From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2012 16:58:40 -0700

It is not so often that I agree with Stevan Harnad, but I think his
comment on so-called Gold OA (really better to call this "author-pays"
publishing, for reasons that will become clear below) is on the money.
 Harnad, however, spins the right facts in the wrong way.  The outcome
will not be as he wants it to be, nor can it. Water flows downhill.

So, where do we agree:  Harnad says that Gold OA will interfere with
Green OA--will slow it down.  On this point he is correct, but he
draws the wrong conclusion:  the point of much activity with Gold OA
is to slow down or marginalize Green OA.   It's an odd thing to accuse
a surgeon of wanting to remove an appendix when he makes an incision.

But Gold OA is not an alternative for the Green variety any more than
an apple is an alternative to an orange.  The kinds of publishing that
takes place and will come to take place with OA publishing will evolve
over time, taking its shape from the containers it resides in.  Among
the properties of those containers is the economic model  that
supports them.

Thus traditional (toll-access) publishing has a certain set of
properties:  the fixed text, the version of record, the process of
peer review (including attempting to identify what is significant),
the subscription model, and so on.  When OA first came along, it was
natural for people to seek to bring to the new medium the properties
of the old, just as early television imitated or borrowed from radio
and early cinema took liberally from theater.  This is McLuhan 101.
Early OA looks like toll-access publishing because that's what people
were familiar with.

Over time, media diverge.  The author-pays model is now making new
kinds of content and publishing possible.  PLoS ONE is but the most
conspicuous example.  it was an enormous imaginative leap for the
editors of PLoS to forego seeking articles of significance and to
focus narrowly on methodological rigor.  This does not mean that the
articles in ONE don't resemble what we find in, say the Lancet or
Nature, but that is a short-term situation.  The author-pays model
will continue to grow, identifying new content types, types that
previously were never published because there was no economic model to
support them.

Nor does this mean that some opponents of OA are thinking this way.
They may simply be trying to shore up mature businesses.  Good luck to
them.  The Finch report seems to me to be a looking-backward document,
as are most documents about scholarly publishing.  It assumes that the
properties of the old medium will be the most important properties of
the new medium.  It makes the same mistake as Green OA.

I first wrote about this back in 2004 on FirstMonday.  The link is here:

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1163/1083

The core issue is that you cannot change one element of a system
without, in time, changing the entire system.  It is for this reason
that I believe that toll-access publishing and author-pays publishing
will coexist for some time, just as TV and radio do to this time.  But
we will use those media--and they will use us--in very different ways.

Joe Esposito

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 3:27 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:21:56 -0400
>
> GOLD FEVER AND FINCH FOLLIES
>
> The biggest risk from Gold OA (and it's already a reality) is that it
> will get in
> the way of the growth of Green OA, and hence the growth of OA itself.
> That's Gold Fever: Most people assume that OA means Gold OA, and don't
> realize that the fastest, surest and (extra-)cost-free way to 100% OA is to
> provide (and mandate) Green OA.
>
> The second biggest risk (likewise already a reality, if the Finch Follies
> are Followed) is that Gold Fever  makes sluggish, gullible researchers,
> their funders, their governments and even their poor impecunious universities
> get lured into paying for pre-emptive Gold OA (while still paying for
> subscriptions)
> instead of providing and mandating Green OA at no extra cost.
>
> The risk of creating a market for junk Gold OA journals is only the
> third of the Gold OA risk factors (but it's already a reality too).
>
> Gold OA's time will come. But it is not now. A proof of principle was
> fine, to refute the canard that peer review is only possible on the
> subscription model.
>
> But paying for pre-emptive Gold OA now, instead of mandating and
> providing Green OA globally first will turn out to be one of the more
> foolish things our sapient species has done to date (though by far
> not the worst).
>
> Stevan Harnad