From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:15:02 -0400


[MOD NOTE:  liblicense-l has been copied on a lively discussion on
the  GOAL  list, arising from a posting  of Rick Anderson's that we
already forwarded last night.  The topic is about libraries' canceling
subscriptions to journals where articles are available via Green
Open Access.  Below, we give the core of the  original
posting and then selections from the subsequent discussion,
designed to facilitate reading while maintaining the views of participants.
We hope this compendious form of presentation will shed light,
minimize heat, and eliminate distraction.  This is a lengthy posting for
liblicense-l, but merely to have forwarded all the original postings
would have had us send along 20+ individual messages with much
crossing of wires. We hope this condensed and combined version
in 2 parts is helpful and interesting.

We apologize to any of those quoted who may take exception to our
digest; the full discussion is available on the GOAL archives.  Such a
digest on this topic is not unprecedented, for what we believe to be
the first book published on the topic of open access, *Scholarly
Journals at the Crossroads:  A Subversive Proposal for Electronic
Publishing*, was published by the Association of Research Libraries in
1995 and comprised mainly a digest of a discussion much like this one,
with at least one of the same participants. Ann Okerson, liblicense-l]


**Rick Anderson's original posting:

 You're right, I should be more precise:  if I know that a publisher
allows green deposit of all articles without embargo, then the
likelihood that we'll maintain a paid subscription drops dramatically
— and drops even further if the journal is near the periphery of my
institution's research and curricular interests.  If the journal is
closer to the center of our interests, then before dropping the
subscription we'd probably do a quick survey to see what percentage of
its articles are showing up in public repositories within a reasonably
brief period.


**In response to a comment, Anderson said:

Yes, you raise a valid point. Just because a publisher allows complete
and unembargoed Green OA archiving of a journal doesn't mean that all
of the journal's content will end up being archived.  So I would
adjust the categorical statement I made in my original posting thus:
"My library will cancel our subscriptions to any such journal, once we
have determined that a sufficient percentage of its content is being
made publicly available promptly and at no charge — promptness being
assessed on a sliding scale relative to the journal's relevance to our
needs."

Obviously, this will be relatively easy to do for new Green journals
or for journals that make the shift in the future.  As for existing
Green-without-embargo journals, I'm currently discussing with my
collection development staff how we might cost-effectively review the
list of Green-without-embargo journal publishers found at
http://bit.ly/1aOetHB and see which of their journals we currently
subscribe to, and which of these we might be able to cancel.  This
would be a relatively time-intensive project, but we have students
working at service desks in my library who could probably help.


**Stevan Harnad responded to Anderson's suggestion:

Rick Anderson has made a public announcement that he may think serves
the interests of University of Utah's Library and its users:

It does not, because it is both arbitrary and absurd to cancel a
journal because it is Green rather than because their users no longer
need it.  About 60% of subscription journals are Green and there are
no data whatsoever to show that the percentage of the contents of
Green journals made OA by their authors is higher than the percentage
for non-Green journals -- and, more important, the percentage of
articles that are made OA today from either Green or non-Green
journals is still low, and the sample is likewise arbitrary.

But more important than any of that is the gross disservice that
gratuitous public librarian announcements like that do to the OA
movement:  We have been objecting vehemently to the perverse incentive
Finch/RCUK have given publishers to adopt or lengthen Green OA
embargoes and offer hybrid Gold in order to get the money the UK has
foolishly elected to throw at Fool's Gold unilaterally, and
preferentially.

Now is it going to be the library community publicly notifying putting
publishers on notice that unless they adopt or lengthen Green OA
embargoes, libraries plan to cancel their journals?

With friends like these, the OA movement hardly needs enemies.

May I suggest, though, that such postings should not go to the GOAL,
BOAI or SPARC lists? Please keep such brilliant ideas to the library
lists.

And please don't reply that "it's just one factor in our cancelation
equation."  There's no need for the OA community to hear about
librarians' struggles with their serials budgets when it's at the
expense of OA.

Stevan Harnad


**Rick Anderson responded:

Depending on what our goals are, reality can sometimes be
counterproductive.  It's a reality that a subscription is less needed
when the content of the journal in question is freely available
online.  (It matters, of course, what percentage of the content really
becomes available that way, and how quickly it will become available.
But the more its content is free and the faster it gets that way, the
less incentive there is for anyone, including libraries, to pay for
access to it.  And the tighter a library's budget, the more sensitive
its cancellation response will be to the Green-without-embargo
signal.)


**Stevan Harnad:

5. Publicly announcing (as you did) that journals are to be cancelled
because they are Green rather than because they are either unneeded or
unaffordable is certain to induce Green publishers to stop being Green
and instead adopt and Green OA embargoes.


**Anderson:

Discussing reality may not always help to advance an OA agenda (or any
other agenda, for that matter), but eventually reality will always
win.  Scolding people for talking about reality is ultimately much
more counterproductive than figuring out how to deal with it.


**Harnad:

6. Library cancellation of Green journals will slow the growth of OA,
thereby compounding the disservice that such an unthinking (sic)
policy does both to users and to OA.


**Anderson:

It doesn't seem to me that OA is something to which we owe allegiance.
 It seems to me that our goal should be a healthy, vital, and
sustainable scholarly communication environment that brings the
maximum possible benefit to the world.  Deciding up front that OA is
the only road to such an environment has two seriously debilitating
effects:  first, it makes the questioning of OA, or even of specific
OA strategies, into a thoughtcrime (as we've seen here today), and
second, it precludes the consideration of other, possibly promising
options.


**In response to the same Harnad message, Thomas Krichel responded,
quoting Harnad with the usual internet carets:


Stevan Harnad writes:

> It does not, because it is both arbitrary and absurd to cancel a journal
> because it is Green  rather than because their users no longer need it"

It is not. There simply is not the money to buy all subscriptions, and
the more a journal's contents can be recovered from the web the more
the need for subscribing to it declines.

> But more important than any of that is the gross disservice that gratuitous
> public librarian announcements like that do to the OA movement:

Libraries are not there to serve the OA movement.

> to get the money the UK has foolishly elected to throw at Fool's
> Gold unilaterally, and preferentially.

I agree. But the subscription model is even more foolish.

Let toll-gating publishers have embargoes till kingdom come.  If
nobody reads the papers, authors, who need the attention of readers,
will have to use the IR to place a version of the paper out.  Scholars
will find alternative ways to evaluate these papers.

> With friends like these, the OA movement hardly needs enemies.

I'm all in favour of OA, but it will not happen until subscriptions
decline.  The more subscriptions decline the better for OA.

Cheers,

Thomas Krichel
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
skype:thomaskrichel


**In a further exchange, Stevan Harnad:

The library community has to make up its own mind whether it is OA's
friend or foe.

(1) Cancelling journals when all or most of their contents have become
Green OA is rational and constructive -- but we're nowhere near there;
and whether and when we get there is partly contingent on (2):

(2) Cancelling (or even announcing the intention to cancel) journals
because they allow Green OA is irrational, extremely short-sighted,
and extremely destructive (to OA) as well as self-destructive (to
libraries).

But I already have enough to do trying to get institutions and funders
to adopt rational and constructive OA mandates that researchers can
and will comply with.

If libraries are not allies in this, so be it; we already have
publishers whose interests conflict with those of OA. If it's to be
the same with libraries, it's better we know it sooner rather than
later.


**Rick Anderson responded:

And this is exactly the kind of rhetoric that gives certain
sectors/members of the OA community a bad name.  The problem isn't OA;
the problem is the unwillingness to deal with OA as something other
than revealed religion.  This kind of talk may help us come up with an
Enemies List, but it doesn't actually help us solve any problems —
unless, of course, you've decided up front that the only solution to
every scholcomm problem is OA.


**Stevan Harnad:

I suspect, however, that there might be a portion of the library
community that would be strongly opposed to cancelling journals
because they are Green, and precisely for the reasons I have
mentioned.


**Rick Anderson:

That was never in doubt, Stevan.  The "library community" is not a
monolith.  Different libraries have different policies and practices.
Publishers are not stupid — they don't think that just because one
librarian says "I'm more likely to cancel a Green-without-embargoes
journal than a toll-access one, all other things being equal" that
every library is going to do the same thing.


**In response to the same Harnad message, Heather Morrison wrote:

Librarians are a much more collaborative profession than most, but
librarians do not all share the same opinions or work in the same
environments.

At most academic libraries, librarians do not have the ability to
unilaterally cancel journals.  If librarians did have this power, some
of the "big deal" publishers might have disappeared a long time ago.
Physics journals have not experienced cancellations in spite of near
100% self-archiving in arXiv because physicists value their journals
and will not allow their libraries to cancel.

Rick Anderson's approach to actively seek OA material in order to
cancel is unique, in my opinion.  Even other librarians with a similar
philosophy are unlikely to undertake the work to figure out what
percentage is free, or risk the wrath of faculty members who value
their journals and/or do not wish to do the extra work of searching in
repositories.

It would be interesting to see how much money Rick's library would
save, and compare this with how much they could save by cancelling a
single big deal with a high-cost publisher.

best,
Heather Morrison


**In a further exchange, Stevan Harnad:

It would be interesting to see how much money Rick's library would
save, and compare this with how much they could save by cancelling a
single big deal with a high-cost publisher.


**Rick Anderson:

Sadly, canceling our big deal would end up saving us nothing, because
we would then have to subscribe to the high-demand titles individually
at a higher aggregate price than what we're currently paying for the
big deal.  That's what broke down our longstanding resistance to the
big deal in the first place. (We could save money by not subscribing
to those high-demand titles, of course, but of course we could save
even more by simply not buying anything our patrons need.)

--END OF PART 1-