DOE: The Grand Compromise of U.S. Public Access Programs: Going Green

[Tein, Andrew - Hoboken]

All—FYI: On Monday, Jeff Salmon at DOE posted the below, which is one of the most wide-ranging reflections on OA from a US agency perspective.

 

Andrew

 

 

Andrew Tein
Vice President
Global Government Affairs

Wiley
111 River St
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
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https://www.osti.gov/us-public-access-programs-going-green

 

The Grand Compromise of U.S. Public Access Programs: Going Green

by Dr. Jeffrey Salmon on Mon, September 12, 2016

 

In April 2012, The Economist ran a biting editorial (link is external) arguing that, “[w]hen research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge.”  Academic journals, the magazine contended, were raking in huge profits by selling content that was supplied to them largely for free and in the process restricting public access to valuable research to just those willing to pay for subscriptions.  The answer to this “absurd and unjust” situation, The Economist wrote, is “simple”: governments and foundations that fund research “should require that the results be made available free to the public.”

We at the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) have found that providing full public access to the research DOE funds is simple in principle and complex in practice.  And reflecting on this 2012 editorial, we can say that a great deal of progress has been made toward reaching the goal of free public access it sets out.  And much of that progress is due to hard collaborative work by both the government and publishers. 

Following the February 2013 memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research (link is external),” all major U.S. federal science agencies are now implementing public access plans, which comprehend both publications and data.

DOE was the first federal agency to gain OSTP approval of its plan – in July 2014.  DOE’s early implementation is a result of the longstanding scientific and technical information (STI) program and infrastructure managed by OSTI since the days of the Atomic Energy Commission.  OSTI has systems in place for providing public access to over 40,000 research items per year resulting from DOE’s $11 billion research and development (R&D) budget.  Such outputs include technical reports, conference papers, and patents, as well as metadata for journal articles and datasets.  With this infrastructure in place, implementing public access to the full text of journal articles (or the accepted manuscripts) was an incremental, not a revolutionary change.  After a 12-month embargo period, or as we like to call it, “administrative interval,” the accepted manuscripts are made freely available through the OSTI-hosted DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science^Beta, or DOE PAGES^Beta.

OSTP encouraged agencies to work together and also to engage in public-private collaboration.  DOE does both.  OSTI partnered with the National Science Foundation (link is external) and the Department of Defense, who wished to deploy PAGES-like features in their public access solutions.  Combined, the three agencies’ research funding results in roughly 80,000 journal articles per year, or nearly half the output of the entire U.S. government’s research investments.  As a complement to the key feature of authors submitting accepted manuscripts, these agencies are also taking advantage of the public access contributions of publishers.  Through the publisher consortium CHORUS (link is external) – the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States, these agencies receive metadata for full-text publications and provide direct links to publisher websites as part of their public access search results.

DOE PAGES^Beta employs both centralized and decentralized components.  Metadata is centralized, but much of the full-text content is reached by links to institutional repositories and to publisher websites.  OSTI maintains a dark archive of full text in the event content becomes inaccessible elsewhere.  This hybrid model suits DOE because it’s the same model OSTI has been successfully using for other kinds of STI from DOE lab researchers and grantees.

The other most common public access model, NIH’s PubMed Central (link is external) (PMC), is more centralized.  In PMC, authors and participating publishers deposit all full text into the PMC central repository.

Whether distributed or centralized, however, the most common element in all federal agencies’ implementation of public access is the feature known as “author deposit.”  In the public/open access jargon, this is known as “green open access,” or “green OA.”

Green OA is the longstanding practice of the self-deposit by authors of accepted manuscripts to an institutional repository that is freely accessible.  Typically, there is a delay between the publication date and such author deposits, with the delay most commonly being 12 months.  Historically, this delay has been a function of publisher policy, but both through legislation and through the exercise of a retained license in the copyright, U.S. government agencies are implementing a 12-month post-publication delay before making accepted manuscripts freely accessible.

“Gold OA,” the flip side to green OA, is typically described as “author pays” rather than “author deposit.”  Authors or their institutions pay a fee to the publisher to make the article freely accessible immediately upon publication.  As this table (link is external) distilled from the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP (link is external)) shows, most funding agencies and governments around the world are implementing green OA models.  A few allow for either green or gold routes to satisfy their public access requirements, and only one funder (the UK Research Councils) specifies a preference for author pays when it’s an option.

Saying that U.S. agencies are implementing green OA models is not the same thing as saying that they prohibit gold OA.  The payment of gold OA fees by authors or their institutions is typically an allowable cost under most federal research grants and contracts.  However, DOE has made it clear to researchers that the payment of gold OA fees is not necessary in order to comply with our public access policy because we rely on author deposits of accepted manuscripts.

A key reason why DOE and other agencies prefer green OA is cost.  In the case of DOE, we estimate that a completely gold OA model would mean between $75 million to $90 million per year diverted from research.  That would provide funding for quite a few post-docs.

No model is perfect.  Green OA implies the need for some kind of embargo, so public access isn’t achieved immediately upon publication.  But we at DOE, along with all other U.S. federal agencies, consider green OA to be a reasonable compromise between immediate open access with gold OA charges and the attendant threat to the publishing industry where access is required immediately, without any charge or payback to publishers.

While it is difficult to quantify the commercial or scientific value of no embargo versus one 12 months long, there is a precedent and strong argument for federal agencies’ implementation of the 12-month embargo.  First, this is the timeframe successfully used by NIH for over eight years in PubMed Central, and this history has certainly informed subsequent legislation and OSTP’s February 2013 memo, which suggested a default embargo of 12 months.  It might be called the “grand compromise” of public access – a proven formula that has been good for science and the public while not harming scientific publishing.

Where access before 12 months is deemed essential, publishers, scientists, and libraries all provide options.  Scientists have always been allowed to share their works immediately on a peer-to-peer basis for scholarly purposes, and this has evolved in an electronic environment.  Publishers have options for enabling researchers to view individual articles, and libraries, especially research and academic libraries, understand and serve their communities’ needs.

The process of moving federally-funded R&D results from the lab to the public takes many forms.  Some of these forms (e.g., technical reports, preprints, and certain datasets) don’t require peer review, which makes dissemination less expensive.  Scholarly publications, however, undergo more rigor in the publication process, and there are naturally higher costs.  While the models for obtaining peer review and publishing peer-reviewed publications are evolving, it’s unlikely that these costs can be taken to zero.  OSTP and U.S. federal agencies appreciate the essential value and role of publishing and peer review (and their attendant costs).  At the same time, agencies are keen to focus their research funding on research.  Our green OA models are a proven, workable solution that achieves the objectives of public access while taking into account the multiplicity of interests involved in the scientific enterprise.

 

Dr. Jeffrey Salmon is Deputy Director for Resource Management in the Department of Energy Office of Science.

 

 

[Angela Cochran]

Thanks for sharing. The US Federal agencies have decided that the published paper is the research output deliverable in many cases. This is not true of all agencies but most. I agree that the 12 month embargo is the "grand compromise" given that funders don't seem to see a need for a deliverable that they have direct control over (like a report) and that publishers have been living with a 12 month embargo for NIH papers for a long time. I will admit that my organization publicly advocated for longer embargoes given how civil engineering content is used but we have given that up and accepted the compromise. We are still waiting to see how all of this affects usage and subscription sales. 

Angela Cochran

ASCE

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[Robert Kiley]

Andrew

Thanks for sharing. 

Though I suspect that another discussion on the benefits of gold v green (and I can already hear OSI members cringing at the use of these labels) is not going to get us very far, I note that the author estimates that the total cost of going gold might cost the DOE between $75m and $90m a year. Though I hope no one would disagree that this is a lot of money, do we know what this when expressed as a percentage of the total research spend of the DOE?

Wellcome has been paying APCs for a decade or more and all the sums we have done show that if every article, which attributes Wellcome funding, was published under an author pays model, and assuming Wellcome picked up 100 per cent of the costs (even though in reality much research is multi funded) then the total cost would be around 1.5% of our annual research budget. 

Now obviously we could spend that money on other things - and I am keen to see the total cost of publishing fall, especially hybrid OA - but we have always taken the view that allocating budget to ensure that 100 percent of the research we fund could be made available at the time of publication, and with a licence that allows and encourages others to reuse and build on the knowledge is a reasonable use of our funds. 

Robert

Robert Kiley

Head Digital Services,

Wellcome Library

Tel: 0207 611 8338

Email: r.k...@wellcome.ac.uk

On 14 Sep 2016, at 17:27, Tein, Andrew - Hoboken <ant...@wiley.com> wrote:

All—FYI: On Monday, Jeff Salmon at DOE posted the below, which is one of the most wide-ranging reflections on OA from a US agency perspective.

 

Andrew

 

 

Andrew Tein
Vice President
Global Government Affairs

Wiley
111 River St
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
www.wiley.com

T              +1 201 748 7751
E-mail     ant...@wiley.com

<image001.jpg>

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[Ivy Anderson]

The NSF has recently invited comments on its 2014-2018 Strategic Plan, which includes its public access polices.  We will be submitting comments that encourage the agency to engage more fully in a consideration of gold / aka “direct” / aka “born” open access (nod to Danny Kingsley) as a mechanism that allows for broad, un-embargoed use and re-use of final versions of record, rather than a sole focus on a parallel and less fully accessible and re-usable green OA infrastructure.  Yes there is a cost, but there is also a cost to green OA - it just resides elsewhere.

 

Ivy

 

Ivy Anderson

Director of Collections

California Digital Library

University of California, Office of the President

ivy.an...@ucop.edu  |  http://cdlib.org

 

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[David Wojick]

Thanks Andrew. I agree this is important. I happened to be OSTI's "Senior Consultant for Innovation" at the time so I will be happy to try to answer questions, although I do not speak for Jeff Salmon (who is a cool dude).

DOE's OA policy is pretty important, since they with NSF and DOD lead the US physical and computer sciences approach, which is a big chunk of the global funding in these areas. There is a lot of precedent here.

David
http://insidepublicaccess.com/

[Marcus A Banks]

While we can all agree that publishing a paper has costs, there is sharp and perennial disagreement on what those costs are or should be.

 

The DOE memo asserts that publishing has “attendant costs” without linking to supporting sources for that claim. This is within a memo that links to numerous supporting sources in general. So it would have been good to see some support for this claim too.

 

Why does this matter? Because my concern remains that costs are likely to rise inexorably – whether for subscription-based journals or for open access journals like PLOS that use APCs. Not having any baseline at all for what the “normative paper” costs to publish only contributes to the problem. I think more transparency and clarity about typical publishing costs would be a useful study for OSI to sponsor, as we are not trying to put anyone out of business (at least I’m not) but we are trying to evolve business models.

 

Maybe it does not matter, though, as the cost of publishing as a proportion of the overall investment in research is tiny. Except when we see arguments from the DOE that the cost of publishing “could provide funding for quite a few post-docs.” Even if we accept the implicit premise here – which is that the act of disseminating research is separable and independent from the acts of funding and conducting research – that indicates that reducing the cost of publishing could lead to immediate OA while funding most (maybe all!) of those post-docs anyway.

 

Marcus

[Rick Anderson]

> I note that the author estimates that the total cost of going gold might
> cost the DOE between $75m and $90m a year. Though I hope no one would
> disagree that this is a lot of money, do we know what this when expressed
> as a percentage of the total research spend of the DOE?

This is a very smart question.

The DOE’s Department of Science was funded at $5.345 billion in 2016 (http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/02/f29/FY2017BudgetinBrief_0.pdf). At the high end of Jeff Salmon’s estimate of the costs of a completely author-pays OA model ($90 million), that model would divert about 1.7% of the total grant budget line away from research and towards dissemination. (This percentage is in line with what Wellcome Trust’s Mark Wolpert has reportedly characterized -- I don’t have a direct link, sorry -- as an acceptable level of research-fund diversion for purposes of open dissemination: 1-2%.)

Here’s why I say it’s a smart question: over time, I’ve learned that whenever someone tries to convince me that a number is either large or small by presenting it as either a raw number or a percentage, it’s always wise to ask for the version of the number that the person didn’t offer. So, for example: those who want to put this kind of OA subvention in the most positive light will say “It’s only 1-2% of the budget!”, while those who want to raise concerns about the subvention will say “It’s $90 million!” But if you want to get a sense for the real-world impact of the policy, you probably need to know both of those figures. It’s true that 1-2% is a small percentage; it’s also true that $90 million is a lot of money. Both of those are important facts.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
rick.a...@utah.edu

[Angela Cochran]

FWIW-- my costs, as a publisher, are rising inexorably. So yes, it will get more expensive. 

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Angela Cochran

[Susan Fitzpatrick]

Rick - thank you for this cogent reminder that in serious conversations it is essential that numbers are provided in their full context - perhaps this group could agree to do this as a component of our professional norms?
Too often in academic policy conversations numbers, percentages, and $s are allowed to float free of context because they are being used to support an a priori position rather than advance real understanding. For a small funder 1-2% of total budget might be a small percentage AND it could actually also be a small number - but still important and how it is expended an important decision reflective of values.

Susan M. Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.
President, James S. McDonnell Foundation
Visit JSMF forum on academic issues: www.jsmf.org/clothing-the-emperor
SMF blog www.scientificphilanthropy.com

-----Original Message-----
From: osi20...@googlegroups.com [mailto:osi20...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Rick Anderson
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2016 1:11 PM
To: Robert Kiley <r.k...@wellcome.ac.uk>; Tein, Andrew - Hoboken <ant...@wiley.com>
Cc: osi20...@googlegroups.com

[David Wojick]

In my several years of doing staff work for this US Federal OA policy, I
have to say that gold OA was never on the table, never even close. The only
real issue was PMC versus CHORUS (which DOE fostered but did not yet
exist). Two flavors of green. The US snubbed the Brits thrust on gold,
ignoring it completely.

However, we are about to get a new Administration, putting present policy
up for grabs, as it were. If there is a case for gold, now is the time to
start making it.

David
http://insidepublicaccess.com/

At 02:11 PM 9/14/2016, you wrote:
> > I note that the author estimates that the total cost of going gold might
> > cost the DOE between $75m and $90m a year. Though I hope no one would
> > disagree that this is a lot of money, do we know what this when expressed
> > as a percentage of the total research spend of the DOE?
>
>This is a very smart question.
>

>The DOE’s Department of Science was funded at $5.345 billion in 2016
>(http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/02/f29/FY2017BudgetinBrief_0.pdf).
> At the high end of Jeff Salmon’s estimate of the costs of a completely

>author-pays OA model ($90 million), that model would divert about 1.7% of
>the total grant budget line away from research and towards dissemination.

>(This percentage is in line with what Wellcome Trust’s Mark Wolpert has
>reportedly characterized -- I don’t have a direct link, sorry -- as an

>acceptable level of research-fund diversion for purposes of open
>dissemination: 1-2%.)
>

>Here’s why I say it’s a smart question: over time, I’ve learned that

>whenever someone tries to convince me that a number is either large or

>small by presenting it as either a raw number or a percentage, it’s
>always wise to ask for the version of the number that the person didn’t

>offer. So, for example: those who want to put this kind of OA subvention

>in the most positive light will say “It’s only 1-2% of the budget!†,

>while those who want to raise concerns about the subvention will say

>“It’s $90 million!†But if you want to get a sense for the

>real-world impact of the policy, you probably need to know both of those

>figures. It’s true that 1-2% is a small percentage; it’s also true

>that $90 million is a lot of money. Both of those are important facts.
>
>---
>Rick Anderson
>Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
>Marriott Library, University of Utah
>Desk: (801) 587-9989
>Cell: (801) 721-1687
>rick.a...@utah.edu
>
>
>

[Mike Taylor]

Interesting stuff. The key issue that gets raised and not discussed is of course cost:

> A key reason why DOE and other agencies prefer green OA is cost.  In the
> case of DOE, we estimate that a completely gold OA model would mean
> between $75 million to $90 million per year diverted from research.
> That would provide funding for quite a few post-docs.

Here it is assumed but not demonstrated that Green OA is cheaper than Gold OA. It's almost certainly true if we consider Gold APCs as an additional cost *on top of* what we are already paying in subscriptions. But that is not the future that any Gold-OA advocate envisages or aspires to. The goal would be to *replace* subscription costs with APCs -- as for example is being done in the recent Netherlands deal with Elsevier.

(For avoidance of doubt: I am still not decided myself whether Green or Gold is the better path, so I have no dog in this fight. I just want to be sure that if we're going to discuss this, we discuss on the basis what people are actually trying to achieve, not just a locally suboptimal transition state. Much depends on how long-term our thinking is.)

While I'm here, there is also this:

> No model is perfect.  Green OA implies the need for some kind of
> embargo, so public access isn’t achieved immediately upon publication.

Actually, Green OA does *not* imply the need for an embargo, There have always been publishers and journals that happily allow self-archiving with no embargo; and no harm to publishers has ever been demonstrated from this practice.

-- Mike.

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[Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF)]

Hi all,

 

Just gently sticking my head over the parapet before I go into meetings for the rest of the day…

 

While I entirely agree with Mike that the costs of either an entirely green OA world or an entirely gold OA world are not clear.  However, I would just gently correct his description of the way we are working with Dutch universities.  In the Netherlands there is a big deal subscription package for the content we publish under the subscription business model and an entirely separate open access package for the content we publish under the gold open access business model.  The two models are separate.  One does not replace the other, because – possibly counterintuitively – the number of articles published under both of these models is growing and one model is not replacing the other. 

 

Only a tiny minority of journals operate green OA policies that have 0 month embargos.  Possibly the perception that this is widespread reflects a conflation between gold OA – where publishing costs have been paid upfront, and so of course the article is immediately available to all with a 0 month embargo – and green OA.  Green OA is symbiotic with the subscription business model, and publishers do therefore need time to recover costs by selling subscriptions.  I’m certain I have circulated to this list before an overview of the problems/risks that journals face if overly short embargo periods are used, and re-attach it here for convenience. 

 

With best wishes,

Alicia

 

Dr Alicia Wise

Director of Access and Policy

Elsevier I The Boulevard I Langford Lane I Kidlington I Oxford I OX5 1GB

M: +44 (0) 7823 536 826 I E: a.w...@elsevier.com

Twitter: @wisealic

 

 

 

From: osi20...@googlegroups.com [mailto:osi20...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mike Taylor

Sent: 15 September 2016 10:05
To: Tein, Andrew - Hoboken <ant...@wiley.com>
Cc: osi20...@googlegroups.com

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[Taylor, Stuart]

 

I was about to make these very same points as Mike but he beat me to it.

 

Jeffrey Salmon seems to think that green OA is somehow free. This is a surprisingly narrow view as it ignores the large cost of journal subscriptions to the system (I guess because the universities are paying for those, rather than the DOE). Nevertheless, they are still costs (and very substantial ones) to the research system as a whole. Gold OA, on the other hand, has the potential to end journal subscriptions completely and (provided there is a functioning market for APCs) also the potential to reduce overall costs. It is disappointing that so many funders take this narrow, short term view that because green OA is cheaper right now and to them that it is really cheaper overall and in the long term. In any case, as Robert has pointed out, the cost of APCs for gold OA is a small fraction of research costs (and could be considerably smaller if more authors moved away from hybrid journals). To quote the former Director of Wellcome, Mark Walport: "I think publishing is a cost of research in the same way as buying a centrifuge is a cost of research"

 

 

Stuart

 

 

Dr Stuart Taylor
Publishing Director

T +44 20 7451 2619

M +44 7787 562340

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0862-163X

The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG
royalsociety.org

 

Registered Charity No 207043

 

 

 

From: osi20...@googlegroups.com [mailto:osi20...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mike Taylor

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To: Tein, Andrew - Hoboken <ant...@wiley.com>
Cc: osi20...@googlegroups.com

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[David Wojick]

We are here talking about US OA policy, made by OSTP in 2013, not DOE. DOE's innovation was adding CHORUS journal linkages to the PMC repository model.

So, with a new Administration looming, what do you folks propose that the US policy be? Do you want a universal APC mandate? Do you propose terminating the US Public Access Program, shutting down PMC and the new green repositories like DOE PAGES?

What specifically do you propose?

David

Inside Public Access

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[Scott Delman]

David,

Here is my strawman proposal:

1. The federal government (or any government for that matter) should not dictate business models, but it is totally appropriate for the federal government to decide how to spend its money, so it can certainly issue guidelines on how and where funds are allocated. I believe it has already done that to a large degree and should now be patient and see how the various agencies implement their plans and how things play out in the scientific community, scholarly publishing community, agency community, etc. It is still early days and things are just starting to evolve. Give it time. For those who want a revolutions that completely disrupts the world of scholarly community, I would only caution to be careful about what you wish for. To answer David’s question, I would not be an advocate of more (and more stringent) mandates, but at the same time I would also not be an advocate of shutting down the program altogether. 

Proposal: The existing mandates have gotten the wheels moving….let’s see what happens before changing direction again (in either direction).

2. One of the tenets of the US Public Access Program was the use of “Public-Private” Partnerships. CHORUS is a perfect example of this, and I believe this is one of the reasons many of the federal agencies were open to working with CHORUS. PMC pre-dated the USPAP and already had good momentum by the time OSTP issued the mandates, and I assume this is one of the major reasons a number of the agencies decided to collaborate with PMC, but I view this not so much as a Public-Private Partnership as a Government driven initiative that was supported heavily by private enterprise (publishers depositing articles on behalf of their authors primarily as a service to their authors), even though there was (at the time) a significant risk to their businesses to do so. One might ask the question “would PMC have become as successful and established as it has without the active support of the publishing community (by virtue of the publishers doing deposits on behalf of their authors). It is important to remember that while NIH mandated an embargo period for deposits into PMC, compliance would likely have been very low if it weren’t for publisher-driven deposits. This is not a knock on PMC in any way and may well just be an opinion (instead of fact), but I think it is a reasonable assumption, but my point is that “compliance” is an enormous issue related to these mandates and it isn’t clear that all federal agencies have implemented plans to track, report, and increase compliance. That is where the focus should be in terms of government oversight in the near term (3-5 years)

Proposal: The US government has gotten the wheels moving with the mandates. Now, it needs to hold the agencies accountable for implementing their plans, and a large part of this accountability involves tracking, reporting, and evaluating compliance…so that this information can be used to take medium term (5-7 years). For those agencies that have taken tangible steps to put systems in place to do this…bravo. For those that have not, I would propose they work with CHORUS or some other mechanism for doing so (but this should involve Public-Private partnerships, as the mandates dictated).

Scott

[Scott Delman]

A few typos in my last post…one that should be fixed….

"Proposal: The US government has gotten the wheels moving with the mandates. Now, it needs to hold the agencies accountable for implementing their plans, and a large part of this accountability involves tracking, reporting, and evaluating compliance…so that this information can be used to take medium term (5-7 years) next step decisions to further increase public access to scholarly information (articles, research artifacts, etc.). For those agencies that have taken tangible steps to put systems in place to do this…bravo. For those that have not, I would propose they work with CHORUS or some other mechanism for doing so (but this should involve Public-Private partnerships, as the mandates dictated). In my opinion, the USPAP (and how it is implemented by funders) should not just be about increasing public access, but should be about how to do that in a way that accelerates innovation and discoveries. If the wrong “macro” decisions are taken that disrupts the ecosystem to the point where it becomes ineffective and unsustainable, then we have done an enormous amount of harm, even if in the short term we make more articles publicly accessible to the world.

Scott

[Taylor, Stuart]

Hi Alicia

 

Is there not another issue lurking in here though? If short embargoes really are the threat to subscriptions that you say they are (and I suspect they are), it really doesn’t say much for the value of the Version of Record does it? If people are happy to cancel their subscriptions because widespread AAMs are available, the latter is presumably quite sufficient. So why are we publishers going to all the extra trouble post-acceptance? I’ve never quite been able to get my head around this one.

 

In this context, it is well worth reading Peter Suber’s comments on the matter (if you haven’t already). Essentially, he is saying that even if it is proven that short embargoes threaten publisher revenues, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should require long ones.

 

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/14/suber-embargoes-on-publicly-funded-research/

 

Stuart

 

 

Dr Stuart Taylor
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[Rick Anderson]

> I just want to be sure that if we're going to discuss this, we discuss on the basis
> what people are actually trying to achieve, not just a locally suboptimal transition
> state. Much depends on how long-term our thinking is.

So true, Mike. And for those who advocate for Green OA as the best road forward, wouldn’t it be fair to say that the current situation (one in which Green OA represents only a fraction of the published corpus, with free content scattered around and often not easily discoverable) represents a “suboptimal transition state”? For those who are working for Green OA, isn’t the end goal that virtually all published scholarship be freely available and easily discoverable in repositories, with minimal or no embargo period?

> There have always been publishers and journals that happily allow self-archiving
> with no embargo; and no harm to publishers has ever been demonstrated from this practice.

But wait – when you say that “no harm to publishers has ever been demonstrated from this practice,” you’re only looking at the current “suboptimal transition state.” Shouldn’t we be focusing on “what people are actually trying to achieve” and thinking about the impacts of that hoped-for scenario? Is it your contention that if virtually all of the published scholarship were freely available and easily discoverable without embargoes, this would have no impact on subscriptions?

[Mike Taylor]

On 15 September 2016 at 15:01, Rick Anderson <rick.a...@utah.edu> wrote:

> I just want to be sure that if we're going to discuss this, we discuss on the basis
> what people are actually trying to achieve, not just a locally suboptimal transition
> state. Much depends on how long-term our thinking is.

So true, Mike. And for those who advocate for Green OA as the best road forward, wouldn’t it be fair to say that the current situation (one in which Green OA represents only a fraction of the published corpus, with free content scattered around and often not easily discoverable) represents a “suboptimal transition state”?

Very much so! I do feel that Green OA *as it presently exists* is much, much less valuable than it ought to be.

For those who are working for Green OA, isn’t the end goal that virtually all published scholarship be freely available and easily discoverable in repositories, with minimal or no embargo period?

That would certainly by *my* goal for Green OA, yes.

> There have always been publishers and journals that happily allow self-archiving
> with no embargo; and no harm to publishers has ever been demonstrated from this practice.

But wait – when you say that “no harm to publishers has ever been demonstrated from this practice,” you’re only looking at the current “suboptimal transition state.”

Excellent point!

Shouldn’t we be focusing on “what people are actually trying to achieve” and thinking about the impacts of that hoped-for scenario? Is it your contention that if virtually all of the published scholarship were freely available and easily discoverable without embargoes, this would have no impact on subscriptions?

That seems unlikely.

-- Mike

[Ivy Anderson]

Scott Delmam wrote:

In my opinion, the USPAP (and how it is implemented by funders) should not just be about increasing public access, but should be about how to do that in a way that accelerates innovation and discoveries.

I completely agree with this. However I have difficulty understanding how CHORUS serves this larger goal. In my understanding, CHORUS limits access to publisher websites, where various restrictions on downloading and re-use may be in effect, even post-embargo. Isn't this also part of the 'grand compromise?' Perhaps I am misinformed - I would be happy to understand this better.

Ivy

Ivy Anderson
California Digital Library

Sent from my mobile

[Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF)]

Hi Ivy,

This isn't quite correct re CHORUS. All manuscripts and articles made available by publishers via CHORUS are available for downloading and re-use in alignment with the OSTP memo.

With kind wishes,

Alicia

-----Original Message-----
From: osi20...@googlegroups.com [mailto:osi20...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ivy Anderson
Sent: 15 September 2016 17:08
To: Scott Delman <scott....@hq.acm.org>
Cc: David Wojick <dwo...@craigellachie.us>; osi20...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: DOE: The Grand Compromise of U.S. Public Access Programs: Going Green

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