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

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:51:58 -0500

** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton
Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus (in press)
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514/

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.

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

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)
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx
Received on Thu Feb 18 2010 - 16:53:13 GMT

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