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-