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The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59.

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Abstract

Among the many important implications of Houghton et al’s (2009) timely and illuminating JISC analysis of the costs and benefits of providing free online access (“Open Access,” OA) to peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journal articles one stands out as particularly compelling: It would yield a forty-fold benefit/cost ratio if the world’s peer-reviewed research were all self-archived by its authors so as to make it OA. There are many assumptions and estimates underlying Houghton et al’s modelling and analyses, but they are for the most part very reasonable and even conservative. This makes their strongest practical implication particularly striking: The 40-fold benefit/cost ratio of providing Green OA is an order of magnitude greater than all the other potential combinations of alternatives to the status quo analyzed and compared by Houghton et al. This outcome is all the more significant in light of the fact that self-archiving already rests entirely in the hands of the research community (researchers, their institutions and their funders), whereas OA publishing depends on the publishing community. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that this outcome emerged from studies that approached the problem primarily from the standpoint of the economics of publication rather than the economics of research.

Item Type:Article
Creator/Authors:
Stevan Harnad
Keywords:open access, green open access, self-archiving, institutional repositories, publishing economics, gold open access
Additional Information:Author Posting. (c) Informa plc 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here with the endorsement of Informa plc for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Prometheus, Volume 28 Issue 1, March 2010. doi:10.1080/08109021003676367 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08109021003676367
Research Group:Current ECS Groups > Web and Internet Science
Old ECS Groups > Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia
Alternative Locations:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08109021003676367
Date:March 2010
Information about this record:
Citations:Google Scholar: 6
Downloads (2010):289
ID Code:18514
Last Modified:23 Sep 2011 10:39
Deposited On:16 Feb 2010 18:19 by Harnad, Stevan

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References in Article

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Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11160/

Harnad, S. (1996) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds.) Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Pp 103-118. http://cogprints.org/1692/

Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242. http://cogprints.org/1646/

Harnad, Stevan (2001) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as: (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. http://cogprints.org/1639/

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 – 68 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17298/

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15617/

Harnad, S., Carr, L. and Gingras, Y. (2008) Maximizing Research Progress Through Open Access Mandates and Metrics. Liinc em Revista 4(2). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16617/

Hitchcock, S. (2010) The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Houghton, J.W. & Oppenheim, C. (2009) The Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models. Prometheus

Houghton, J.W., Rasmussen, B., Sheehan, P.J., Oppenheim, C., Morris, A., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Summers, M. and Gourlay, A. (2009). Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the Costs and Benefits, London and Bristol: The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

Smith, J.W.T. (1999). The Deconstructed Journal, a new model for Academic Publishing, Learned Publishing 12(2), 1999, pp. 79-91.

Ware, M. and Mabe, M. (2009) The stm report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journals publishing, Oxford: International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers.

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