Getting Open Access Embargoes Right: Rational Policy Must Be Evidence-Based | The Scholarly Kitchen

"A new study, out today, takes a broad look at the usage lives of scholarly journal articles. The information it contains is vital for achieving the balance necessary for Green OA policies to work. A few weeks ago we saw a series of dust-ups over Green Open Access (OA), and its potential economic impact on journals. One faction made the seemingly obvious statement that if you make a product free, customers (particularly financially strapped customers) will stop paying for it. The other side of the argument stated that because Green OA was disorganized and sporadic, it wasn’t an adequate substitute for the paid product, and would thus have no negative impact on subscriptions. Both sides of this argument contain some truth, but as we move forward, both are essentially wrong because they fail to take into account how much the Green OA landscape is changing due to funding agency mandates. While some funding agency and government public access mandates favor the Gold route to OA, most seem to be leaning more toward the Green route. The United States, Australia and others (Argentina most recently) have announced these sorts of policies requiring public access to research articles based on their funding efforts. The widespread growth of such policies moves Green OA from a disorganized practice into an consistent prerequisite for researchers hoping to retain their funding. Furthermore, efforts like CHORUS will soon provide a mechanism for fulfilling these mandates automatically. In short order, any argument about the disorganized nature of today’s Green OA will be moot ... This wave of Green OA mandates also changes the question librarians will need to ask about retaining subscriptions. Public access to the articles will only come after an embargo period. The real purchasing question for librarians will not be,  'is it free?' Instead they must ask, 'is it free soon enough to meet the needs of my researchers?'  Embargoes are at the heart of making these Green public access policies work. As Joe Esposito has noted, the concept behind Green OA is somewhat self-contradictory. Its success means damaging the survival chances of the very thing upon which it depends. Embargoes are the mechanism necessary to create a symbiotic relationship between the two and provide the balance needed to keep things running. Whilesome extremists dream of a world where everything is immediately free, this seems, at least under current conditions, the equivalent of hoping for a perpetual motion machine or a free lunch.

The problem with embargoes is that nobody seems to know how long they should be.  One of the great strengths of the White House OSTP policy is that it requires a rational, evidence-based procedure for setting embargo periods ... The Journal Usage Half-Life study, released today, marks a beginning to the evidence gathering needed to answer these questions and set rational policy ... The new study, however, suggests that the NIH experience may have been a poor choice for a starting point. Clearly the evidence shows that by far, Health Science journals have the shortest article half-lives. The material being deposited in PubMed Central is, therefore, an outlier population, and many not set an appropriate standard for other fields ..."