From: Frederick Friend <[log in to unmask]>
 Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2012 10:55:18 +0100

Jan,

I cannot speak for Stevan Harnad, but the problem many of us have with
the Finch Report is not that "they see the gold route as worthy of
support as well" but that it unfairly rubbishes the green route and -
in giving priority to gold - does not maintain the balance between
green and gold to which you and I signed up in BOAI.

Fred Friend
http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk


-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 10:08:26 +0200

It should be abundantly clear that Open Access policies by Finch,
RCUK, Wellcome Trust and many others are very important for the
development of universal OA, in that they not only indicate practical
ways of achieving it, but also signal to the scholarly community and
the wider society interested in scientific knowledge and its advance
that OA should be the norm.

The 'sin' that RCUK, Finch and the Wellcome Trust committed is that
they didn't formulate their policies according to strict Harnadian
orthodoxy. It's not that they forbid Harnadian OA (a.k.a. 'green'). It
is that they see the 'gold' route to OA as worthy of support as well.
Harnad, as arbiter of Harnadian OA (he has acolytes), would like to
see funder and institutional OA policies focus entirely and only on
Harnadian OA, and would want them, to all intents and purposed, forbid
the 'gold' route. In this view, the 'gold' route comes into play (as
'downsized gold', whatever that means) only once all scholarly journal
literature is OA according to Harnadian rules. These rules are quite
specific: a) articles must be published in peer-reviewed subscription
journals; b) institutions must mandate their subsequent deposit in an
institutional repository (not, for instance in a global subject
repository); c) there must be no insistence on OA immediately upon
publication (his big idea is ID/OA — Institutional Deposit / Optional
[sic] Access); d) there must be no insistence on CC-BY or equivalent
(which would make re-use and text-mining possible — OA in this view
should just be ocular access, not machine-access).

It must be difficult to comply with these rules, and seeing his recent
applause, subsequently followed by withdrawal of support, for the RCUK
policy, even Harnad himself finds it difficult to assess whether the
rules are 'properly' adhered to. It also seems as if his main focus is
not OA but mandated deposit in institutional repositories. Probably
hoping that that will eventually lead to OA. He would like to see
'gold' OA — OA at source — considered only if and when it is
"downsized Gold OA, once Green OA has prevailed globally, making
subscriptions unsustainable and forcing journals to downsize." It is
the equivalent of opening the parachute only a split second before
hitting the ground. It would be the triumph of a dogmatically serial
process over a pragmatically parallel one. The triumph of cloud cuckoo
land over reality.

Open Access is more than worth having. Different, complementary, ways
help achieve it. There are many roads leading to Rome.

Jan Velterop
OA advocate