{"id":11,"date":"2009-06-11T06:54:32","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T10:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/?p=11"},"modified":"2009-06-09T18:37:09","modified_gmt":"2009-06-09T22:37:09","slug":"the-argument-for-gold-oa-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2009\/06\/11\/the-argument-for-gold-oa-support\/","title":{"rendered":"The argument for gold OA support"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are green and gold open access<\/a> independent of each other? In particular, is worry about gold OA a waste of time, and are expenditures on it a waste of money? Stevan Harnad has brought up this issue<\/a> in response to a recent talk I gave at Cal Tech<\/a>, and in particular my remarks about a potential “open access compact”. I will take this opportunity to explain why I think that the answer to both questions is “no”.<\/p>\n

Enaction of green OA policies at universities requires the broad support of faculty and administration, and careful attending to their wholly reasonable concerns. Chief among these is the following argument against a green OA policy: The services that the journals provide are important, as are the scholarly societies that publish many of the journals. They constitute a good to the scholarly community. But now consider the following dystopian scenario. Suppose the green OA policy being proposed were to be adopted universally, and further that it were widely followed so that the vast majority of scholarly articles were thereby openly available (though admittedly in the deprecated form of author’s final manuscript rather than publisher’s version). This might lead some libraries to feel freer about canceling subscriptions, which would lead to price pressure on journals. This price pressure might become so great that publishers might not even be able to recoup their costs by sale of subscriptions. In the absence of other business models, the publishers will have no choice but to shut down their journals. Then by a Kantian argument, it follows that the green OA policy should not be supported.<\/p>\n

This worry is by far the most common one that I encountered in working with three Harvard faculties<\/a> in passing green OA policies, and still encounter as I work with the remaining faculties at Harvard and talk with other institutions.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are a lot of “might”s in the worry. But, it doesn’t matter that there is no evidence that such a scenario will transpire<\/a>, and that there is in fact evidence against it<\/a>. (The case of physics is well known.) It doesn’t matter that many of the steps in the process may not occur. I myself have recapitulated these counterarguments many a time. What is important is that it certainly might<\/em> occur, it is consistent with the laws of economics (even if not dictated by them), and most importantly, it is widely perceived<\/em> as being a real possibility. For that reason alone, it is important to have a response.<\/p>\n

Let me first dismiss two inadequate responses:<\/p>\n