From: "Andrew A. Adams" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2012 10:08:54 +0900

Jan Velterop wrote (on the liblicense list):

> Indeed, we signed up to the BOAI, as did Stevan Harnad, and the
> Initiative talked about two routes to OA, which have become known as
> 'gold' and 'green'. The BOAI doesn't talk about keeping a 'balance'
> between the two, if memory serves. (I tried to look it up to make
> sure, but the BOAI page at soros.org is not available anymore, perhaps
> temporarily, in any case this morning).

This fetishism with the first formal statemet of OA principles and practice
is, I think, counterproductive. Our understanding has improved in the more
than a decade since, in particular driven by over ten years of experience in
trying and failing to achieve (even near-)universal open access.

I do not care which route we achieve open access by. I care that we achieve
it. In the seven years that I have been involved in this debate I have been
persuaded that the Gold route is slow, costly, highly uncertain, depends on
actors with different interests and incentives to the authors and readers of
the scholarly literature. That is why I am persuaded that the way to achieve
open access most quickly and most certainly is via the Green Road.
Governments, research funders, research institutions and researchers cannot
dictate a shift to Gold. They can dictate and adopt a shift to Green. THere
are on the order of 10,000 research instutitions and more than ten times as
many journals. Persudaing 10,000 institutions to adopt OA deposit mandates
seems to me a quicker and more certain route to obtain OA than persuading
100,000 journals to go Gold (and finding more money to bribe them into it, it
would appear - money which is going to continue to be demanded by them in
perpetuity, not accepted as a transitional fee - there's nothing so permanent
as a temporary measure).

> Since the BOAI, 'green' has evolved somewhat. And so has the need for
> full access and re-use (delivered by what is now sometimes called
> 'libre OA', though the definition of OA in the BOAI already included
> the properties of 'libre'). Originally, 'green' was the deposit (by
> authors) of their final, accepted manuscript in an open repository,
> before or at the time of publication of its formal version in a
> journal. That has been watered down, not in terms of deposit, but in
> terms of openness and 'libre-ness', by the idea of ID/OA (in which OA
> means 'optional access', to make any confusion about OA worse).
> Delayed OA (which 'green' with embargoes is) and not being able to
> re-use the literature would have been anathema at the original BOAI.

> The way I read it, the Finch Report expresses a preference for
> immediate, 'libre', open access, and sees 'gold' as more likely to be
> able to deliver that than 'green'. Meanwhile, 'green' is a way to
> deliver OA (albeit delayed and not libre) where 'gold' is not feasible
> yet. That is an entirely sensible viewpoint, completely compatible
> with the letter ' and I think also the spirit ' of the BOAI.

The Finch report is at the same time an idealistic piece of pie in the sky by
and by and a cynical derailment of the most successful (but still far from
successful enough) move towards OA (the UK's lead on Green OA mandates which
outstrips any other approach except for HE Physics and the ArXiv which has
been shown not to be scalable to other disciplines, while the UK's lead in
mandates show that the Green route is possible to achieve by focussed
consistent work at multiple levels; funder, institution, researcher - and
could be accelerated by the government joining forces instead of diverting
the stream).

I, too, would like full CC-BY open access provided by the journals
themselves, today. That's not going to happen. Attempting to bribe the big
publishers by swelling their coffers even more and diverting research
resources to pay them extra (when they're alrady making obscene profits as
parasites on the scholarly communication process) is not only obscedne itself
at a time of financial austerity, but is not going to work. If publishers
were going to transition to Gold OA on any non-glacial timescale, they'd have
done so by now. They will not do so voluntarily, only when dragged kicking
and screaming into it, just as all the other content industries are being
dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet Age.

Green OA mandates are only the first step, but without us taking that first
step first, as a body, focussing on getting everyone (by everyone I mean all
researchers, research instutitions, funders and governments) to take that
first step, we will continue to fall flat on our faces.

Finch is a diversion from taking that first step, driven by idealists who
have failed to learn the lessons of the decade since the BOAI and by the
those with their own rent-seeking profits in mind.

Professor Andrew A Adams                      [log in to unmask]
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/