Summary:Jean-Claude Guédon has suggested that (1) the percentage of non-OA journals that are subsidised may be closer to 50% than 5%, and that hence (2) OA self-archiving mandates could also mandate the conversion of those subsidised journals to OA. It is not clear, however, (i) whether the percentage of national journals that are subsidised is representative of the total percentage of the world's 24,000 journals that are subsidised. The right question is: (ii) what percentage of a nation's research output is published in subsidised journals? A second, unavoidable question is: (iii) where in the quality hierarchy of 24,000 peer-reviewed journals do the subsidised journals tend to fall? (The answer to (ii) and (iii) will differ by both nation and discipline.) In any case, the adoption of the proposed OA self-archiving mandates (such as the US FRPAA proposal or the European Commission's A1 recommendation) should on no account be handicapped by trying to add to them a mandate to convert subsidised journals to OA. The same is true of individual institutional self-archiving mandates. Once self-archiving mandates prevail, the need to convert journals to OA will in any case become a far less urgent one, and no longer an OA matter.
Comments.
I've only excerpted the summary of a larger post. Readers interested this question should read the whole thing.
Jean-Claude wasn't talking about subsidized TA journals in general but specifically about TA journals subsidized by public funds.
It doesn't matter what the percentage turns out to be or where the publicly-subsidized journals fall on the quality scale. The funding agencies have a right to put an OA condition on their money; and to pursue their own missions and promote the public interest, they have an interest or even an obligation to do so. This is one of the principles behind the funder mandates for OA archiving and I don't see why the same principle doesn't extend to journals.
Stevan is right that if OA archiving mandates prevail, then the need for OA journal-conversion mandates will be less urgent. But it won't disappear, since (among other reasons) the archiving mandates usually permit embargoes and don't apply to the published editions of the articles.
Stevan is also right that OA archiving mandates "should on no account by handicapped" by the pursuit of journal-conversion mandates. For example, if a one-mandate policy is still being drafted or debated, then it would be a mistake to turn it into a two-mandate policy; that would roughly double the difficulty of building consensus for the result. But that doesn't rule out a plan to pursue both policies in parallel or in sequence. If we can pursue two good policies instead of one, without reducing the odds for the one we're already pursuing, then we should. But if not, not. This is an empirical question and the answer may change from place to place and time to time.
In any case, there's no reason why a funder that already has a strong archiving mandate should hold off considering a journal-conversion mandate.
The NIH estimates that the cost of implementing its OA policy with 100% grantee compliance would be $3.5 million/year (for 65,000 manuscripts/year). But it also estimates that it spends $30 million/year on subsidies to TA journals. I'd like to see it either phase out the subsidies to TA journals or put an OA condition on the money. I see no reason why this would interfere with its current archiving policy or with ongoing efforts to strengthen that policy. But if it would, then I'd reconsider and give priority to strengthening the archiving policy.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/05/2006 09:56:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
