From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2013 23:35:29 -0500

TIME, MONEY, ACCESS & IMPACT ARE 'AWASTING

Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open
Access Publishing ("Gold OA") are premature.

Funds are short.

Eighty percent of journals (including virtually all the top journals)
are still subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for
Gold OA, and making all Gold OA payment double-payment (subscriptions
+ Gold OA fees).

The asking price for Gold OA is still far too high.

And there is concern that paying to publish may inflate acceptance
rates and lower quality standards.

What is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA
self-archiving (of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately
upon acceptance for publication) ("Green OA") -- which is exactly what
FASTR and SPARC have proposed to do (and what 55 funders and 200
institutions worldwide have already done: see ROARMAP).

Universal Green OA mandates will provide universal OA.

Then, if and when universal Green OA should go on to make
subscriptions unsustainable (because users are satisfied with just the
Green OA versions), that will in turn induce journals to cut costs (no
more print edition, no more online edition, all access-provision and
archiving offloaded onto the worldwide network of institutional Green
OA repositories), downsize to just providing the service of peer
review, and convert to the Post-Green Gold OA cost-recovery model.

Meanwhile, the subscription cancellations will have released the funds
to pay these residual service costs.

The natural way to charge for the service of peer review then will be
on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution or funder paying
for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome (acceptance,
revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize cost while
protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in quality
standards.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of
Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16
(7/8). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html


On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 2:48 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: T Scott Plutchak <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:15:50 +0000
>
> SPARC is cranking up the PR works in support of the latest version of
> their legislative solution.  Some comments here:
>
> http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2013/02/not-fastr-enough.html
>
> Scott
>
> T. Scott Plutchak
> Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
> University of Alabama at Birmingham
> [log in to unmask]