Elsevier, for those living beneath rocks, has announced its latest set of outrageous restrictions regarding green open access. Same guano, different day, sighed the Loon, dismissing it from her mind; making life as difficult as possible for those seriously desirous of open access has been Elsevier’s stock in trade for quite some time. If it works, the big pigs want no part of it. (See also Kevin Smith’s commentary with a bit of Loonish gloss.)

Otherwise sensible commentators Mike Eisen and Mike Taylor, however, see in this the more-or-less imminent end of green open access as currently constituted. (N.b.: the Loon does not particularly disagree with either Eisen or Taylor’s longer-term suggestions.) This rather astounds the Loon. What she cannot fathom is why either of them thinks Elsevier can make this stick.

Let us not forget that amidst Elsevier’s fanfare, Elsevier quietly gave up on its prior outrageous restriction: those subject to campus or departmental open-access policies no longer labor under a retributive policy from Elsevier. Bluntly, Elsevier couldn’t beat campus mandates, so it gave up. Moreover, almost no other toll-access publisher, big or small, joined Elsevier in this particular public folly, something of a departure from its past efforts. (Possibly the history of failure is too much to ignore. PRISM Coalition, the anti-NIH bandwagon, Research Works Act and its various analogues, CHORUS…)

Think about that for a moment. Individually, campuses are not particularly powerful opponents stacked against the mighty Elsevier, the biggest of the big pigs. Yet Elsevier couldn’t, or at least didn’t, squash them like bugs. What would happen should Elsevier meet an opponent something close to its own weight? Hold that thought.

The Loon thinks there are two ways to read Elsevier’s retreat (aside from the obvious inference that Elsevier’s lawyers couldn’t find a toehold to oppose the policies from). One is that Elsevier no longer adjudges campus mandates a threat, considering them ineffectual. This may well be so; the Loon hasn’t seen any impact assessments yet (aside from Harvard’s rather wearisomely constant trumpeting), and her professional cynicism whispers that in the absence of fairly serious staff infrastructure aimed at collecting eligible materials from faculty, which to date very few institutions with campus policies have, such policies indeed won’t accomplish much. This reading requires, however, that Elsevier be shortsighted enough not to realize that there has hardly been time to design and build such infrastructure at the lion’s share of institutions; that such infrastructure doesn’t exist does not necessarily mean it never will.

The other way to read it is that the policy’s major impact on Elsevier was disaffected authors and fewer submissions, doubtless a small revolt in an absolute sense, but enough that Elsevier smelled trouble. The Loon would very much like this to be true, but again she has no way to assess it. It is a provocative hypothesis regardless of actual truth value, however, because it suggests that a fairly standard economic view of journals is incomplete.

It is often said that journal articles are, in economic parlance, non-substitutable goods: someone who needs a specific one will not be satisfied with a near-miss. The extent to which that is actually true of journals as opposed to articles is a salient and inadequately-explored question, but a tangential one for the Loon today. What the Loon wants to suggest is that for authors, journals are indeed substitutable—not infinitely so, to be sure, but enough to matter.

Yes, yes, glamour mags, but for pity’s sake, glamour mags only publish a sliver of a sliver of the literature, almost by definition. Glamour mags don’t matter. The giant sea of non-glamour-mags, that is where the economic substitutability magic happens.

It so happens that the Loon participated in a “where shall we publish this thing?” discussion with a group of coauthors not long since. The lead author (not the Loon) offered a list of suggestions, all but one of which were immediately shot down by the Loon and other colleagues (the Loon, of course, because the journals in question were not open-access–friendly, and yes, one of them was an Elsevier outlet, in which words of the Loon’s will be published only subject to Gavia Libraria’s CC-BY license or over the Loon’s Boring Alter Ego’s dead and rotted body). The last journal standing (a gold-OA journal without author-side fees, if anyone is curious) is now the designated outlet, the lead author understandably not caring to argue with the Loon or their other coauthors.

If this choice-by-elimination process is broadly typical, and the Loon has no reason to think it isn’t, it presents a problem for Elsevier’s anti-open-access tactics, because Elsevier constantly and consciously designs those tactics in ways that make it far more likely authors will eliminate their journals from consideration because of hassle factor—coauthor hassle factor, journal-style hassle factor, “keep the funder happy” hassle factor, speed of publication hassle factor, and so on.

Prestige? Bah. Outside the glamour mags, prestige pales in comparison to hassle factor—or, perhaps better said, at any given level of prestige in many disciplines, several journals exist that compete largely on the basis of hassle factor. Moreover, the bog-standard academic is absolutely useless at gauging journal prestige; why else has impact factor lasted as long as it has, and how else do scam journals (of any business model) survive? The problem is worsening, too, as the journal issue and the journal itself gradually disassemble themselves. How many young scholars have the concept of a journal truly baked into their bones, the way scholars of the Loon’s generation and older do?

Elsevier’s next fight against green open access, which neither Eisen nor Taylor particularly took into account in their discussions, is against the feds—that is, major United States governmental grant agencies subject to the OSTP Memo, most of whom are pushing green rather than gold. This will touch tens of thousands of researchers, perhaps more. It is shaping up to be (as the Loon has expected from the start) an absolute maelstrom of researcher, program-officer, librarian, and publisher confusion. Hassle will be perilously near maximum.

And Elsevier thinks it can play hassle-increasing games in the face of all this and get away with it? The Loon doesn’t. And that means, given the thrust of agency responses to the OSTP Memo so far, that green open access is still very much in the game, even in its current admittedly primitive form.

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