From: "Friend, Fred" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:10:38 +0000

Stevan's analysis of the way in which open access was developing
alongside licensing is very important. We need to understand the way
in which OA developed in order to avoid the kind of distortion of OA
that emerges from time to time. I was also going through a time of
fluid thinking at the same time as Ann and Stevan. For me a
combination of pragmatism and vision led me away from licensing to
embrace OA. The pragmatism came as I realised that licensing was
simply not working. The theory was that the big library consortia
could produce more access at less cost, but gradually it became clear
that the increase in access was only in the number of journals online
- not in the number of people having access - and that the cost was
still increasing well above inflation. So in my mind the question was
if licensing is not working, what is the alternative? That is where
the vision element entered my thinking, because the open access people
definitely had a vision - read the text of the BOAI if you do not
believe me. Vision is different from ideology, and also different from
the religious fervour we were accused of. Vision in the BOAI is
essentially earthed in the reality that had to be changed.

Fred Friend
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL

________________________________
From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 19 November 2013 17:44

Ann Okerson (as interviewed by Richard Poynder) is committed to
licensing. I am not sure whether the commitment is ideological or
pragmatic, but it's clearly a lifelong ("asymptotic") commitment by
now.

I was surprised to see the direction Ann ultimately took because -- as
I have admitted many times -- it was Ann who first opened my eyes to
(what eventually came to be called) "Open Access."

In the mid and late 80's I was still just in the thrall of the
scholarly and scientific potential of the revolutionarily new online
medium itself ("Scholarly Skywriting"), eager to get everything to be
put online. It was Ann's work on the serials crisis that made me
realize that it was not enough just to get it all online: it also had
to be made accessible (online) to all of its potential users,
toll-free -- not just to those whose institutions could afford the
access-tolls (licenses).

And even that much I came to understand, sluggishly, only after I had
first realized that what set apart the writings in question was not
that they were (as I had first naively dubbed them) "esoteric" (i.e.,
they had few users) but that they were peer-reviewed research journal
articles, written by researchers solely for impact, not for income.

But I don't think the differences between Ann and me can be set down
to ideology vs. pragmatics. I too am far too often busy trying to free
the growth of open access from the ideologues (publishing reformers,
rights reformers (Ann's "open use" zealots), peer review reformers,
freedom of information reformers) who are slowing the progress of
access to peer-reviewed journal articles (from "now" to "better") by
insisting only and immediately on what they believe is the "best."
Like Ann, I, too, am all pragmatics (repository software, analyses of
the OA impact advantage, mandates, analyses of mandate effeciveness).

So Ann just seems to have a different sense of what can (hence should)
be done, now, to maximize access, and how (as well as how fast). And
after her initial, infectious inclination toward toll-free access
(which I and others caught from her) she has apparently concluded that
what is needed is to modify the terms of the tolls (i.e., licensing).

This is well-illustrated by Ann's view on SCOAP3: "All it takes is for
libraries to agree that what they’ve now paid as subscription fees for
those journals will be paid instead to CERN, who will in turn pay to
the publishers as subsidy for APCs."

I must alas disagree with this view, on entirely pragmatic -- indeed
logical -- grounds: the transition from annual institutional
subscription fees to annual consortial OA publication fees is an
incoherent, unscalable, unsustainable Escherian scheme that contains
the seeds of its own dissolution, rather than a pragmatic means of
reaching a stable "asymptote": Worldwide, across all disciplines,
there are P institutions, Q journals, and R authors, publishing S
articles per year. The only relevant item is the article. The annual
consortial licensing model -- reminiscent of the Big Deal -- is
tantamount to a global oligopoly and does not scale (beyond CERN!).

So if SCOAP3 is the pragmatic basis for Ann's "predict[ion that] we’ll
see such journals evolve into something more like 'full traditional
OA' before too much longer" then one has some practical basis for
scepticism -- a scepticism Ann shares when it comes to "hybrid Gold"
OA journals -- unless of course such a transition to Fool's Gold is
both mandated and funded by governments, as the UK and Netherlands
governments have lately proposed, under the influence of their
publishing lobbies! But the globalization of such profligate folly
seems unlikely on the most pragmatic grounds of all: affordability.
(The scope for remedying world hunger, disease or injustice that way
are marginally better -- and McDonalds would no doubt be interested in
such a yearly global consortial pre-payment deal for their Big Macs
too…)

I also disagree (pragmatically) with Ann's apparent conflation of the
access problem for journal articles with the access problem for books.
(It's the inadequacy of the "esoteric" criterion again. Many book
authors -- hardly pragmatists -- still dream of sales & riches, and
fear that free online access would thwart these dreams, driving away
the prestigious publishers whose imprimaturs distinguish their work
from vanity press.)

Pragmatically speaking, OA to articles has already proved slow enough
in coming, and has turned out to require mandates to induce and
embolden authors to make their articles OA. But for articles, at
least, there is author consensus that OA is desirable, hence there is
the motivation to comply with OA mandates from authors' institutions
and funders. Books, still a mixed bag, will have to wait. Meanwhile,
no one is stopping those book authors who want to make their books
free online from picking publishers who agree…

And there are plenty of pragmatic reasons why the librarian-obsession
-- perhaps not ideological, but something along the same lines -- with
the Version-of-Record is misplaced when it comes to access to journal
articles: The author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft means the
difference between night and day for would-be users whose institutions
cannot afford toll-access to the publisher's proprietary VoR.

And for the time being the toll-access VoR is safe [modulo the general
digital-preservation problem, which is not an OA problem], while
subscription licenses are being paid by those who can afford them.
CHORUS and SHARE have plenty of pragmatic advantages for publishers
(and ideological ones for librarians), but they are vastly outweighed
by their practical disadvantages for research and researchers -- of
which the biggest is that they leave access-provision in the hands of
publishers (and their licensing conditions).

About the Marie-Antoinette option for the developing world -- R4L --
the less said, the better. The pragmatics really boil down to time:
the access needs of both the developing and the developed world are
pressing. Partial and makeshift solutions are better than nothing,
now. But it's been "now" for an awfully long time; and time is not an
ideological but a pragmatic matter; so is lost research usage and
impact.

Ann says: "Here’s the fondest hope of the pragmatic OA advocate: that
we settle on a series of business practices that truly make the
greatest possible collection of high-value material accessible to the
broadest possible audience at the lowest possible cost — not just
lowest cost to end users, but lowest cost to all of us."

Here's a slight variant, by another pragmatic OA advocate: "that we
settle on a series of research community policies that truly make the
greatest possible collection of peer-reviewed journal articles
accessible online free for all users, to the practical benefit of all
of us."

The online medium has made this practically possible. The publishing
industry -- pragmatists rather than ideologists -- will adapt to this
new practical reality. Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

Let me close by suggesting that perhaps something Richard Poynder
wrote is not quite correct either: He wrote "It was [the]
affordability problem that created the accessibility problem that OA
was intended to solve."

No, it was the creation of the online medium that made OA not only
practically feasible (and optimal) for research and researchers, but
inevitable.

Stevan Harnad