** Apologies for Multiple Posting **
Dear OA advocates:
This is a note of caution about the spate of publishers
currently
announcing that they are offering Open Choice -- i.e., the
option
for authors to buy OA, at various asking prices, for their
individual article.
On the surface, this sounds like a positive development:
Publishers experimenting widely with OA publishing at last.
But please don't forget the OA mandates that have been
proposed
and are pending in the US, UK, EC, Australia, Germany,
France,
Norway.
Those are all OA self-archiving mandates, and they are
already
long-delayed, mostly because of opposition from the
publishing
lobby.
Please be aware that the publishing lobby will now be using
the
paid-OA option that they are offering as yet another means
of
trying to delay or divert the adoption of the OA
self-archiving
mandates.
If the US, UK, EC, Australia, Germany, France, Norway felt
they
had the extra money to mandate and fund paid OA instead of
self-archiving today, and promptly did so, that would be
fine.
But that outcome is highly unlikely, for many reasons (the
chief
of which being that 100% of the cash for funding publication
is
currently tied up in paying subscriptions, so the extra
money
would have to be found from elsewhere, in advance!).
Moreover, a consensus on a policy of mandating OA via
self-archiving, at no extra cost, even though it has been so
long
in coming (mainly because of publisher opposition) is far
less
likely, and likely to be far longer in the coming, if it
instead
becomes a paid-OA mandate, conditional on finding and
agreeing to
invest all that extra cash in advance -- particularly at a
time
when all publication costs are being paid, hence there is no
call
for extra cash.
The publishers' promise that as paid OA catches on they
will
scale down subscription prices is a hollow one: It is
tantamount
to saying, to an individual customer: "Buy more of my
product and
the effect will trickle down in the form of a lower price
for
everyone, including you." Nonsense: individual
authors, if they
paid for the OA option for their own articles, would simply
be
subsidising an infinitesimal reduction in the price of
subscriptions for institutional libraries the world over.
And the research community and public need 100% OA now.
I think Open Choice is a Trojan Horse, and that we should be
very
careful about our reaction to it, as it risks eliciting
years
more of delay for OA (under the guise of "preparing
the way").
>From publishers who do not oppose the self-archiving
mandates,
Open Choice is fine: it is an indication of good faith, and
willingness to test the waters of Open Access Publishing.
But
from publishers lobbying against the adoption of
self-archiving
mandates, and touting Open Choice as an alternative -- or,
worse,
pressing for the mandating of paid-OA rather than
self-archiving
-- it is a clever, but somewhat cynical way of delaying
still
longer the immediate mandating of OA, as now proposed all
over
the world.
Stevan Harnad
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