From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2012 17:32:02 -0500


On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 5:06 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2012 08:02:23 +0000
>
> “We estimate that a full transition to OA could lead to savings in the
> region of 10-12% of the cost base of a subscription publisher.”
>
> BernsteinResearch investment analyst Claudio Aspesi
>
> The key question: If Aspesi's estimate of the potential cost savings
> provided by a full transition to OA is accurate, would those savings
> be passed on to the research community if they were achieved?
>
> https://plus.google.com/109680188903316748168/posts/ao2BBmwpzHg
>
> http://bit.ly/TquCZz
>
>
> Richard Poynder

I  think that what Richard is worrying about here is whether the
cost-cutting that a transition from subscription publishing to Gold OA
publishing would make possible (e.g., curtailing the print edition)
would be reflected in lower Gold OA charges to the author/institution
or they would simply be absorbed by the publisher (Aspesi's (2012)
test case being Elsevier), leaving Gold OA charges higher than they
need to be.

I join this speculation and counter-speculation only reluctantly, for
two reasons:

(1) I think there are significant transition factors that none of the
economic analyses has yet fully taken into account, and hence that the
potential savings are still being considerably underestimated.

(2) I also think this focus on predicting the costs of Gold OA just
reinforces the excessive preoccupation with estimating the costs and
benefits of pre-emptive Gold OA rather than the costs and benefits of
OA itself, and what is needed, practically, for facilitating a
transition to OA itself, rather than just a direct transition to Gold
OA in particular.

Post-Green Gold will cost far less than the pre-emptive pre-Green Gold
that the economic analyses keep estimating.

We keep counting the "savings" from generic Gold OA publishing without
reckoning how to get there, and whether the transition itself might
not be a major determinant in the potential for savings (from OA as
well as from Gold OA).

I am not an economist, so I will not try to do anything more than to
point out the main factor that I believe the economic analyses are
failing to take into account:

If Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories is mandated
globally by institutions and funders, this will have two major
consequences:

I. First, not only will globally mandated Green OA provide universal
OA (and all of its benefits, scientific and economic) alongside
subscription publishing, at minimal additional cost (because (a)
repositories are relatively cheap to create and maintain, (b) most
research-active institutions have created repositories already, and
(c) have done so for multiple purposes, OA being only one of them).

II.  Second, mandating Green OA globally (unlike pre-emptive Gold OA)
also puts competitive pressure on subscription publishers to cut
obsolete costs, because the universal availability of the Green OA
version makes it much easier for cash-strapped institutions to cancel
their journal subscriptions.

Not only can the print edition and its costs be phased out under
cancelation pressure from global Green OA, but so can the publisher's
online edition and version of record: The worldwide network of Green
OA repositories and their many central harvesters are perfectly
capable of generating, hosting, archiving and providing access to the
version-of-record. No more PDF or XML needed from the publisher; nor
archiving; nor access provision; nor marketing; nor fulfillment. Nor
any of their associated expenses.

All that's needed from the publisher is the service of managing the
peer review (peers review for free) and the certification of its
outcome with the journal's title and track-record.

That's post-Green Gold OA publishing. Compared to that, all the
economical estimates of savings are under-estimates.

Nor will there be any need -- with post-Green Gold OA -- for
mega-publishers (like Elsevier), publishing vast fleets of unrelated
journals;  nor for mega-journals (like PLoS ONE), publishing vast
flocks of unrelated articles. There are many narrow research
specialities, a few wider ones, and a few even wider,
multidisciplinary ones. They each have their own peers, and they each
need their own peer-reviewed journals; depending on the size of the
field, some fields will several journals, forming a pyramid of quality
standards, the most selective (hence smallest) at the top.

There may have been economies of scale for multiple journal
production, in the Gutenberg days. But in the PostGutenberg era, with
post-Green Gold OA journals, providing only the service of peer
review, there will be no need for generic refereeing being
mass-marketed by generic editorial assistants for mega-publishers or
mega-journals, where no one other than the referee (if  competently
selected!) knows anything about the subject matter.

So besides scaling down to the post-Green OA essentials, post-Green
Gold OA journals will also revert to being the independent, peer-based
titles that they were before being jointly bought up for by the
post-Maxwellian publisher megalopolies. The online-era economies will
come from restoring journals' own natural speciality scale rather than
from agglomerating them into generic multiple money-makers.