On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Rick Anderson wrote: > > (1) What is the something that needs to be kept in mind? > > I repeat: it is that offering a scholarly author lots of readers may > not tempt her to publish in an OA journal unless publishing in that > journal will also confer upon her professional prestige. For example, > as a tenure-seeking librarian, I would rather publish an article in, > say, Serials Review than, say, American Libraries -- even though AL has > many more readers than SR.
And you are quite right to publish in the peer-reviewed journal that has the track record for the highest quality standards and prestige in your field (if that is indeed Serials Review!). But there is a systematic misunderstanding here (and that is why I have again redirected the discussion to the existing AmSci topic thread that has already been discussing this for some time): The misunderstanding is two-fold: It is either (1) being unaware of the green road to 100% OA (OA self-archiving of non-OA journal articles) altogether, and hence treating OA as if the only road to it were the golden road (creating/converting OA journals and publishing one's articles in them) or (2) being aware of both roads, but imagining that they can be treated independently, as if the other possibility did not even exist. I repeat: the *premise* of OA is peer-reviewed journal publication. If it were not, then (research) authors could maximize their potential readership by simply doing vanity self-publishing on their web pages: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.4 Moreover, it is part of that same premise (and has nothing to do with OA per se) that the (research) author wants to publish in the most suitable journal for his findings, both in terms of its subject matter and in terms of its established quality standards ("prestige"). So it is only on the assumption that this premise has been fulfilled -- publishing in the most suitable, highest-quality peer-reviewed journal that will accept the article -- that the further question of maximizing users and usage comes up: There is no trade-off between this second question and the fulfillment of the first premise. And here is how the second question is answered: (Gold): Is the most suitable, highest-quality peer-reviewed journal that will accept my article an OA journal? Then publish it there. (Green): Is the most suitable, highest-quality peer-reviewed journal that will accept my article a non-OA journal? Then publish it there and also self-archive it to make it OA. That way users and usage are maximized either way, and no potential users, usage or impact are needlessly lost. You, Rick, have instead been systematically bracketing the Green option, and treating what I had proposed based on the full spectrum of options as if it applied only to Gold: "Surely authors don't just want to maximize readers at all costs: They want journal prestige too, perhaps even more!" But that's like giving a person a one-sided choice between stating that he either (1a) has or (1b) has not stopped beating his wife (without room for the premise that (2) he has never beaten his wife -- or has no wife at all!). The rationale for OA is not that the author just wishes to maximize his readers at all costs: It is that he wants to maximize his readers for articles he has published in the most suitable, highest-quality peer-reviewed journal that will accept them. First fulfill the (non-OA) premise, *then* ask the question about how to maximize users, usage and impact. And the reason Rick keeps getting stuck in this one-sided choice between (1a) maximizing "prestige" and (1b) maximizing readership is that he thinks (1) Gold is the only OA option, or an option that somehow can and should be weighed independently of the other OA option, which is (2) Green. This is logically incoherent, hence strategically counterproductive. > > (2) What do you mean by "OA providers"? The authors who > > self-archive? The authors who publish in OA journals? Or the > > publishers of OA journals? > > Mainly, I'm talking about publishers of OA journals, since they're > the ones who need to figure out how they're going to attract authors. > You're right that self-archiving is a separate issue. I keep trying > to talk about OA publishing. (That would probably be clearer to all if > you didn't keep changing my subject headers for me.) I said self-archiving is *another option*, not a "separate issue"! Yes, OA journals (like all new journals) have to figure out how to attract authors. The fact that they can offer higher readership is a plus, but that does not offset the handicap of being a new journal, without a track-record and often with no impact factor yet. Moreover (and this is a subtle point, but an *extremely* pertinent one): Even the prospect of a maximized online readership with an OA journal -- the only reason, after all, that an *author* should consider preferring an OA journal over a non-OA journal at all! -- must be weighed against the alternative of publishing in a more suitable non-OA journal and self-archiving! For that too provides the maximized online readership! So Gold and Green cannot be treated as if they were two independent options: They interact, and the whole OA picture has to be kept in view and in focus, not just the local region one might prefer (usually because of tunnel vision!). And yes, I continue to re-direct postings to their proper topic-threads. A lot of ground has already been covered in this Forum since 1998. This has never been an unmoderated chat-group in which discussion could flow willy-nilly, posters changing subject-headers at will ["Walt's a Wanker: (Was: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire)". As moderator I have always actively kept the subject-headers focussed, with an eye not only to keeping the discussion on-topic, but also to making the discussion archive navigable and useful to current workers and future historians alike: "Please Try to Use Current Subject Headers" (1998) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0007.html (And the reason I explicitly pointed out that there are *three* kinds of OA "providers" -- (1) authors who choose to publish in gold (OA) journals, (2) authors who choose to publish in green (non-OA) journals and self-archive, and (3) publishers who choose to publish gold (OA) journals that make their contents free online -- was to remind everyone that both the *choice* to make their articles OA, and the benefits of doing so, are mostly in the hands of their authors, not someone else!) > > (3) The "option of publishing in a non-OA forum"? Why not > > call a spade a spade and say "non-OA *journal*"? > > Um... because not all non-OA fora are journals? If you mean peer-reviewed conference proceedings, you're right (and I use "journal" as a shorthand for them too, more or less as Ulrich's does). But if you mean anything else -- e.g., books or unrefereed magazines -- those are *not* what OA is about. (Esoteric monographs may eventually come under the OA umbrella too, but for now, the only clearcut targets are the 2.5 million articles appearing in the world's 24,000 refereed journals [and conference proceedings], and 80% of them have yet to be made OA!) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1 > > That means 95% of authors, because only 5% of journals are OA journals > > today. That means that 95% of authors today have no option *but* to > > publish in a non-OA journal. > > You need to stop and reconsider the mathematical logic of that > statement, Stevan. (In fact, every author has the option of > contributing to an OA journal, even if OA journals are a small minority > in the journal marketplace.) I am always chuffed to have my logic challenged, as it gives some relief to the unjust stereotype that it is always I who am, curmudgeonly, chipping away at others' logic! Just to see where your mathematical logic leads, Rick, and then work backwards: are you suggesting that all 2.5 million articles currently published in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals could be rechanneled to just 1 of those 24,000 journals? No? Then let's do some mathematical induction: 2? 2%? 5%? No, 95% of the annual peer-reviewed literature cannot be squeezed through the keyhole of the 1383 OA journals known to exist today: http://www.doaj.org/ Moreover, there is a *function* being performed by that large and diverse array of existing journals, not only in covering all fields, but in covering, hierarchically, each level of each field. That's what "choosing a suitable journal" means (above): choosing the journal that covers the subject matter, and at the highest quality level (peer-review standard) that the paper can manage to successfully meet. This means (among other things) that journals must be selective -- in some cases (the top) *very* selective. It is not just a matter of squeezing all candidates into the tiny arbitrary subset of them that happen to share a certain cost-recovery model today! > > (4) At least 87% of those non-OA journals, however, are already > > green: i.e., they have given their authors the green light to make > > their articles OA by self-archiving them (not "later," but > > immediately). > > Right. You're back to self-archiving. I'm talking about OA journal > publishers, and the question of how they're going to attract authors. > What started this whole conversation was your assertion that scholarly > authors just want readers. But my question was asked in the *full* context of OA options, and not artificially restricted to the gold option (OA journals) alone! In other words, we have never *left* self-archiving: You simply kept leaving it out of your own reckoning. > > (5) What is the "big issue" for publishers? > > There are several big issues for OA publishers, of course, but the one I > keep hoping we can discuss is the issue of how OA journals are going to > be able to get better traction in the marketplace, given that they have > to compete for authors with other venues that don't charge their authors > for the privilege and that confer greater prestige. The way OA journals are going to get better traction is by earning it (as all other new journals must). First, note that the definition of an OA (gold) journal is that it makes its full-text contents accessible online for free (not necessarily that it adopts the author-institution-end cost-recovery model). JHEP, the leading journal in the field of High Energy Physics, was such a gold journal. It launched in 1997 as a free, online-only journal (supported by subsidy) and by 2001 it had an ISI impact factor of over 8 -- the highest in its field: http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~ejds/seminars2002/Loriano_Bonora/Jhep_presentazione/impact01.htm So that should lay to rest the idea that being new and gold prevents a journal from out-competing its rivals for prestige, sometimes surprisingly quickly. On the other hand, the author-institution charge is definitely a handicap, and when in 2002 JHEP became unable to make ends meet through subsidy, it migrated to a green publisher, Institute of Physics (IOP) and IOP made the strategic decision to convert JHEP from gold to green -- even though IOP already publishes one gold journal of the same age as JHEP -- the New Journal of Physics (NJP) -- which uses the author-institution-end cost-recovery model. JHEP's backwards transition from gold to green was successful, despite the fact that do all the prior issues remain OA, and that virtually 100% of JHEP's past, current and forthcoming articles continue to be self-archived by their authors: "JHEP will convert from toll-free-access to toll-based access" (2002) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1812.html http://www.ioppublishing.com/news/346 http://www.ioppublishing.com/news/428 http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/JHEP http://www.iop.org/EJ/njp Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here: This area of physics (HEP) is one of the most advanced in self-archiving and has been doing it the longest. If there is peaceful co-existence between green user-institution-end cost-recovery and 100% OA via green self-archiving here, perhaps that -- rather than an immediate direct transition to gold author-institution-end cost recovery -- is the evolutionary path we should all be promoting. "The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3378.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/greenroad.html > An OA journal may be able to offer more readers, but what most scholarly > authors are really after is impact and advancement. A bit of the usual conflation here (between OA and OA-journals): for (1) getting more impact (citations) depends on getting more readers and (2) OA journals (5%) are not the only way nor the best way to increase both readers and impact: there is the OA self-archiving option (95%) too! > As you've acknowledged, Stevan, lots of the former [readers] doesn't > necessarily lead to much of the latter [impact]. All I said was that, logically, access is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for impact! But I did also cite strong empirical evidence that (a) across all disciplines, OA articles have a consistent, significant impact advantage over non-OA articles and also that (b) usage impact (downloads) correlates with citation impact. http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/correlation.php Harnad, S. & Brody, T. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals, D-Lib Magazine 10 (6) June http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html These findings are mostly in connection with OA via green rather than gold, but you, Rick, keep reverting to questions that are exclusive to gold: Widen your color spectrum and you will see the answers to your own questions. The two options are *interdependent.* > For new OA journals (especially those that depend on funding from authors) > to survive in the short term, they'll need to figure out a way quickly > to increase their ability to confer prestige on those they publish. How > can they do that -- and how can we help them do that? This seems to me > to be a pretty big issue, and one that I would have thought is worthy of > discussion here. Efforts to help the 5% of journals that are gold survive and thrive and grow are all commendable and welcome, but they are extremely *minoritarian* efforts. To not waste another decade or more to reach 100% OA, at least 95% of our efforts now need to be focussed on the 95% road -- the green road of OA self-archiving. The only way that OA journals can increase prestige is the usual way: to earn it (as JHEP did) by adopting high-quality peer-reviewing standards in a niche where there is a need. To increase submissions despite the deterrent of author-institution publication charges, they will either need to seek subsidies (as JHEP did) -- subsidies either to publishers or to authors -- so as to remove this deterrent, or they will have to wait patiently for progress via green self-archiving to at last usher in the 100% OA era (and *perhaps* eventually generate the user-institution windfall cancellation savings out of which to pay the author-institution publication charges). http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm Stevan Harnad AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php 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