publishing models to develop, such as
the "overlay" model or data-plus-text models which will allow greater
control for the research community over the publishing process. Open
access advocates have never been "anti-publisher", nor
"anti-commerce", but rather "pro-research" and "pro-taxpayer", and
those priorities call for an approach to gold OA which provides good
value for the taxpayer and unrestricted rights for the researcher,
allowing for a return to the publisher in proportion to the value the
publisher adds to the dissemination of publicly-funded research. That
is not what happens in the current subscription/licensing model, and
it is more likely to happen in a gold OA model if gold OA is "a" route
to sustainable OA rather than "the" route.

Fred Friend
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL

-----Original Message-----
From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 21:01:53 +0100

Interestingly, we heard today at a conference in Brussels on the PEER
project that the project found:

1. No evidence of any harm to publishers as a result of embargoed green OA
2. Evidence of increased total usage through green OA
3. Evidence that green OA through the PEER project actually drives
usage at the publisher site.

The PEER project did not investigate issues around gold OA and so I am
a little surprised that this is the focus of the press release from
STM.

David



On 29 May 2012, at 19:52, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: Kim Beadle <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 16:59:25 +0200
>
> PEER End of Project Conference
> 29 May 2012. Brussels
>
> STM welcomes support for gold open access from PEER conference
>
> 'Gold' open access publication is the practical route to achieving
> sustainable open access, the project partners agreed today at the PEER
> End of Project results conference in Brussels. The Publishing and the
> Ecology of European Research (PEER) project, which will report to the
> European Commission in July 2012, provides large-scale, robust
> research to inform the debate about access to publicly funded
> research.
>
> The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical
> Publishers (STM) welcomes the consensus of the partners, and hails
> PEER as a successful collaboration.
>
> Behavioural, economics and usage research were presented at the
> conference today. "The PEER project shows that self-archiving is
> complex, inefficient and cannot be successfully achieved without the
> co-operation of publishers," said Michael Mabe, CEO of STM.  Only 170
> of the c 11,800 authors invited to self-archive, chose to do so.
> Usage research supports the hypothesis that readers prefer the
> publishers' final version over self-archived manuscripts.
>
> "Through working together on PEER, publishers, funders and the
> repository community have established greater trust and
> understanding," said Mabe. "Today has demonstrated that there are a
> number of fundamentals on which all PEER partners are agreed, based on
> the results and experience of the project. Most strikingly, all
> partners are in agreement that 'gold' open access publication provides
> a practical, viable way to provide public access to research
> findings."
>
> PEER, supported by the EC eContentplus programme, is a collaboration
> between publishers, repositories, and the research community. The
> project was a partnership between STM, Fondation Européenne de la
> Science Association (ESF), Göttingen State and University Library
> (UGOE), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V.
> (MPG), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en
> Automatique (INRIA).
>
> The project, which has run since September 2008, has been
> investigating the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of
> authors' final peer-reviewed manuscripts on reader access, author
> visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology
> of European research, with the aim of informing the evolution of
> policies in this area.
>
> -ENDS -
>
> STM is an international association of over 100 scientific, technical,
> medical and scholarly publishers, collectively responsible for more
> than 60% of the global annual output of research articles, 55% of the
> active research journals and the publication of tens of thousands of
> print and electronic books, reference works and databases. We are the
> only international trade association equally representing all types of
> STM publishers - large and small companies, not for profit
> organizations, learned societies, traditional, primary, secondary
> publishers and new entrants to global publishing. www.stm-assoc.org
>
> Contact Kim Beadle for more information - [log in to unmask]