Martin Hall: "Green or Gold? Open Access After Finch" http://uksg.metapress.com/content/e062u112h295h114/fulltext.html

The substance of Martin Hall's defence of the Finch recommendation that the UK should (double-)pay for Gold instead of strengthening its mandate for Green is that (1) Gold provides the publisher's version of record, rather than just the author's peer-reviewed final draft, that (2) Gold provides text-mining rights and that (3) Gold is the way to solve the journal price problem.

What Hall does not even consider is whether the publisher's version of record and text-mining rights are worth the asking price of Gold, compared to cost-free Green. His account (like everyone else's) is also astonishingly vague and fuzzy about how the transition to Gold is to take place in the UK. And Hall (like Finch) completely fails to take the rest of the world into account. All the reckoning about the future of publishing is based on the UK's policy for its 6%.

Hall quotes Peter Suber's objection but does not answer it; and he does not even bother to mention (nor give any sign of being aware of) the substance of my own many, very specific points of criticism about both the Finch recommendations and the RCUK policy. (This is rather consistent, however, since if Hall had given any of these points some serious thought, it is hard to see how he could have endorsed the Finch recommendations in the first place; most had already been made before Finch.)

The Swan/Houghton economic analyses, too, are cited by Hall, as if in support, but in fact not heeded at all.

It will be instructive to see whether the remarkable superficiality of Hall's defence of Finch is noticed by the UK academic community, or it is just catalogued as further "authoritative support" for Finch/RCUK.

Stevan Harnad

Gargouri, Y, Lariviere, V, Gingras, Y, Carr, L & Harnad, S (2012) Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline. In: 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Montrel. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340294/

Gargouri Y, Lariviere V, Gingras Y, Brody T, Carr L & Harnad S (2012) Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/344687/1/finch2.pdf

Harnad, Stevan (2012) Why the UK Should Not Heed the Finch Report. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Summer Issue http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/341128/

Harnad, Stevan (2012) Research Works Act H.R.3699: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/273093/

Harnad, S (2012) Hybrid gold open access and the Chesire cat’s grin: How to repair the new open access policy of RCUK. LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog September Issuehttp://eprints.soton.ac.uk/342582/

Harnad, S (2012) There's no justifying RCUK's support for [hybrid] gold open access. Guardian HE Network. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/342581/

Harnad, S (2012) United Kingdom's Open Access Policy Urgently Needs a Tweak. D-Lib Magazine Volume 18, Number 9/10 September/October 2012 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september12/harnad/09harnad.html

Harnad, S (2012) The Optimal and Inevitable outcome for Research in the Online Age. CILIP Update September 2012 http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/342580/

Harnad, S (2012) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012. Tuesday, September 12, Oxford.

Poynder, Richard & Harnad, Stevan (2012) OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy. Open and Shut, July. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/343130/