On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > As the author of the September98 article that initiated this forum, I would > like to see a name that allows discussion of other means of achieving > Stevan's "all papers in all fields, systematically interconnected, > effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable, from any researcher's > desk, worldwide for free." > > How about an "Immediate Free Web Access" Forum (=the IFWA Forum)?
I am quite happy with Tom Walker's suggestion to rename the Forum instead as "Immediate Free Web Access" Forum. That is indeed neutral as to the means of achieving our shared ends. But now I cannot resist reminding the Forum again (2 years later) of exactly why I think Tom's means would retard rather than hasten our shared ends, and why they do not not contain the seeds of a rational transition to the final state desired by us all: > I am not convinced that auto-archiving will, by itself, crumble the dikes > of S/L/P. It requires more effort on the part of authors and is more > confrontational than an alternative suggested in my Sept98 article--namely, > that members of societies that publish journals should demand that their > societies allow authors that want Immediate Free Web Access (IFWA) to their > articles be allowed to pay a fair price for it. A price equal to that of > 100 paper reprints would seem a bargain to authors and would be a > (temporary) windfall for publishers. [A publisher can post an article on > PubMed Central for substantially less than the cost of printing and mailing > 100 paper reprints.] The extra profits from selling IFWA might even > please society executives and governing bodies, who are looking for ways to > pay for the expensive, restricted-access e-versions they have started. The only two problems with this suggestion are the following: (1) Authors can achieve exactly the same outcome for free, by self-archiving their paper in an Open Archive. Tom owes us an explicit rationale for of why we should ask or expect authors to pay for something that they can do for free. (I will return to the "confrontationality" issue -- if that is to be the rationale -- shortly. For the moment, I want to say only that it is not clear whether the "effort" of paying for reprint rights would be any greater than the effort of popping the paper in an Open Archive -- especially once the free and monumentally effortless Santa-Fe compliant open-archive software we are preparing is given [free] to all universities and research institutions so they can install interoperable archives for all their authors to drop their papers into. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/education/features/newsid_521000/521816.stm) (2) Tom's proposal is not a solution for papers whose authors cannot or will not pay to have their journals archive them for them, and that means that if his proposal, paid o-prints, instead of self-archiving, were promoted, then those papers would not be freed. [On the other hand, if self-archiving were the primary means advocated, and paid journal o-prints were just mentioned as a supplementary route available to those who may wish to take it, there would be no harm in that. I think promoting paid o-prints as the primary or principal means, however, would only retard progress, partly because of (1) and (2), and partly because of (3).]: (3) Whereas the causal chain leading from the status quo to the freeing of the literature from S/L/P and the downsizing of publication to QC/C service provision, paid for out of the author-institution's S/L/P savings is clear, logical and explicit, via the self-archiving route, it is not at all clear via the paid-o-print route: Here is the causal chain for self-archiving. (a) self-archive unrefereed preprint (b) submit preprint to peer reviewed journal of choice for refereeing (c) if/when accepted, self-archive the final accepted draft (if the publisher's copyright agreement does not forbid it), or self-archive a file indicating the CORRIGENDA that will turn (a) into the final accepted draft (if the publisher's copyright agreement is unalterable and forbids self-archiving). (d) readers will prefer the free version (e) institutions will prefer to cancel S/L/P (f) the shrinking S/L/P market and the institutional availability of the funds to pay for QC/C out of a portion of the annual windfall S/L/P savings will amply cover the costs of QC/C paid at the author-institution end for those publishers who want to stay in the business and are ready to downsize to becoming QC/C service providers only (and the old titles of those publishers who do not wish to stay in the business can migrate to those who are) I do not say this causal chain may not prove unstable at some points unless the transition sequence is well planned out in advance, but the sequence, direction, and momentum are clear. In contrast, what is the causal chain for paid o-prints? (a) those authors who are willing and able to do so pay to have their papers made available free online (b) readers prefer the free version (c) this perhaps drives more authors to pay the price (if they can find the funds) (d) meanwhile, S/L/P proceeds apace; maybe prices reduced a bit because of the windfall revenue from reprint funds Then what? What is to free the rest of the literature, that authors cannot or will not pay money to free? What is to make publishers put an end to S/L/P and downsize to QC/C (without which the institutional funds to pay for the QC/C are not available either, as the institutions are still squarely in the throes of their serial crises)? No, in my opinion, the paid-reprint strategy is incoherent and leads nowhere. Yes, the self-archiving strategy is more "confrontational," but what it is confronting is a conflict of interest between research and publication that is intrinsic in the status quo, and that will not be resolved voluntarily by the interests that are pitted against those of research and researchers. (Why should it be? If I were an established journal publisher, I would not let go of the S/L/P revenue stream unless I had to.) And note that self-archiving is not illegal; it is inconvenient to take the "corrigenda" route, but it gets around copyright (because it is just self-piracy, a victimless crime) and (I am betting) will still produce a free corpus that is more attractive to the reader than the firewalled one despite the inconvenience of having to look at corrigenda instead of the clean drafts in some cases. > As subscriptions begin their inevitable decline as more and more authors > buy IFWA, the fair price of IFWA will increase. Members will learn that > their societies must continue to pay the costs of quality assurance and of > continuing to publish paper issues (until members are willing to forego > them). However, so long as paper issues are published and many libraries > and members are subscribing to them, the fair price of IFWA should no more > than double. Tom has given no reason to believe in any "inevitable decline" in S/L/P in his scenario; he has only described an extra source of publisher revenue, which might or might not be passed on by publishers in the form of lower S/L/P prices. S/L/P cancellations have always been compensated by rises in S/L/P prices, not declines. S/L/P cancellation pressure would only come if enough of the literature were available free so that readers and their institutions had nothing to lose by cancelling S/L/P. Self-archiving, being cost-free, is a sure thing for freeing the literature eventually, and and has no costs to deter it; pay-your-way o-prints are at least as uncertain as the source of the revenue to pay for them (and whatever they will actually prove to cost, especially under S/L/P cancellation pressure!). Tom resolves that uncertainty by speculating about what authors will/would do. But if he is wrong, then we have been led along a dead-end path: nothing "immediate" about that. In contrast, the path of self-archiving is already tried and true, as nearly of decade of Los Alamos experience has demonstrated: http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_weekly_graph It is true that Los Alamos self-archiving has not put an end to S/L/P in Physics yet, but in a sense that does not matter; the objective is to free the refereed literature for users immediately; the rest can sort itself out in time. (Chances are that S/L/P cancellations will only become substantial when the literature has been freed across disciplines, and not just in a portion of one discipline.) > Two of the attractive things about this scenario are > > (1) It is market driven. Authors who don't want IFWA don't buy it. > Societies who sell it can profit from it, but they must convince their > members and their authors that the price they charge is fair. Market driven only if we forget about the self-archiving option. Free always beats fee; and no charge is fair for something (legal) that one can do for free. > (2) It provides a smooth transition to e-only publication. Societies need > not abandon paper and subscription revenues until they see a way to > fiscally survive without them. If commercial publishers don't begin to > offer IFWA, authors who want it can choose society-published journals or > violate the copyright releases they have signed and self archive. I am afraid that the coherency of the paid o-print proposal diminishes the more we unpack its ramifications: Authors can self-archive whether or not societies offer IFWA! And if self-archiving is countenanced by the Walker proposal in any way, then the Walker proposal is "confrontational" too! Nor do I see any smooth transition here, only a gratuitously expensive and indirect way of self-archiving (and only if/when journals get around to offering it). For now (in keeping with the "immediacy" condition Tom himself is proposing for the theme of this Forum, the "I" in the IFWA), it is self-archiving that is immediate and ongoing, and publisher o-prints that are still out of reach, and a pig in a poke! Nor is there any reason to imagine that anyone would ever voluntarily abandon S/L/P revenues, which, after all, are medium-independent, and can be used to keep the literature hostage online just as it was on paper. > In my Sept98 article, I used the term "electronic reprints" rather than > IFWA. Perhaps that was that why earlier efforts to get this forum to > address the desirability and/or possibility of an e-reprint transition > failed. I'll soon try again and use IFWA instead. IFWA admirably covers both of our proposals; the difference is that IFWA via self-archiving is immediately available and has face validity, whereas IFWA via paid o-prints is not immediately available and (as a means of freeing the literature) of uncertain efficacy. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of "Freeing the Refereed Journal Literature Through Online Self-Archiving" is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
