Every one of the points raised by Iain Stevenson below has been answered (many times over) across the years -- so much so that they have even become FAQs! http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#31-worries
It is hence a really head-shaker that they are still being innocently raised in 2004. (And historians of the already far-overdue advent of the open-access era will no doubt find a good deal to learn about human nature and human progress from such data!) On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Iain Stevenson wrote: > I don't have a problem with self-archiving per se, only how it is managed How it is managed? Self-archiving is so far not "managed" at all! It is anarchic, based on individual self-initiative, i.e., whether the author has the good sense to make the connection between the impact of his own research and whether or not all would-be users can access it (and what he can do about it, i.e., how to provide open access, now). http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#researcher/authors-do It is precisely "management" that has so far been missing, and I hope universities and research funders will have the good sense to provide it soon! What is needed from the "managers" of researchers is an official extension of their existing institutional "Publish or Perish" policy to "Provide Open Access (to your peer-reviewed research articles)". The managers can then also monitor and reward compliance as well as monitor, measure and reward the resulting research impact. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#research-funders-do The researchers' institutional libraries can manage the archives: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#libraries-do All this management costs a pittance, administratively, yet its returns (in terms of research visibility and impact) and its rewards (in terms of research productivity, funding, and prestige) will be immense. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0003.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0004.gif > and the argument that it is somehow "toll free" That it is toll-free is not an *argument* but a *fact.* One need only understand what "toll" and hence "toll-free" mean here: Institutions currently pay subscriptions, licenses, or pay-to-view (i.e., *tolls*) in order to purchase access for their researchers to whatever fraction of the peer-reviewed journal literature they can afford (24,000 journals in all, publishing 2,500,000 articles per year). Toll-free access means access to that literature, without the user-institution having to pay those tolls. I assume that Iain is here conflating (1) the toll-costs of user-institution subscriptions per incoming journal with two other things: (2) author-institution publication charges per outgoing article on the open-access journal cost-recovery model (the "golden" road to open-access provision) and (3) what he imagines to be the high costs of self-archiving in institutional open-access eprint archives (the "green" road to open-access provision). The equation of these three things is incoherent, and Iain is simply dead-wrong about the costs of self-archiving (and would do well to look at the actual figures, per article!). A journal's current total toll-access revenue, per article, averages about $1500. That is the total amount per article paid annually, jointly, by those institutions who can afford to subscribe to that journal (divided by the annual number of articles in the journal). (Figure out your own institution's serials budget, and divide it by the total number of articles in the journals it subscribes to, and that will be how much your own institution is paying per incoming article.) (Now be careful to keep it straight in your mind what is a journal's total income per article, from all subscribing institutions, and what is an institution's total expenditure, for all its subscribed serials. Let us call the total annual institutional expenditure for its full current quota of serials 100%. We will shortly be dividing that amount, counter-intuitively, but correctly, not by the number of *incoming* articles subscribed to, but by the institution's annual number of *outgoing* articles published.) The cost of implementing peer review is $500 per article (i.e., 33% of its total revenue). *If and when* institutions are no longer paying any access-tolls at all (100%) for *incoming* articles (because all journals have converted to the "gold" standard for cost-recovery: one-time payment per outgoing article), they will be paying, on average, *at most* the same total amount they paid the old way (100%) (co-varying with the institution's own ratio of formerly incoming to now outgoing articles). But it is far more likely that by then journals will have been forced to cut costs by cutting out the inessentials (offloading all text-generation and processing onto the author and all access-provision and archiving onto the institutional archives). So the institutions would more likely be saving something closer to 66% annually (*if and when*). http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#8.Paying http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0230.html That is all hypothetical, however, as there has been no wholesale conversion to open-access (gold) journal-publishing and its cost-recovery model. The fewer than 5% of journals that conform to this model are hence not representative, nor do they provide much open access today (<5%). The green road to open-access provision, in contrast, provides a good deal more open access today (at least three times as much), but, more important, it *could* provide 100% open access, *immediately.* Self-archiving can provide toll-free access to all 2,500,000 annual articles in all 24,000 journals, virtually overnight. At what cost, you ask? The archiving cost per article is a few dollars; not even worth mentioning! The problem of the institutional eprint archives at the moment is not that they are too *costly,* but that they are too *empty* (because there is not yet an official institutional open-access provision policy mandating and monitoring open-access provision). http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#researchers-institutions-do > There have to be costs in the system: archives need to be maintained, > indices provided, databases managed, telecoms links paid for. These are > all real costs that have to be met somewhere. To quote in extenso the FAQ on this old chestnut "8. Paying the piper" http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#8.Paying "I worry about self-archiving because someone surely has to pay for all this: you can't get something for nothing!" "There are many fallacies embedded in this worry, among them misunderstandings about the nature of global networked communication. Internet connectivity is now a standard part of the infrastructure of most of the world's universities and research institutions. If you are not equally worried about who pays for your emails, websites, and web-browsing, you should not be worrying about your self-archiving either. Moreover, paying access-tolls is not paying the pertinent piper here anyway! (I.e., it is not publishers who pay for universities' network infrastructure!) "The refereed research literature is minuscule compared to the rest of the traffic on the Web. It is the flea on the tail of the dog. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/summary.html Worry about the storage and band-width for the growing daily creation and use of audio, video, and multimedia (most of it non-research use!) by researchers at universities and research institutions before even beginning to fret about the refereed-research flea. "As usual, there is also some of the archiving/publishing conflation here -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 -- thinking that we must find some sort of counterpart for the printing/distribution costs, somewhere. But there isn't any. The cost per-paper of permanent online archiving is virtually zero, yet everyone, everywhere, has access to it all, forever. This is a Gutenberg expense that has simply vanished in the PostGutenberg Galaxy, leaving only the Cheshire Cat's Grin. "There is indeed one essential publishing cost that still needs to be paid, but it has nothing to do with Internet use: It is the cost of implementing peer review. That cost, however, is only 10-30% of the access-tolls currently being paid, and hence could easily be paid out of the annual toll savings. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#3.2 "The last of the "who-pays-the-piper" worries is, I think, a variant of the Capitalism (14) worry: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#14.Capitalism The best way to dispel it is is to note that refereed publishing in the PostGutenberg Galaxy, once the literature has been freed through self-archiving, is likely (apart from whatever optional add-on products and services there may still be a market for) to downsize into a *service* (peer review), provided to the author-institution, instead of the toll-based *product* (the text) that was provided to the reader-institution in the Gutenberg era. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#3.2 "Nothing hinges on this, however, for as long as the world wants to keep paying for the toll-based product, even after the refereed literature has been self-archived, the piper will be fully paid, yet the literature will be free of all its access/impact barriers." http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#8.Paying > The problems that I see are as follows: > > (a). Implicitly, the publication model of open-access and > self-archiving reflects the publishing culture of Anglo-American > STM research, well-funded with grants that include publication costs > and I suspect also salaried research assistants and post-docs to do > the leg-work in archiving. This is completely irrelevant. *Both* roads to open-access provision -- both (1) the golden road of conversion to open-access publishing recovering costs at the author-institution end, per outgoing article, instead of at the user-institution end, per journal toll-accessed, and (2) the green road of supplementing toll-access publishing with author-institution self-archiving of their own toll-access journal articles in their own institutional open-access eprint archives -- simply presuppose that the current costs of journal publication are whatever they are now. Grants and assistants and legwork have no more or less to do with it than they do now. (Self-archiving is a few extra keystrokes per article, over and above the ones that went into generating it in the first place: no legs needed.) > In the tradition of social science and humanities research, typified by > sole researchers with smallish (or no) grants, self-archiving probably > isn't easily achieved, unless the institution where the worker is based > provides, staffs and pays for a self-archiving system. Neither discipline-differences nor grants have anything whatsoever to do with self-archiving. (You are here conflating the golden and green roads to open access provision.) Self-archiving costs per article are negligible. (The extra keystrokes are truly not worth discussing.) Please adduce evidence to the contrary if you disagree. The 100+ institutions that have set up one $1000 linux box and installed the free GNU Eprints software on it are not fretting about the cost per paper. (They are -- or should be -- fretting about the low number of papers, for lack of an institutional open-access provision policy!) http://software.eprints.org/archives.php > And where does that leave the self-funded independent scholar who is > still a feature of many of the soft-sciences? There are plenty of nowhere-near-capacity central archives to host the articles of scholars not affiliated with an institution that has provided open-access eprint archives. http://www.arxiv.org http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ (And institutions have a long history of hosting unaffiliated scholars and their work!) See also: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0020.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2753.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3385.html > The other issue is what about the exclusion of researchers from those > countries where lack of computers, poor telecoms and general lack of > funding mean they can't access the self-archiving stores? Repeatedly raised in this Forum, this worry has been repeatedly answered by those who are actually activists for alleviating the access problems of poor countries (Leslie Chan, Subbiah Arunachalam, Barbara Kirsop). I think I can faithfully express their position as follows: "If you want to provide us with computers, telecoms and funding, please do! But if not, please don't use that as an excuse for continuing to deny us access to the research literature with whatever connectivity we do have: We cannot afford toll-access! Open-access would be a godsend for us!" See also " 29. Sitting Pretty": http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#29.Sitting "I don't worry about self-archiving because there is really no problem: My institution gives me all the access and impact I want or need already. I'm satisfied!" "If a researcher -- especially a researcher at a well-off institution -- does not exercise some critical reflection, the natural feeling is: "Where's the problem? I and others at my institution were already well-off in paper days. Now, in the online era we are even better off, with desktop online access to everything, instead of having to walk to the library, and with licensing 'big deals' that get us even more journals than we used to have!" "This is related in part to the "Harvards vs. Have-Nots" misconception. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3177.html It is also a symptom of not having understood the causal connection between access and impact. "Yes, the better-off institutions enjoy better access to the peer-reviewed journal literature than the less-well-off institutions (and better access than they had in paper-days). But no institution can afford toll-access to all or even most of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals that exist. And most institutions can afford toll-access to only a small and shrinking portion of them. And even the Harvards (not only the Have-Nots) are groaning under their growing serials-budget expenditures. So no researcher, at any institution, has access to more than a fraction of what there is. And usage patterns in those lucky fields where open online access is most advanced show that when everything is accessible and a keystroke is the only barrier, users make vastly more use of the literature. http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasis-abstract.html "So much for access. The other side of the coin is even more important: Researchers at prestigious institutions will also say that they only write for one another. But they don't really mean it. All researchers are interested in their research impact (citation counts), not only because that is one of the things that advances their careers and funds their further research, but also it is a measure of the size and importance of their contribution to knowledge. Few researcher are aware -- because the data on the strong causal connection between access and impact are new and still being gathered -- of the size of their own and their institution's cumulative daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly impact-loss owing to access-denial to those would-be users world-wide whose institutions cannot afford the toll-access to their work. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif "In this equation, the Harvards are losing almost as much as the Have-Nots, because they are losing the potential impact from the users at the Have-Not institutions, which vastly outnumber the Harvards! Yes, the Harvards may be somewhat better off in their own access to the research output of others; but the following is just as true of them as it is of the Have-Nots: For every one of the 2,500,000 articles published annually in the 24,000 research journals it is a fact that it is not accessible to most of its potential users because of unaffordable toll-barriers. And (this too is critical): this would remain true even if all 24,000 journals were sold at cost." http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#29.Sitting > In the UK, we are still living with the damage that the first Research > Assessment Exercise [RAE] caused by assuming that STM-type article publishing > was just about the only acceptable form of measuring research output. In many fields the peer-reviewed journal article is indeed the main measure of research output. (That is just peer review and "publish or perish" and not the fault of the RAE!) Open-access provision is targeting only the author give-away literature http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1 so book-based disciplines (if there are such) are only touched to the extent that they also publish journal articles: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/bookcite.htm But it encompasses all of the peer-reviewed journal literature: all 2,500,000 annual articles in all 24,000 journals. The RAE has nothing to do with that fact. (But it can benefit from it: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/ .) > Research can be expressed as a music or dance performance, a sculpture > or (as in my own department) a broadcast documentary, a magazine > design, or a round-table debate between industry practitioners and > academic researchers. So self-archive those too (if they are digitized, and give-aways)! Surely you don't want to invoke the impossibility of providing open access to nondigital or non-giveaway research as a reason for holding giveaway digital research and its impact hostage to access-tolls! > It is not inconceivable that such research outputs could be self-archived > but it is inconceivable that they could be done without considerable > costs in software, hardware, personnel and know-how. Who pays? The open-access movement's first, second and third objective is to provide open access to the annual 2,500,000 articles published in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, in order to maximise the impact of that research. What on earth does that rational and reachable objective have to do with the question of who will pay to digitize or archive a dance or a piece of sculpture? And what does it have to do with reforming research evaluative criteria? These are red herrings! > (b) One form of self-archiving that derives from the traditional > format of paper journal publishing was of course the off-print. > The system whereby anyone could write to an author requesting > an off-print did disseminate research quickly and freely and was > inclusive of colleagues everywhere. I still get the occasional > off-print request from eastern europe, india and china but never from > western Europe or the USA. It was a simple, easy system that worked > and although publishers found it increasingly expensive, I do not > know of any publisher, commercial or non-profit, who ever seriously > considered abandoning what was felt to be a form of royalties in lieu. > It seems a great pity that the distribution of requesting and sending > off-prints seems to be dying. Why re-invent the wheel? Even if you > have easy electronic access, reading a paper on paper can often be > much more convenient, or indeed pleasurable, and offprints, although > they come by snail-mail, are probably more convenient than downloads. Iain's wisftfulness is touching, but so out of touch that it takes one's breath away! Go back to postal request-a-print for access instead of clicking and reading onscreen or printing off a hard copy of any of the 2,500,000 annual articles in the 24,000 journals? Re-inventing the wheel? More like replacing modern rapid transit by walking, or reverting from online communication to the oral tradition! Self-archiving is the equivalent of providing limitless reprints to all potential users without anyone having to post a request, post a reprint, or be affiliated with an institution that can afford the access-tolls! Convenient? Access-denial: convenient? To whom? (Please see "Sitting Pretty" again, above.) > (c) I accept that you may not argue for "publisher-free" journals > although Watts in his article implied that you feel "with the > exception of peer review , the various editorial services that > publishers arrange are forms of help that he (ie.you) feels he can do > without" Watts quoted me correctly. What you have not quite grasped, Iain, is that a peer-reviewed journal publisher in the PostGutenberg, open-access age may well turn out to be a peer-review/certification service-provider, instead of being that *and* an access-provider for a text-product (as in the Gutenberg toll-access age). (The jury is out on whether a copy-editing service will need to be bundled in with the peer-review service.) "Online Self-Archiving: Distinguishing the Optimal from the Optional" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0248.html "Separating Quality-Control Service-Providing from Document-Providing" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0466.html "Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1437.html "The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html "The True Cost of the Essentials http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1973.html "Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review - NOT!)" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1966.html "Journal expenses and publication costs" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2589 "Re: Scientific publishing is not just about administering peer-review" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3069.html "Author Publication Charge Debate" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1387.html Except in book-based disciplines, "publish" in academic "publish or perish" disciplines always meant "publish in a peer-reviewed journal [or refereed conference proceeding]". http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving-vs-publication http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2239.html > but I do feel that a lot of the rhetoric about open-access > does caricature publishers as greedy parasites whose time has come. I agree with you that this demonization of publishers is unnecessary, counterproductive and probably unfair -- in the context of open-access provision. On the subject of journal pricing I take no position because pricing is a different problem, even though it did help draw our attention to the access/impact problem: The key to understanding the difference between the serials budget crisis and the access/impact problem is to realize that even if the 24,000 journals were all pricing their tolls *at cost*, most institutions still could not afford toll-access to most of them, and probably no institution could afford them all. So research impact would continue to be needlessly lost. This is not the fault of the publishing community but of the research community, for their failure to realize that in the online age they can and should supplement toll-access by providing open-access to their own articles for all potential users, anywhere, any time, whose institutions may not be able to afford the toll-access (and not by waiting for them to mail a reprint request!). Researchers have been sluggish in realizing this PostGutenberg fact and capability, but they will realize it, under the influence of empirical evidence for the size of their cumulative impact loss; and either they or their managers will twig on the urgent need for a systematic policy of open-access provision for all refereed research output. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif > The whole modern system of peer reviewed quality controlled journals > would not have existed without the planning and envisaging skills > of publishers, even if we have to accept Robert Maxwell as one of > the innovators. Half a century ago, the vehicles for scientific and > other research publication in the english language world were few > indeed, and it was publishers who created the modern infrastructure. Fine. Put we are not talking about publishers now. We are talking about open access provision, now. This is possible now; it was not possible then. Otherwise the whole peer-reviewed research enterprise would have taken a different form from the very beginning. Blame Gutenberg. Thank Tim Berners-Lee. And then get the research community to get its act together! > Universities and research institutions could have created journals > and it is a question for research why by and large they didn't. I > would argue that publishers (of all kinds) and the research community > have had a creative partnership that has benefited both, and that > the partnership should continue to be creative in the future. Yes, but apart from these pious platitudes to which we can all assent, what about open-access provision, now? and stanching needless impact-loss, at long last, now? (The real question for historical research will be why it took the research community so long to twig on the optimal and inevitable outcome, and then take the simple, obvious steps to bring it about!) > (d) My final point is that open access self-archiving creates the > illusion of free material without acknowledging the very real costs > involved in the process. The costs are shifted to another locus > in the system but they are there. Iain, I'm afraid the illusion might be yours (if the costs you have in mind are the negligible costs of self-archiving)! More likely, though, you are conflating (1) open-access provision via open-access journal publication (the golden road, in which publishing costs are recovered by charging the author-institution per outgoing article instead of the user-institutions per incoming journal) with open-access provision via author-institution self-archiving of a supplementary version of their toll-access article output in their own institutional eprint archives, in order to provide access to all those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford the toll access (the green road to open access). On the golden road, there is a shift of costs, because one cost-recovery system is being substituted for another. On the green road, there is no shift of cost, because the open-access version is a supplement to, not a substitute for, the toll-access version. For the rest, see "Paying the Piper" again. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#8.Paying > I think we agree (and disagree with Watts) that open access and > subscription models can co-exist, and that it would be undesirable if > the first totally supplanted the latter Geoff Watts was just reporting the various opinions expressed by the research and publishing community. (He did this rather well, I might add, compared to many other articles I have seen on this topic. And it's not clear that he took a position of his own.) You and I agree that toll-access publishing and supplementary open-access self-archiving can co-exist. I have no opinion on whether or not it would be desirable for open-access publishing to supplant toll-access publishing. I'm concerned only with the long-overdue and urgent provision of open access, now. (Though I can speculate as well as the next guy about where that may or may not eventually lead: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm ) > but I am concerned that driving publishers, commercial and non-commercial, > out of business would only serve to impoverish research rather than > enhance it. No one is driving publishers out of business! I would say that the 1000 out of 24,000 open-access (gold) journals today (<5%) constitutes competition rather than an attempt to drive toll-access publishers out of business (and not very threatening competition, so far). Morever conversion (to the golden cost-recovery model) is an available option, rather than just extinction (though neither seems imminent). Nor is (green) self-archiving intended or likely to drive publishers out of business. On the contrary, for a publisher to declare itself officially green (i.e., author self-archiving-friendly) is a way to show that they are not opposed to open-access provision, not in favor of impact-denial, even if not ready to take the much more radical (and risky) step of converting to gold at a time when the gold cost-recovery model is still an experimental one. In fields where self-archiving is the most advanced -- e.g., in physics, where some subfields are already 100% self-archived, hence open-access, since the early 1990's -- there has been no sign whatsoever that this is driving publishers out of business! On the contrary, as Geoff Watts reported, there has even been a case of an open-access journal, JHEP, which was "born gold," and achieved a huge impact factor within a few years of launching, that has now successfully reverted to the toll-access (green) cost-recovery model -- yet 100% of its contents have been and remain open access (through self-archiving) throughout. If we want to make empirical predictions rather than merely spin off doomsday fantasies, we need to take the actual evidence into account. "JHEP will convert from toll-free-access to toll-based access" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1812.html Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: [email protected] Hypermail Archive: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
