Anthony Watkinson wrote on LIBLICENSE:

“…There were three publishers on the Finch committee (out of seventeen members)… [1]

“…I do not know of any evidence that they had a special line to Finch herself or any special privileges.
I do not know of any special influence that representative bodies for publishing might have had.
Does Professor Harnad?… [2]

“…Some years ago Professor Harnad had a lot of influence on the conclusions of a Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee in the UK.
Perhaps he expects the same special channel he had then… [3] [boldface added]”

[1] Publishers on the Finch Committee
There were more than three publishers on the Finch committee — Learned Societies are publishers too — but three publishers would already be three publishers too many in a committee on providing open access to publicly funded research. (Besides, the lobbying began well before the Finch Committee, and already had a hand in how the Committee was constituted and where it was headed.)

Research is funded, conducted, refereed and reported as a service to research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, the R&D industry, and the public that pays for it all. Research is not a service to publishers: Publishers sell a service to research institutions, for which they are paid very handsomely. (I don’t think any of this ruckus is about journal publishers being underpaid, is it?)

[2] Influence of Publishers on Finch Committee Outcome
The recommendations of the Finch committee were identical to the ones for which publishers have been lobbying aggressively for years (ever since it has become evident that trying to lobby against OA itself in the face of the mounting pressure for it from the research community is futile and very ill-received by the research community).

The publisher lobbying has accordingly been for the following:

“Please phase out Green OA as inadequate, parasitic and likely to destroy publishing and peer review — and please provide extra money instead to pay us for Gold OA, if you want OA so much.”

The Finch outcome was already pre-determined as a result of publisher lobbying before the committee was even constituted:

Finch on Green: “The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories? [so] the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should [instead] be developed [to] play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation [no mention of Green OA]?”

Finch on Gold: “Gold” open access, funded by article charges, should be seen as “the main vehicle for the publication of research”? Public funders should establish “more effective and flexible arrangements” to pay [Gold OA] article charges? During the transition to [Gold] open access, funding should be found to extend licences [subscriptions] for non-openaccess content to the whole UK higher education and health sectors?”

But that’s all moot now, as both RCUK and EC have ignored it, instead re-affirming and strengthening their Green OA mandates the day after Mr. Willets announced the adoption of the recommendations of the Finch committee:

RCUK: “[P]eer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils… must be published in journals? [either] offering a ?pay to publish? option [Gold OA] or allowing deposit in a subject or institutional repository [Green OA] after a mandated maximum embargo period? of no more than six months? except? AHRC and? ESRC where the maximum… is 12 months?”

[3] “Special Channel” on 2004 Select Committee?
The 2004 recommendations of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology were based on 23 oral testimonials and 127 written testimonials. Mine (part 1 and part 2) was one of the 127 written testimonials. If anything had influence on the outcome, it was evidence and reasons.

The 2004 Select Committee recommendation had been this:

?This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way… [T]he Report [also] recommends that the Research Councils each establish a fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish…?

At that time, despite the fact that the UK government (again under pressure from the publishing lobby) decided to ignore the Select Committee?s recommendation to mandate Green OA, RCUK and many UK universities adopted Green OA mandates anyway.

As a result, the UK became the global leader in the transition to Open Access.

If heeded, the Finch Committee recommendation to downgrade repository use to the storage and preservation of data, theses and unpublished work would have set back global OA by at least a decade.

Fortunately, the RCUK has again shown its sense and independence, reaffirming and strengthening its Green OA mandate. Let us hope UK?s universities ? not pleased that scarce research funds, instead of being increased, are to be decreased to pay extra needlessly for Gold OA ? will likewise continue to opt instead for cost-free Green OA by mandating it.

If so, the UK will again have earned and re-affirmed its leadership role in the global transition to universal OA.

---

Anthony Watkinson replied on LIBLICENSE:

“[In] 2003/2004 I was asked to be the expert adviser to the [UK Select] committee? and had a pleasant conversation with Ian Gibson, the member of parliament who was the committee chair. It seemed to me in our conversation that Dr. Gibson had already been lobbied by Professor Harnad or his disciplines [sic] and that his mind was already made up. I cannot remember now whether or not Dr. Gibson said that he had met Professor Harnad but it was definitely the impression I had.”

“I am impressed by the suggestion that Professor Harnad actually thinks that learned societies, organisations that represent the academic communities, should not be involved in decisions which will have such an impact on the said academic communities!”

I am flattered that Dr. Watkinson feels I had special influence on Ian Gibson and his Select Committee. I wish I had had!

But alas the truth is as I have already written (above): I was not one of the 23 witnesses invited to give oral evidence (several publishers were).

Ian’s parliamentary assistant Sarah Revell pencilled me in for a personal appointment on Wednesday October 13 2004 (depending on whether Ian’s jury duty ended in time: it did), but my recall of that breathlessly brief audience was that it was too compressed for me to be able to stutter out much that made sense, and I left it pretty pessimistic.

And my subsequent over-zealous attempts to compensate for it via email were very politely but firmly discouraged by the committee’s very able 2nd clerk, Emily Commander.

So my input to the Committee amounted to being one of the 127 who submitted written evidence, plus that tachylalic personal audience on the 13th.

The rest of the influence on the committee was from written reasons, not personal charisma.

I’m not aware of having had any “disciples,” to lobby the Committee at that time (though extra disciplines, as well as discipline, are always handy in lobbying for the interests of research and researchers).

My understanding, however, is that Ian Gibson was indeed pre-lobbied in favour of OA, and indeed that’s why the Committee was created. But that pre-lobbying in 2003 had been done by a Gold OA publisher, Vitek Tracz of BMC (and perhaps others), not by me; and the lobbying was not at all in favour of Green OA but in favour of Gold OA. This initial goldward bent is quite evident in the Committee’s original call for evidence in late 2003, which was the first I ever heard of the Committee’s existence:

“The Committee will be looking at access to journals within the scientific community, with particular reference to price and availability. It will be asking what measures are being taken in government, the publishing industry and academic institutions to ensure that researchers, teachers and students have access to the publications they need in order to carry out their work effectively…. What are the consequences of increasing numbers of openaccess journals, for example for the operation of the Research Assessment Exercise and other selection processes? Should the Government support such a trend and, if so, how?”

As a result, the Committee’s final decision to recommend that institutions and funders mandate Green and merely experiment with funding Gold was an unexpected surprise and delight to me. It also turned out to be a historic turning point and blueprint for OA worldwide.

As to publishers, and learned-society publishers: they are pretty much of a muchness in their fealty to their bottom lines. The only learned societies that could testify (for either the 2004 Gibson Committee or the 2012 Finch Committee) with a disinterested voice (let alone one that represented the interests of learned research rather than earned revenues) would be the learned societies that that were not also publishers.

Stevan Harnad

The seemingly selfless offer from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) to pay £1 million in hybrid Gold OA fees for its authors at institutions that subscribe to all the RSC’s 72 journals is in reality a totally self-interested strategy for locking in RSC’s current publishing revenue streams should the research community prove foolish enough to seek OA via the slow and costly route of paying pre-emptively for Gold OA instead of providing cost-free Green OA by self-archiving their refereed final drafts free for all online.

The hybrid Gold “membership/transition” strategy is not new: The same Trojan Horse offer has been made by Springer (but with little uptake) for a few years now, with a promise to lower subscription fees “proportionately” as hybrid Gold uptake rises.

The irony is doubled (and along with it the foolishness of researchers who fall for this option) by the fact that both RSC and Springer have already formally recognized their authors’ right to provide immediate, unembargoed Green OA. See: SHERPA/ROMEO

Stevan Harnad

Paul Ayris’s points in
“Why panning for gold may be detrimental to open access research”
are all spot on:

The UK Government — under the palpable influence of ponderous (and successful) lobbying by the publishing industry lobby — recommends that the UK should phase out extra-cost-free Green OA self-archiving in institutional repositories and instead pay publishers extra for Gold OA out of scarce UK research funds, as recommended by the Finch Report. Fortunately, RCUK (and the EC) think otherwise and continue to mandate Green OA, in keeping with the UK Select Committee’s historic recommendation in 2004.

There is also the question of the rest of the world, as only 6% of research journal content comes from the UK.

Paul writes:

“If the whole world turned open access tomorrow, the evidence suggests that the greatest savings would come from gold, rather than green, open access.”

This is incorrect, because it omits the question of how the rest of the world is imagined to turn OA tomorrow:

1. If tomorrow the entire world, like the UK, immediately agreed pre-emptively to pay publishers’ asking price for Gold OA, the world would have OA, but everyone would be paying more for publishing than they are paying now for subscriptions, because they would be paying for subscriptions plus pre-emptive Gold OA. Publishers would, of course, obligingly agree to cap total expenditure at what is today being paid for subscriptions, thereby ensuring their current revenue streams.

2. If tomorrow the entire world instead immediately mandated extra-cost-free Green OA, the world would have OA, and subscriptions would continue paying for subscriptions, at no extra cost or saving.

But the reality is that the entire world cannot and will not agree to pay publishers extra pre-emptively for Gold OA tomorrow, as the UK seems to have agreed to do. There will be an anarchic transition period, in which mandating extra-cost-free Green OA will be the much less expensive option.

And if Green OA nears or reaches 100% globally, institutions will finally able to cancel their subscriptions, forcing publishers to phase out the print and online edition, archiving and access-provision and their costs, downsizing to the management of the peer-review service and converting to Gold OA, whose far lower costs institutions will pay, per paper published, out of a fraction of their annual windfall savings from having cancelled subscriptions.

This is the contingency the publishing lobby managed to gull the gullible Finch Committee and UK government into overlooking completely in favour of a gratuitous rush to pan out pre-emptively for pre-Green Gold. (And this is the reason that pre-emptive Gold is such a foolish, unrealistic and costly option, whereas post-Green Gold will not only provide 100% OA but it will also lower overall publishing cost and expenditure substantially.

Swan, Alma & Houghton, John (2012) Going for Gold? The costs and benefits of Gold Open Access for UK research institutions: further economic modelling. Report to the UK Open Access Implementation Group, June 2012.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed). The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

From Swan & Houghton’s 2012 executive summary (as quoted by Peter Suber in “Transition to green OA significantly less expensive than transition to gold OA” )

“Based on this analysis, the main findings are: [1] so long as research funders commit to paying publication costs for the research they fund, and [2] publication charges fall to the reprint author?s home institution, [3] all universities would see savings from (worldwide) Gold OA when article-processing charges are at the current averages, [4] research-intensive universities would see the greatest savings, and [5] in a transition period, providing Open Access through the Green route offers the greatest economic benefits to individual universities, unless additional funds are made available to cover Gold OA costs….[F]or all the sample universities during a transition period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing institutions around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university sampled. In a transition period, providing OA through the Green route would have substantial economic benefits for universities, unless additional funds were released for Gold OA, beyond those already available through the Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust….”

The Centre for Research Communications (CRC) at the University of Nottingham has partnered with Research Information Network (RIN), in a project that will shed light on the policies devised by academic publishers to promote linkage between  journal articles and underlying research data. This initiative, entitled Journal Research Data (JoRD) Policy Bank, is funded by JISC as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme; it runs from July to December 2012.

 

The overarching aim of the JoRD Policy Bank project is to conduct a feasibility study into the scope and shape of a sustainable service that will collate and summarise the relevant journal policies. The project will deliver requirements and specifications for a service that will provide researchers, managers of research data and other stakeholders with an easy source of reference to understand and comply with the research data policies of journals and publishers.

Through maintaining a firm focus upon research literature and stakeholder consultations, the project aims to:

• identify and consult with a wide range of stakeholders, publishers and others, and develop a detailed set of stakeholder requirements and service specifications;
• investigate the current state of data sharing policies within journals and shed light on how journals are addressing this crucial question;
• scope and deliver recommendations on the shape of a central service that will (i) summarise journal research data policies; and (ii) provide a ready reference source of easily accessible, standardised, accurate and clear guidance and information relating to the journal policy landscape for research data;
• provide models to establish the business framework that will allow the committed relationships necessary to deliver such a service on  a long term basis;
• provide service sustainability models determining how the long term operation of such a service can be sustained.

 

Further information will be posted on these pages as the project evolves during the second half of 2012. In due course, there will also be links to blogs which will provide an opportunity to keep abreast of developments.

Jane & Azhar

asks:

“Is ?gold? open access necessary to provide the financial resources to make open access a reality?”

No. Institutional subscriptions are already paying the cost of publication, in full, handsomely, today. No need to pay still more for Gold OA while subscriptions are still paying the bill: Just mandate Green OA self-archiving of the author’s peer-reviewed final draft.

That’s exactly what RCUK and EC research funders are mandating. All insitutions and funders worldwide need to do the same, and global OA will be a reality.

“Are taxpayers who have paid for the research entitled to the free access that ?green? open access promises?”

Of course. And all their funders and institutions need to do is mandate Green OA, as RCUK, EC, NIH and other funders, as well as UCL, Harvard, MIT and other institutions have begun to do (see ROARMAP).

“Is there a hybrid model that preserves the positive elements of both ?gold? and ?green? models?”

The RCUK & EC mandates are already hybrid Green+Gold: They mandate Green and provide funds for Gold.

But research money is already overstretched today. Gold need not be paid for in advance (pre-emptively) until and unless universal Green has caused global subscription cancelation, making subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering the cost of publication. Then journals will downsize to providing just the peer review service alone and convert to Gold OA, paid for, per paper published, by the authors’ institutions, out of a small portion of the windfall savings freed up by the subscription cancelations made possible by the universal availability of the Green OA version.

That’s a scalable, affordable and sustainable post-Green Gold “hybrid”.

In contrast, pre-emptive payment for hybrid subscription+Gold, pre-Green, as Finch/Willets have recommended, is not: It’s just the needless and senseless waste of a lot of public money for little OA in return.

The only interest served by paying for pre-emptive hybrid subscription+Gold today is publshers’ self-interest, in preserving their current bloated revenue streams, come what may, whilst holding Green OA at bay, at the cost of both lost research access and lost research funding.

“Where does peer review and quality assurance fit in to all of this?”

Peer review is quality assurance, and it never left! Green OA is the self-archiving of peer-reviewed papers, the peer review being paid for by institutional subscriptions. Post-Green OA-Gold OA is the peer review service itself, paid for out of the subscription cancelations.

It is pre-emptive, pre-Green payment for hybrid subscription+Gold that is a needless and senseless waste of a lot of public money for little OA in return.

The only interest served by paying pre-emptively for hybrid subscription+Gold today is publshers’ self-interest in preserving their current bloated revenue streams, come what may, whilst keeping Green OA at bay, at the cost of both lost research access and lost research funding.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed). The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

Robert Kiley [Wellcome Trust] wrote in GOAL:

My reading of the RCUK policy is somewhat different to Stevan?s. In short, I see clear parallels between what Finch recommended (disclosure ? I sat on the Finch Working Group) and the RCUK policy…

Finch recommended gold OA and flexible funding arrangements to cover OA gold costs. RCUK have released a policy that allows for gold publishing, and provides flexible funding (via block grants to HEI?s) to support these aims.

Finch said when publishers didn’t offer a mechanism to pay for OA gold, it was reasonable for funders to demand an embargo period of less than 12 months. [See paragraph 9.10 of the Finch Report]. The RCUK have followed this.

Finch said that support of OA publications should be supported by policies to ?minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use?. RCUK have followed this, and indeed pushed further to require than when an APC is levied the article must be published under a CC-BY licence. This is identical to the policy change the Wellcome Trust announced at the end of June….

There were a long string of posts on this forum at the end of last week calling for an end to the counter-productive squabbling over the minutiae of differences between green and gold, the obsession with costing models, etc. The RCUK policy is entirely compatible with the recommendations of the Finch Report, and continually rubbishing Finch seems counter-productive on many levels.

In response to Robert, let’s keep it simple and go straight to the heart of the matter:

1. Ever since the historic 2004 Report of the UK Parliamentary Select Committee which made the revolutionary recommendation to mandate (what has since come to be called) Green OA self-archiving as well as to fund (what has since come to be called) Gold OA journal fees, RCUK (and later the EC and other funding councils worldwide) have been mandating Green and funding Gold.

2. The Finch report recommended phasing out Green and only funding Gold.

3. RCUK and EC declined to follow the Finch recommendation and reaffirmed (and strengthened) their Green OA mandates.

That’s the substance of the “squabbling over the minutiae of differences between green and gold”.

The Finch Report is “compatible with the recommendations of the Finch Report” only in the sense that -A & B is more “compatible” with A & B than with A & -B. (RCUK could, I suppose, have retained its Green mandate but dropped its Gold funding, contradicting its own prior policy, but it did not?)

The Wellcome Trust’s pioneering historic lead in OA has since 2004 alas hardened into rigid dogma, at the cost of much lost growth potential for OA (as well as of much potential research funding).

The 2004 UK’s Parliamentary Select Committee’s prescient recommendation eight years ago had been this:

?This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way… [T]o encourage? experimentation? the Report [also] recommends that the Research Councils each establish [an experimental] fund to which their funded researchers can apply should they wish to pay to publish…?

CC-BY is not nearly as urgent and important as “Gratis” OA (free online access): not all authors want it, most users don’t need it, and it would immediately make endorsing un-embargoed Green ruinous to subscription publishers: so demanding it today, pre-emptively leads to less OA and longer embargoes (just as demand for pre-emptive Gold does). See: “Overselling the Importance and Urgency of CC-BY/CC-BY-NC for Peer-Reviewed Scholarly and Scientific Research.”

(Lest it sound as if I am lauding the pre-emptive funding of Gold today: I am not. It was historically important to demonstrate that fee-based Gold OA is conceivable and viable, in order to fend off the publishing lobby’s doomsday contention that OA would destroy publishing. So the early Gold OA proof-of-principle, especially by PLOS-Biology and PLOS-Medicine, was very timely and useful. But the subsequent mindless Gold Rush, at the expense of neglecting the enormous power of cost-free Green OA mandates to accelerate the growth of OA, not to mention the needless waste of money diverted from research to fund Gold pre-emptively, have been exceedingly detrimental to overall OA growth. The simplest way to summarize the underlying logic and pragmatics is that pre-Green-OA pre-emptive Gold OA, at today’s inflated asking prices and while subscriptions still prevail, is extremely bad for OA progress: wasteful, unscalable, and unsustainable, it generates very little global OA, very slowly. In contrast, post-Green-OA, downsized Gold OA, once Green OA has prevailed globally, making subscriptions unsustainable and forcing journals to downsize and convert to Gold OA for peer review service alone, at a far lower cost, paid out of subscription cancelation savings instead of scarce research funds, will be affordable, scalable and sustainable)

Stevan Harnad

1. “Open Access” does not mean “Open Access Publishing.”

2. “Open Access” (OA) means free online access to peer-reviewed, published journal articles.

3. OA comes in two “degrees”: “Gratis” OA is free online access and “Libre” OA is free online access plus various re-use rights. (Most of the discussion right now is about Gratis OA, which is the most important, urgent and reachable degree of OA.)

4. Authors can provide OA in two ways: (4a) by publishing in a subscription journal and making their final, peer-reviewed drafts free for all online by self-archiving them in their OA institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication (“Green OA”) or (4b) by paying to publish them in an OA journal that makes them free for all online (“Gold OA”).

5. Both Green OA and Gold OA is peer-reviewed: no difference there.

6. But Gold OA costs extra money (which the Finch Report proposes to take out of already-scarce research funds).

7. Green OA is free of extra cost (because subscriptions are still paying in full — and handsomely — for publication).

8. About 60% of journals officially recognize their authors’ right to provide immediate Green OA, but about 40% impose an embargo of 6-12 months or longer before their authors may provide Green OA.

9. All the UK Research Councils (RCUK) mandate that their authors provide Green OA with a maximum allowable embargo of 6 months (12 for AHRC and ESRC). They also make some funds available to pay Gold OA fees.

10. The Finch report, under very strong lobbying pressure from publishers, recommended that cost-free Green OA be phased out and that only funded Gold OA should be provided.

11. Both RCUK and the EC demurred, and continue to mandates Green OA as well as funding Gold OA.

12. The tumult from researchers and OA advocates is about the diversion of scarce research funds to pricey Gold OA what Green OA can be provided cost-free.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed). The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L’Harmattan. 99-106.

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos.

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos: The Journal of the World Book Community. 21(3-4): 86-93

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2012) Open Access Mandates and the “Fair Dealing” Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Professor Adam Tickell (pro-VC, U. Birminhgam): “Critically, the minister for universities and science wanted to ensure that all relevant stakeholders – universities, funders, learned societies and publishers – were represented“

The only “relevant stakeholders” are those by and for whom research is funded, conducted, refereed and reported. That does not include publishers, whether commercial or learned-society.

Professor Tickell: “Open access is not a significant issue for most academic researchers: we already have access to most research papers.”

In searching the latest literature in his field, is Adam Tickell one of the rare academics who has not reached (frequently) an access-denied link offering pay-to-view with a hefty price-tag?

Is it not as evident in Birmingham that most universities can only afford to subscribe to a fraction of the peer-reviewed research journals published annually, and that even the university with the biggest serials budget — Harvard — has announced that it can no longer sustain it?

Professor Tickell: “Many UK-based learned societies rely on income from publishing – most of which is export income – to remain viable”

Are Green Open Access Mandates rendering anyone’s publishing income nonviable?

And are learned societies’ interests the interests of learned research or the interests of sustaining learned societies’ publishing income?

Professor Tickell: “As green was unacceptable to funders unless learned societies and publishers were willing to allow it with minimal embargo periods (which would undermine their business models), the group recommended gold as part of a mix that includes elements of all forms of open access.”

Are the interests of publishers, whether commercial or learned-society, the arbiters of what is in the interest of those by and for whom research is funded, conducted, refereed and reported? And what was the green part of the Finch “mix”? This?:

FINCH ON GREEN: “The [Green OA] policies of neither research funders nor universities themselves have yet had a major effect in ensuring that researchers make their publications accessible in institutional repositories? [so] the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should [instead] be developed [to] play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation [no mention of Green OA]?”

Stevan Harnad

The latest issue of Evolutionary Applications has now been published. This is a Special Issue on Evolution and Biological Control, guest edited by George K. Roderick, Ruth Hufbauer and Maria Navajas. The guest editors describe the aims of the issue in their editorial: ‘The papers in this volume address fundamental questions concerning the role of evolution in biological control. The ultimate goal, as in any science, is for the research to have predictive power. These papers take a giant step in that direction…Papers in this volume point to three themes for future work that together will be critical in understanding the role of evolution in biological control and adding predictive power to an emerging field: species interactions and global change, higher order interactions and environmental benefits and risks.’

Below are two editorial highlights from this issue which both address important issues of rapid evolution in biological control agents:

  Evolution of critical day length for diapause induction enables range expansion of Diorhabda carinulata, a biological control agent against tamarisk (Tamarix spp.)
Dan W. Bean, Peter Dalin and Tom L. Dudley

  Evolving while invading: rapid adaptive evolution in juvenile development time for a biological control organism colonizing a high-elevation environment
Peter B. McEvoy, Kimberley M. Higgs, Eric M. Coombs, Evrim Karaçetin and Leigh Ann Starcevich

Read the whole issue here >

Sign up for e-toc alerts here >

Submit your article here >

Irony of ironies, that it should now appear (to some who are not paying attention) as if the RCUK & EC were following the recommendations of Finch/Willets when in point of fact they are pointedly rejecting them!

RCUK and EC were already leading the world in providing and mandating Green OA.

Finch/Willets, under the influence of the publisher lobby, have recommended abandoning cost-free Green OA and instead spending scarce research money on paying publishers extra for Gold OA.

Both RCUK & EC immediately announced that, no, they would stay the course in which they were already leading — mandatory Green OA. (They even shored it up, shortening the maximum allowable embargo period, again directly contrary to Finch/Willets!)

What Finch/Willets have mandated is that £50,000,000 of the UK’s scarce research budget be taken away annually from UK research and redirected instead to paying publishers for Gold OA.

The UK government is free to squander its public funds as it sees fit.

But as long as cost-free Green OA mandates remain in effect, that’s just a waste of money, not of progress in the global growth in OA.

(A lot of hard, unsung work had to be done, by many, many people, to fend off the concerted efforts of the publishing industry lobby — so brilliantly successful in duping Finch/Willets — in the effort to dupe the RCUK and EC in much the same way. The publishing industry’s lobbying efforts have failed with RCUK and the EC; instead, the global research community’s self-help efforts to protect the interests of publicly funded research have triumphed. And the publishing lobby will now fail once again, with the US. And the UK has once again re-affirmed its leadership in the worldwide OA movement — despite Finch/Willets, not because of it.)

Stevan Harnad

Despite the recommendation by the Finch Committee and UK Science and Universities Minister David Willets (under heavy influence from the publisher lobby) to downgrade repository use to the storage and preservation of data, theses and unpublished work, the UK research funding councils, RCUK, have re-confirmed their policy of mandatory author self-archiving in Green OA repositories:

?The new policy, which will apply to all qualifying publications being submitted for publication from 1 April 2013, states that peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils? must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access.

?Criteria which journals must fulfill to be compliant with the Research Councils? Open Access policy are detailed within the policy, but include offering a ?pay to publish? option or allowing deposit in a subject or institutional repository after a mandated maximum embargo period??

This is eight years almost to the day in 2004 when the UK Parliamentary Select Committee made its revolutionary recommendation to mandate Green OA:

?This Report recommends that all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online. It also recommends that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way.?

At that time, despite the fact that the UK government (under pressure from the publishing lobby) decided to ignore the Select Committee?s recommendation to mandate Green OA, RCUK and many UK universities adopted Green OA mandates anyway. As a result, the UK became the global leader in the tranistion to Open Access.

If heeded, the Finch Committee recommendation to downgrade repository use to the storage and preservation of data, theses and unpublished work would have set back global OA by at least a decade.

Fortunately, the RCUK is again showing its sense and independence. Let us hope UK?s universities ? not pleased that scarce research funds, instead of being increased, are to be decreased to pay extra needlessly for Gold OA ? will likewise continue to opt instead for cost-free Green OA by mandating it.

If so, the UK will again have earned and re-affirmed its leadership role in the global transition to universal OA.

Stevan Harnad

Wiley has partnered with the Royal Meteorological Society to launch the Geoscience Data Journal as part of the Wiley Open Access publishing program. The new online-only journal will publish short, earth science data papers cross-linked to datasets that have been deposited in approved data centres and awarded DOIs.

“It is becoming increasingly important that the data which underpins key findings should be made more available to allow for the further analysis and interpretation of those results,” said Mike Davis, Vice President and Managing Director, Life Sciences Wiley. “The ability of researchers to create and collect often huge new data sets has been growing rapidly in parallel with options for their storage and retrieval in a wide range of data repositories. We are launching the Geoscience Data Journal in response to these important developments.”

The editorial team, which includes representatives from the Natural Environment Research Council and the British Atmospheric Data Centre, is led by Dr Rob Allan from the UK Met Office, and will work alongside a global network of data centres. The journal will play a crucial role in the curation and archiving of digitally stored datasets, ensuring geosciences data is easily accessible, readable and understandable for years to come.

Geoscience Data Journal is online-only and will publish short data papers (articles describing a dataset, giving details including collection, processing, software and file formats) covering topics ranging from weather and climate, to oceanography, atmospheric chemistry and geology. All published data papers will be linked to datasets, which provide details of the collection, processing and file formatting of data.

“Issues around provenance, curation, recognition and discovery of data have always been important, but never as much as over recent years,” said Professor Paul Hardaker, Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society. “Being able to publish data in a peer-reviewed journal not only helps to address many of these challenges, but for the first time will help to recognise the contribution that data and those scientists that work with data make to the wider community.”

“The establishment of journals which allow for the formal peer-review, publication and citation of data sets provides a real opportunity to promote open data, improve the openness and transparency of the research process and promote the re-use of data held by NERC and other research organisations,” said Mark Thorley, Head of Science Information at the Natural Environment Research Council. “NERC has been an active supporter of the data science activities that have led to the establishment of this journal, and we will be encouraging and supporting our research community to use it to publish data sets that they hold.”