…

What seems clear is that the conversion of established journals to OA, along with their track-records for quality control and ethics, is far preferable to new OA journal start-ups when what is missing and urgently needed today is more OA to the contents of existing journals, not more journal start-ups.

It is commendable that OASPA is making efforts to ensure that members are likely to have acceptable standards of quality and ethics. The remaining weak point, however, continues to be that a fleet publisher of 999 non-OA journals plus one OA journal can officially call itself an “Open Access Publisher,” as a “full member” of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. (Meanwhile the publisher of a single journal that is considering converting to OA can only be an “associate member.”)

Perhaps the mistake is making the publisher rather than the journal the unit of currency; or perhaps “membership” should be graded: not “full” vs. “associate” but by percentage of journals that are OA: Hence a publisher of two journals, one of them OA, could would be a 50% member of OASPA, and could call itself a 50% OA publisher, whereas a publisher of 100 journals, one of them OA, would be a 1% member of OASPA, and could only call itself a 1% OA publisher.

It is less clear how to weight voting rights (especially on questions like standards and ethics). On the face of it, a 50% member publishing a fleet of 50 OA journals (and 50 non-OA journals) would seem to deserve more of a voice than a 100% member publishing one OA journal, so perhaps there needs to be some normalization and weighting along those lines. (I am not sure, though, whether in the long run it is a good idea to encourage fleet publishing at all…)

From the bylaws of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)
http://www.oaspa.org/bylaws.php

To be considered an OA scholarly publisher and eligible for full membership… the Publisher must… Publish at least one OA journal that regularly publishes original research or scholarship, all of which is OA… [which] includes… Copyright holders allow users to “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship…” [i.e., "libre" OA]

It is exceedingly difficult to see the value to OA itself  of: 

– (1) officially including as “full members” of an “OA Scholarly Publishers Association” publishers that oppose immediate OA Self-Archiving by their authors (such publishers can now even proudly say of themselves that they are “full OA” journal publishers in good standing if they publish one single libre Gold OA journal while forbidding Green OA self-archiving for their 999 other journals)

– (2) officially excluding from an ”OA Scholarly Publishers Association” publishers every one of whose 999 journals are gratis Gold OA, perhaps not even charging a penny for it, as not being “full OA” journal publishers in good standing, because they are not “libre” Gold OA.

http://poynder.blogspot.com/2009/09/compact-for-open-access-publishing.html Richard Poynder was right (again):  ”officially” sanctioning this perverse play on words will not only 

(a) allow being an “OA publisher,” “Gold OA publisher” and “full OA” publisher in good standing to be touted and promoted in a self-interested, word-bending way by publishers that are just about as far from being OA as a publisher can be,

(b) prevent publishers that are genuinely “full OA” publishers (fully gratis OA, hence fully Gold, and hence fully Green, for all their journals, hence fully OA) by any rational construal of “full OA publisher” from calling themselves “full OA publishers” in good standing, and

(c) add yet another unwelcome layer to the confusion about the meaning of “OA” as well as of being an “OA publisher” that we owe to the premature, persistent and counterproductive profusion of gold dust and publishing-economics in place of OA.

Full members should only be publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA (and all of whose journals are Green OA); otherwise just “Associate” members. (And gratis OA journal publishers should either be full OASPA members or we should stop repeating the slogan that “most OA journals do not charge for publication.”)

Of course it is the publisher that represents the journal.  But reserving full OASPA membership for publishers all or most of whose journals are Gold OA would rule out the obvious abuse of “full OA” status by a publisher that publishes a fleet of 1000 journals, only one of them OA, yet currently entitled to call itself an “OA publisher” in virtue of full membership in good standing in OASPA. Such a publisher would then simply be an Associate Member of OASPA. (An independent journal, by the way, not associated with a “publishing house,”  is simply its own publisher.) That would remedy abuse of full membership status by publishers.

But to remedy the very meaning of OA and OA journal, it would be just as important to admit as full members the publishers of (all or mostly) gratis OA journals (including gratis OA journals that do not charge authors or their institutions/funders for publication, but make ends meet from subscriptions or subsidy). Yes, fee-free gratis OA journals represent a different “business model,” but nevertheless they are “fully” OA in every respect.

(It also seems fine to accept hybrid Gold OA publishers  as Associate Members, given that the Association’s interest seems to be primarily in OA publishing business models.)