If budget lines for OA journals are to be given the same fair treatment as budget lines for traditional resources, one would expect a similar form of fiscal responsibility and accountability.

Quite simply, the objective of the Cornell Open-Access Publication fund is to promote open access to the scholarly research output of Cornell University (regardless of the business model, which needs a community solution). As the signatory from Cornell, our Provost, says: “as part of its social commitment as a research university, Cornell University strives to ensure that scholarly research results are as widely available as possible.”

You express concern that we have decided in favor of author-pays OA before its impact can be understood — and suggest we are being disingenuous in not admitting the foregone conclusion. But you should note that the Compact is only one of numerous “experiments” in alternative publishing models that Cornell (and the other signatories) are pursuing. In the cases of arXiv, Project Euclid, the institutional repositories, our collaborations with the University Presses, etc., etc., we are making scholarly content available in various, disparate ways without knowing what the long-term impact will be on scholarly communications — which models will be taken up, which will fall away, which will coexist, etc. The OED also tells us that the word “experiment” is related to “experience”: without putting new models into practice, without gaining experience with different publishing models, there is no experiment and no concrete knowledge. The Compact facilitates an experience for scholars, libraries, universities, readers.

You certainly asking the right questions: will this or that model “help or hinder who is allowed to participate in generating new knowledge”; which will “disseminat[e] scientific results to more readers”; which will save money? These are questions that many of us have been thinking about for a long time. We should be maintaining an “experimental” outlook and making these considerations about all of our scholarly communications efforts. We need to consider liabilities as well as benefits — these will no doubt be present, in different combinations, in all of the models we consider.

Along with the objective of opening access to Cornell scholarship, I think a primary goal of our implementation of the Compact is to start a dialog among authors at Cornell about the true costs involved in publishing their work. At least initially, I think the success can be measured by the intensity of this dialog.

In terms of Stevan’s issue about “green” before “gold” — we’ve tried that at Cornell and have so far been unsuccessful in achieving a mandate. I’m hoping a successful dialog among our authors about the issue will enable progress toward this goal as well.

The breadth of coverage of the funds is up to the individual universities (as are other issues of implementation), but the argument for the particular approach that Harvard and Cornell are taking is discussed in my background paper in PLoS Biology (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000165).

Also, while several universities have already provided fees funding for OA articles a year or two ago, including UCB, through their libraries or combination of adminstration/library, this particular initiative seems narrow in just what kind of OA it will support. Why would that be?

Phil raises the right questions:

“If the creation of a funding line to support a particular form of publishing is designed as a hypothesis, what result are they expecting?  What constitutes a successful or failed experiment?… If this is about access, let’s talk about whether this type of publishing results in disseminating scientific results to more readers.  If this debate is about economics, let’s talk about whether Cornell and the four other signatory institutions will save money under this model.”

It’s the usual conflation of the access problem with the affordability problem, as well as the conflation of the solutions: Gold OA publishing and Green OA self-archiving.

Open Access (OA) is about access, not about journal economics. The journal affordability problem is only relevant inasmuch as it reduces access; and Gold OA publishing is only relevant inasmuch as it increases access — which for a given university, is not much. Authors must be free to publish in their journal of choice. Most journals are not Gold OA journals. Nor could universities afford to pay Gold OA fees for the publication of all or most of their authors’ research output today, because universities are already paying for publication via their subscription fees today.

The only measure of the success of a university’s OA policy is the degree to which it provides OA to the university’s own research article output. By that measure, a Gold OA funding compact provides OA to the fraction of a university’s research output for which there exists an affordable Gold OA journal suitable to the author and the research. That fraction will vary with the institution, but it will always be small.

In contrast, a Green OA self-archiving mandate provides OA to most or all of a university’s research article output within two years of adoption.

There are 5 signatories to the Gold OA “Compact” so far. Two of them (Harvard and MIT) have already mandated Green OA, so what they go on to do with their available funds does not matter.

But the other three signatories (Cornell, Dartmouth and Berkeley) have not yet mandated Green OA. As such, their “success” in providing OA to their own research article output will not only be minimal, but they will be setting an extremely bad example for other universities, who may likewise decide that they are doing their part for OA by signing this compact for Gold OA (in exchange for next to no OA, at a high cost) instead of mandating Green OA (in exchange for OA to most or all their research articles output, at next to no extra cost).

What universities, funders, researchers and research itself need, urgently, is Green OA mandates, not Gold OA Compacts. Mandate Green OA first, and then compact to do whatever you like with your spare cash. But on no account spend it on funding Gold OA INSTEAD of mandating Green OA — not if OA is your goal, rather than something else.

See: “Please Commit To Providing Green OA Before Committing To Pay For Gold OA!” http://bit.ly/K1uVw