I think A.R. Suhail continues to misunderstand a rather fundamental point here. His suggestion is that OA journals are not a good idea because they are unaffordable for some authors. My reply was that there is a free alternative for any author who either cannot afford to publish in an OA journal or for whom a suitable OA journal does not exist: Publish in a conventional toll-access (TA) journal and make your article OA by self-archiving it.
Suhail unfortunately continues to pass over this point in silence, returning repeatedly to his own point that if an author spends his money on publishing in an OA journal (as Suhail has done, once), he has less money to purchase access to TA articles. Suhail also repeats that (because of the OA journal affordability problem), delayed (embargoed) access a year after publication should be the goal, not OA! (Once again, passing over OA self-archiving in silence.) Over 95% of journals today are TA and fewer than 5% are OA. Consequently, the OA journal option for providing immediate OA to an author's own articles is a 5% option even if *every* author could afford it. The only OA option for the remaining 95% of articles is already self-archiving. Wouldn't the rational application of Suhail's observation that not all authors can afford to publish in an OA journal be that those authors' articles (whatever fraction they actually represent of the 5% for which there exists a suitable OA journal today) should simply be added to the 95% of articles for which the author provides OA by self-archiving them -- rather than to take them as an argument against providing OA through OA publishing if and when it is available, and affordable? (In addition, it needs to be pointed out that the OA/TA distinction mainly concerns institutional tolls, rather than individual-user tolls. Users have access to the TA journals for which their own institutions can afford to pay the tolls. They may occasionally take out an individual TA subscription, or may pay TA for an individual article on an individual pay-to-view basis. But the lion's share of worldwide TA expenditure -- and of the TA access-denial/impact-denial problem -- is in the institutional tolls; individual subscription tolls have long ceased to be a significant means of accessing the journal literature in the online age. Moreover, at most institutions, even the user's individual pay-to-view and interlibrary-loan tolls are paid by the user's institution, rather than by the user. Once again, one cannot and should not generalise from the fraction of cases where a user may still be spending money from his own pocket to access the journal literature to the vast majority in which it is the user's institution that is bearing this burden. And certainly not as a rationale for arguing against either OA journals or OA.) Some comments. I wrote: >sh> The user of N articles is one person, the author publishing in an >sh> OA journal is another. (And A.R. Suhail has completely overlooked >sh> my main point about the option of self-archiving for the author >sh> who either does not have a suitable OA journal to publish in, >sh> or cannot afford to.) Suhail A. R. replied: > Cheaper for both. The user of N articles [spends] less if he does > not publish his subsequent work in an OA journal. That is what > makes research, not just possible but also affordable to him. If the user cannot afford to provide OA to his own articles by publishing them in an OA journal, he should provide OA to them by self-archiving them. So there is no relationship whatsoever between (1) the affordability of individual (as opposed to institutional) TA to an individual as a user and (2) the affordability of OA journal publication costs to an individual as an author: If the OA journal is unaffordable for you, publish in a TA journal and self-archive. Then use whatever money you had intended to use for accessing TA journal articles exactly as you had intended, not one penny less. (And know that in having made your *own* articles OA for other users by self-archiving them, you have made an investment toward eventually having OA to *their* articles too!) Harnad, S. (2003) Self-Archive Unto Others as Ye Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You. University Affairs, December 2003 http://www.universityaffairs.ca/pdf/past_articles/html_articles/2003/december/opinion_e_p.html >sh> You are comparing apples and oranges (users/institutions accessing >sh> the articles of others versus authors/institutions paying to publish >sh> their own articles) and omitting the author's other (free) option: >sh> self-archiving. > > It boils down to the same issue. I will not pay to access articles if I know > that I will not be able to publish subsequently due to prohibitive costs. *What* boils down to the same issue? (1) apples (users/institutions paying TA to access the TA articles of others), (2) oranges (authors/institutions paying OA journals to publish their own articles so as to make them OA to others) or (3) bananas (authors/institutions paying nothing to publish in TA journals and self-archiving their articles to make them OA to others)? If OA journals are unaffordable for an author's own articles because of the author's individual TA expenditures for access to TA articles by others, let the author not publish in an OA journal but make his own TA articles OA by self-archiving them -- and use all his available money to pay for the TA articles of others as before. > A major motivation to research is letting others know about it. No one does > research simply for personal satisfaction, except those not interested in > career development. Correct. Which is precisely the reason all authors should provide immediate OA to their own articles -- whether by publishing them in an OA journal (5%) or by self-archiving them (95%). What author wants a 1-year embargo before those would-be users who cannot afford the access-tolls can use his work! How does that help develop their careers? >sh> The question is not how many embargoed articles can I *buy* but how >sh> many embargoed articles can I *use* (if access is toll-free). The >sh> answer is: far, far more than you can even imagine. And this is >sh> what the open-access movement is all about. > > While authors like us have to pay for open access, we do not have the luxury > of contemplating how many we can *use*. Then contemplate instead how many would-be users could and would use *your* article if they (or their institutions) did not have to pay tolls to do so. (Then imagine yourself as one of those users!) (The point -- apparently still not clear to Suhail -- is that toll-free usage levels are incomparably higher than toll-constrained ones. That is why *authors* should be focusing on providing immediate OA to their own articles by every means available, rather than merely focusing on the minor and self-imposed side-issue of trading off their own individual TA access budgets against their own individual OA publishing budgets!) > It all boils down to money either way, and I have learnt from bitter > experience that how many you can buy determines how many you can *use*. Back to the minor and self-imposed side-issue again! > We must all remember that while an idea (eg OA) may be good for a > section of the community where research is institutionalised, it may > not necessarily be practical or beneficial to others out of those systems. (1) "OA" does not equal "OA journal-publishing" (5%). (There is OA self-archiving too (95%)). (2) OA is beneficial to the author as well as to the user. (3) OA's benefits (or feasibility) have nothing to do with whether or not research is "institutionalised." (4) The feasibility of providing OA does not depend on whether or not the author can afford OA publishing charges. > If we all made the mistake of supporting the current author charged > OA system and all free submissions were to close down, I estimate that > two-thirds of the researchers (not two-thirds of research output) would > immediately find it impossible to publish. (5) Supporting cost-recovery for OA journals is not a mistake but a necessity, if there are to be OA journals at all; but neither publishing in OA journals nor paying its costs is a necessity in order to provide OA to an author's articles: There is also the 95% alternative: self-archiving. (6) If all articles for which (i) there exists a suitable OA journal today (c. 5%) and (ii) their author can afford it were to be published in those OA journals, that would be very good for OA, and would help OA journals grow beyond 5%, but it would come *no where close* to "closing down" the remaining TA journals (95%)! (7) Even if all the remaining articles (95%) were made OA by their authors by self-archiving them, it is not at all clear that that that would close down or convert the remaining TA journals (95%) into OA journals. That is a possibility, but by no means a certainty; if it did, though, it would also generate institutional windfall savings that would be more than enough to pay for all institutional author OA journal publishing charges without requiring a penny from the author's pocket: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm (8) What is a certainty, however, is that we are nowhere near having provided the 100% OA on which all the rest of this is contingent. (Instead, we are at this moment treating the 5% option as if it were the *only* OA option, and as if current individual-user TA charges were a reason to reject that 5% option, because it would somehow make 2/3 of authors unable to publish!) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif > Finally, why should an OA journal decide who or who not to give waivers to?. > I think one way around OA is to make waiver rules that are not in the > individual journals control. In other words, if an OA journal is to start, > then it has to follow an international waiver standard by law. These waivers > would then automatically apply to non funded research regardless of where it > originates from. The journal then makes its living from funded research > work. Will this work....I don't really know. I suggest that these recommendations be directed to the OA journal publishers. They are of very little immediate relevance or interest to those whose immediate interest is in Open Access, Now. (Why an author for whom OA journal publishing is unaffordable today would prefer pondering OA journal "waiver" policy rather than immediately providing OA to his articles by self-archiving them is another of Zeno's Koans for which I have no answer, and can only leave to future historians of the research community's needlessly sluggish trajectory toward the optimal and inevitable outcome for research, researchers, and the society that funds and benefits from the research.) Stevan Harnad