The "overlay journal" notion is and always has been an inchoate, incoherent idea. Physicists thought that since they were happy just using the Arxiv version of preprints and postprints, the "journals" could be phased out, and the peer-review could be "overlaid" on Arxiv. But the journals are sustained by subscriptions, and therefore the costs of implementing the peer-review are paid by subscriptions. What does it mean to subscribe to an "overlay"?
The answer is obvious: An "overlay" is just the service of peer review, its outcome certified by the journal-name and track-record. So why not call it what it always was: peer review, not "overlay journal." We all understand the difference between a print text and an online one, and we don't much care any more. And with nothing to subscribe to, it is also obvious that the (minimal) expense of peer review per paper will have to be paid up-front, on what is now called the Gold OA model. So far so good. The journal-name persists, as the quality-level "brand-name," and the peer-review is paid for via Gold OA peer-review service charges. But where is the resultant paper archived and made accessible? For the papers in Arxiv, we know; but that's just 500,000 papers in 18 years, in a few fields. There are 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all fields, publishing 2.5 million articles per year. Where are the papers on which the peer-review is to be "overlaid"? The natural candidate is: in the authors' own institutional repositories (IRs). The unrefereed preprint is deposited in Closed Access (or maybe even darker, so that even the metadata are not publicly visible until and unless the paper is accepted by a journal). The submission to a journal goes pretty much as it always did, except that instead of mailing the journal a manuscript, you email the URL and password, so the editor and referees can access it in your IR (while it is dark to everyone else). If and when the paper is successfully revised and accepted, the lights are turned on, it becomes OA in the IR, and is tagged as published by the journal that accepted it. Then you don't have "overlay-journal" articles; you just have journal articles, as you always did, peer-reviewed by the journal that accepted them. Yes, they are online only, but we're all used to that. We don't call the online edition of print journals "overlay editions." And we don't call the growing number of online-only journals, who no longer generate a print-run at all "overlay journals," with the overlay being on top of the journal's own online archives, or the archive of the libraries subscribing to them. In other words, once the shock and romance of online editions is behind us, we realize that peer-reviewed journals have always been (trivially) "overlay journals," in that peer-review and revisions were always "overlaid" on the original unrefereed draft, regardless of whether it began or ended on paper or on-line. Nor is this mere semiology; for thinking in terms of "overlay journals" rather than just peer-reviewed online-only journals with distributed archiving and access-provision, we miss the fact that the only real substantive components are the fact that articles need to be OA, and there needs to be a way other than subscription fees to pay for the cost of the peer review. On even more exotic ideas, such as Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/ Stevan Harnad PS Please don't even get me started on "disaggregated journals"... http://bit.ly/S7 On 25-Jun-09, at 10:26 PM, Sue M. Woodson wrote: But didn't the commercialization of peer-review came about because scholars didn't find it worth their time to organize and run the peer review-process. The Max Plancks of today don't edit journals they way he edited Annalen der Physik. Physicists today are willing to do the reviewing but they are not always willing to do the organizational work -- finding the reviewers, prodding them to get the work in, etc. And, if you think about it, that's not really a good use of their time. The questions remain: Who will do that work? and Who will pay to have that work done? Sue Woodson Welch Medical Library -----Original Message----- From: owner-liblicens...@lists.yale.edu [mailto:owner-liblicens...@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Stern, David Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 5:25 PM To: liblicens...@lists.yale.edu Subject: RE: Article on arXiv There is a basic tautology in the comment that the physics portion of arXiv demonstrates that there is really no impact from e-prints on publishing and commercial publications. The problem is that we are observing two separate processes: distribution and peer review. The distribution of physics material is fairly well handled by arXiv, and the basic researcher population does not really require commercial publishing. The peer review process is what keeps the commercial publications viable. The minute a viable peer-review overlay is added to the arXiv server there will no longer be a need for the commercial journals. The other aspects of commercial publishing (copy editing, added-value branding, etc) might be worth maintaining, but it does not seem important for the researchers who have willingly adopted arXiv as their new choice. You will see a drastic drop in commercial subscriptions the minute a well established set of editorial boards offer peer-review overlays on top of arXiv. What is required is a far less expensive editorial board cost model, one in which profit is removed and only the minimal costs for the infrastructure are justified and covered by some alternative and reduced revenue stream. E-prints will impact the viability of commercial journals, but not until peer review is addressed. David Stern Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources Brown University