Many thanks to Andrew for pointing out my pre-emptive error (in sniffing out Gold Fever)! No, Hokkaido University is not paying pre-emptively for Gold Open Access. It is merely (like all universities) paying for subscription access and (like all but 100 universities so far) limiting the potential impact of its own research output as well its own users' access to the research output of other universities published in journals to which it cannot afford to subscribe. So (like all universities that have not yet done so) the only thing Hokkaido needs to do now is to mandate the Green OA self-archiving of its own research output. That done, all else will take care of itself, as a natural matter of course...
Stevan Harnad
PS I doubt that any university in the world can afford to pay pay-per-view costs for every paper any one of its users ever clicks on!
On 2010-09-18, at 6:46 AM, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
>> On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
>>
>>> AAA:
>>> During Open Access Week in October both Otaru University of Commerce and
>>> Hokkaido University will be holding meetings to promote deposit and adoption
>>> of a mandate. I have accepted invitations to speak at both events, arranged
>>> by Shigeki Sugita of the library at Otaru University of Commerce and Masako
>>> Suzuki of the library at Hokkaido University. Both are keen supporters of
>>> Green OA and a deposit mandate and are working hard to persuade managers and
>>> faculty at these two very different though physically close universities to
>>> adopt mandates (Otaru, being small and with limited funds has an access
>>> problem itself, whereas Hokkaido is one of the top ten universities in Japan
>>
>> Splendid news from AAA, Asian Archivangelist!
>>
>>> and provides full funding of toll-gate access fees for its staff, who
>>> nevertheless lose impact for their publications when they are not deposited,
>>> unless published in an OA journal)
>>
>> This is the familiar "gold rush," which impels institutions to imagine,
>> unthinkingly, that what they need to do in order to have OA today
>> is to spend their scarce resources to subsidize the costs of Gold OA
>> publication -- even though most of the potential funds to do so are
>> still tied up in paying the institutional subscriptions that are covering
>> the costs of journal publication today. And meanwhile these institutions
>> are not adopting the cost-free Green OA self-archiving mandates that would
>> provide OA to all their subscription journal articles too!
>
> Stevan has misinterpreted my admittedly very shorthand description of
> Hokkaido's situation. What I was referring to was the Hokkaido as a
> well-funded top-10 University in Japan subscribes to many of the publishers'
> complete access but also provides direct payment for individual item access
> costs when Hokkaido's researchers encounter an article not available under
> the existing subscription. Thus, researchers at Hokkaido themselves
> experience no access problems in their reading, but their writing misses out
> on readers just the same as everyone else's. They haven't succumbed to
> pre-emptive Gold Fever, but have not yet embraced a Green Mandate. My goal in
> speaking there will be to promote the benefits of mandating archiving to the
> authors and the institution in terms of visibility and impact.
>
> --
> Professor Andrew A Adams aaa_at_meiji.ac.jp
> Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
> Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
> Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
Received on Sat Sep 18 2010 - 12:36:55 BST