From: "Pikas, Christina K." <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 26 May 2015 13:09:08 +0000 Physics does provide a case study for this. It is impossible to know how this would vary by discipline. See: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/openaccess/Suber_15_chap8.html Quoting: 1. Nobody knows yet how green OA policies will affect journal subscriptions. Rising levels of green OA may trigger toll-access journal cancellations, or they may not. So far they haven’t. 2. The evidence from physics is the most relevant. Physics has the highest levels and longest history of green OA. The evidence from physics to date is that high levels of green OA don’t cause journal cancellations. On the contrary, the relationship between arXiv (the OA repository for physics) and toll-access physics journals is more symbiotic than antagonistic. Physicists have been self-archiving since 1991, far longer than in any other field. In some subfields, such as particle physics, the rate of OA archiving approaches 100 percent, far higher than in any other field. If high-volume green OA caused journal cancellations, we’d see the effect first in physics. But it hasn’t happened. Two leading publishers of physics journals, the American Physical Society (APS) and Institute of Physics (IOP), have publicly acknowledged that they’ve seen no cancellations attributable to OA archiving. In fact, the APS and IOP have not only made peace with arXiv but now accept submissions from it and even host their own mirrors of it.2 3. Other fields may not behave like physics. We won’t know more until the levels of green OA in other fields approach those in physics. It would definitely help to understand why the experience in physics has gone as it has and how far it might predict the experience in other fields. But so far it’s fair to say that we don’t know all the variables and that publishers who oppose green OA mandates are not among those showing a serious interest in them. When publisher lobbyists argue that high-volume green OA will undermine toll-access journal subscriptions, they don’t offer evidence, don’t acknowledge the countervailing evidence from physics, don’t rebut the evidence from physics, and don’t qualify their own conclusions in light of it. They would act more like scientific publishers if they acknowledged the evidence from physics and then argued, as well as they could, either that the experience in physics will change or that fields other than physics will have a different experience. An October 2004 editorial in The Lancet (an Elsevier journal) called on the publishing lobby to do better. “[A]s editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with [Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder’s] central claim. Widening access to research [through green OA mandates] is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do. . . .”3 For more than eight years, green OA mandates have applied to research in many fields outside physics. These mandates are natural experiments and we’re still monitoring their effects. At Congressional hearings in 2008 and 2010, legislators asked publishers directly whether green OA was triggering cancellations. In both cases, publishers pointed to decreased downloads but not to increased cancellations.4 4. There is evidence that green OA decreases downloads from publishers’ web sites. When users know about OA and toll-access editions of the same article, many will prefer to click through to the OA edition, either because they aren’t affiliated with a subscribing institution or because authentication is a hassle. Moreover, when users find an OA edition, most stop looking. But decreased downloads are not the same thing as decreased or canceled subscriptions. Moreover, decreased downloads of toll-access editions from publisher web sites are not the same thing as decreased downloads overall. No one suggests that green OA leads to decreased overall downloads, that is, fewer readers and less reading. On the contrary, the same evidence suggesting that OA increases citation impact also suggests that it increases readers and reading.5 5. Most publishers voluntarily permit green OA. Supplementing the natural experiments of green OA mandates are the natural experiments of publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. The Nature Publishing Group is more conservative than most toll-access publishers by requiring a six-month embargo on green OA, but more progressive than most by positively encouraging green OA. NPG reported the latest results of its multidisciplinary natural experiment in January 2011: “We have, to date, found author self-archiving compatible with subscription business models, and so we have been actively encouraging self-archiving since 2005.”6 This or something similar to it must be the experience of the majority of toll-access publishers who voluntarily permit green OA. Even if they don’t actively encourage green OA, most permit it without embargo. If they found that it triggered cancellations, they would stop. 6. Green OA mandates leave standing at least four library incentives to maintain their subscriptions to toll-access journals. ...... Christina Christina K. Pikas Librarian The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 02:33:26 +0000 >I think the important point here, aside from the double-talk Dr. Wise >continues to employ even after Steven points out the inconsistency, is >that there is no evidence at all that libraries have or will cancel >journal subscriptions because of author self-archiving in institutional >repositories. Of course, gathering real-world data from imaginary scenarios is notoriously tough. So here¹s my question (and this will be awkwardly phrased, sorry): is anyone aware of a subscription journal for which most or all of the content is consistently self-archived in repositories? If there are ten or twenty such journals out there, it would be very interesting to see whether and to what degree subscriptions have been affected since the self-archiving started ‹ and to monitor that trend over time. --- Rick Anderson Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections Marriott Library, University of Utah [log in to unmask]