Stevan:Remember, I am an OA supporter, though I am getting discouraged about the
slow progress. You raise good points, but I think you are the one conflating
issues. I will try to keep them separate.
1. Journal pricing.
Independent of OA, it is important to take the cost of scholarly publishing
down. For example, the UC system is looking at a 16% increase in tuition for
each of the next three years, and that is if there are no additional crises
around the corner.
When it comes to the cost of journals, we've been stuck in the Hitler argument,
i.e., publishers are greedy bastards. We rarely consider that they are expensive
for real technical and business reasons. The argument I made in earlier blog
posts is that site licenses are the root cause of the cost problem. It is time
for libraries to get out of the banal role of middleman, and let researchers
manage their own subscriptions. You call that a speculative hypothesis. I call
it restoring a real free market, where the end-user gets to make a price-value
evaluation. Is an iTunes for scholarly articles really all that speculative and
revolutionary?
2. Green Open Access
I agree that Green Open Access would solve the access problem,... provided
everyone joins the initiative. The problem is, too few are joining and because
of quality control issues too difficult to use. The mandate movement is getting
some traction, but most mandates come with loopholes. So, I am getting
discouraged. I wonder when patience runs out.
3. The effect of Green Open Access on Journals.
We both agree that Green Open Access does not solve the cost problem of
journals. Prices keep on rising and (except for some fiddling around the
margins)Â subscriptions are by and large maintained.
You say that journal prices do not matter with Green OA in place. I say they do,
because universities end up underwriting two overlapping systems: one to
maintain the scholarly record and editorial boards and the other to provide
immediate access. Admittedly, Green OA is the better bargain. But if Green OA is
not reducing the cost of the other, it just adds to the total cost.
You say:
Perhaps what you mean is that if all subscribing institutions
promised to keep paying the asking price in perpetuo, then journals
would agree to make all their contents OA?
But who would (or could) make such a (foolish) promise?
I answer:
No one would dare to make such a foolish promise explicitly, but
that is actually exactly what is happening. In the one example in
which Green OA is near universal, scholars are working hard to make
sure their journals can maintain their current revenue stream.
There may be no explicit promise to maintain current subscriptions, but
there certainly is an implicit one. Current academics are scared to lose
the formal scholarly record in its current form and the editorial boards
that control the refereeing process. When push comes to shove, they are
convinced that the journals in which they publish and on whose editorial
boards they sit deserve to survive. It is the other journals, the ones in
which they do not publish and on whose boards they do not sit, that are
too costly and should disappear. Free markets are set up to deal with
exactly this kind of problem. The current system takes end users out of
the price-value evaluation and has led to an unrestricted growth of the
scholarly literature. Â
So, by all means, continue Green OA. However, also bring a real free market to
the scholarly-journal business. Who knows what the real market-driven price
point will be for a scholarly article?
--Eric.
http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com
On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 9:09 AM, Stevan Harnad <har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
On 2011-10-28, at 5:47 PM, Eric F. Van de Velde wrote:
> My most recent blog may be of interest to this list. It starts as
follows, the rest is available at
> http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/10/open-access-doubts.html
There are very simple answers to each of Eric's doubts, which arise mostly
from a library-based rather than a research-based perception of the open
access (OA) problem and its solution.
There is only one doubt that is most definitely justified, though Eric has
not expressed it: Researchers themselves -- even though they and their
research are the primary losers because of access-denial, and the primary
beneficiaries of providing OA -- are not providing OA in sufficient
numbers until and unless it is mandated by their institutions and funders.
That does raise some doubts, but not about the feasibility or benefits of
OA -- only about the alertness of researchers to their own needs and the
way to meet them.
Open Access Reassurances
> Assessing the ongoing Open Access experiment, where are our doubts? I
have three.
> Is Affordable Better than Free?
Affordable is not better than free because even if journal subscriptions
were sold at cost, with no profit margin at all, not all or even most
institutions could afford to subscribe to all or even most peer-reviewed
journals.
The purpose of OA is to provide online access to all would-be users, not
just those whose institutions can afford a subscription to the journal in
which it was published.
Eric is conflating the journal affordability and the research
accessibility problems.
> A robust and user-friendly network of open scholarly systems seems
farther away than ever because of inexpertly formatted content and bad,
incomplete, and non-public (!) metadata.
No, researchers are not being denied access to peer-reviewed research
because of "inexpertly formatted content and bad, incomplete, and
non-public (!) metadata" but because of content to which (a) their
institution cannot afford access and (b) that has not been made OA at all.
It is librarians who worry about formatting and metadata! Researchers
worry about inaccessible content.
> While there is always room for improvement, pay-walled journals provide
professionally formatted and organized content with excellent metadata and
robust services. The problem is cost. Unfortunately, we did nothing to
reduce cost. We only negotiated prices.
Cost is not the OA problem: Access-denial is. Lowering cost is a library's
goal. Gaining access is the user's need. And even lowering prices to
cost-without-any-profit does not remedy access denial.
> The root of the problem is site licenses... Site licenses are
market-distorting products that preserve paper-era business processes of
publishers, aggregators, and libraries.
No, the root of the problem is access-denial and the solution is access
provision. And the way to provide OA is for authors to self-archive their
refereed final drafts ("green OA"). And the way to ensure that authors
self-archive is to mandate it.
> Universities can cut the Gordian knot right now by replacing site
licenses with direct subsidies to researchersâ¦Researchers, empowered to
make individual price-value judgments, would become consumers in a
suddenly competitive market for content and information services.
Instead of mandating green OA (cost-free), cancel all subscriptions and
give the funds to researchers, and the market will take care of the rest!
Eric, when many of us are struggling to get something concrete and
practical that has already been tried, tested, and proven effective --
namely, green OA mandates -- to be implemented by more institutions after
15 years of needlessly lost research access and impact, I don't think this
is the opportune time to try or even contemplate rather speculative
hypotheses!
> What are the Goals of Institutional Repositories?
>
> Open Access advocates have articulated at least five goals for
institutional repositories: (1) release hidden information, (2) rein in
journal prices, (3) archive an institutionâs scholarly record, (4) enable
fast research communication, and (5) provide free access to
author-formatted articles.
If "release hidden information" (1) means provide online access to
refereed research to which access is currently denied to users at
non-subscribing institutions, then this is the one and only fundamental
rationale for OA, and has been ever since the online era made it feasible.
(But I'm afraid this might not even be what Eric means by "release hidden
information!)
The other four goals are secondary ones: If all refereed research is
(green) OA, whether or not it reins in journal prices (2) is secondary,
since all users have access, whether or not their institutions can afford
to buy access.
An institution's scholarly record is already "archived" in the journals in
which is was published (3) (all of them are now online and archived). The
trouble is that the institution itself has no record of it. (Mandating
green OA provides that.)
OA doesn't just speed up research communication and progress (4), it makes
research progress possible (for those users who are otherwise denied
access). That's not just speed: it's access and hence uptake.
And the purpose of OA is to provide free access for all would-be users,
whether or not their institutions can afford paid access to the
publisher's version of record. Access to the author's refereed final draft
(5) may sound like less than perfect from a librarian point of view, but
it is the difference between night and day to an otherwise access-denied
researcher.
> Institutional repositories are ideal vehicles for releasing hidden
information that, until recently, had no suitable distribution platform
(1).
This is a profound error and misunderstanding: The fundamental reason for
providing OA is to "release" _published_ information that was only
accessible to users at subscribing institutions rather than to all
would-be users. It is not about information that had "no suitable
distribution platform." (Although unrefereed papers and other kinds of
research content are welcome in repositories too, the first and foremost
target content is refereed, published research.)
> Institutional repositories fall short as a mechanism to rein in journal
prices (2), because they are not a credible alternative for the current
archival scholarly record.
You are conflating "gold" OA publishing with green OA self-archiving here:
Green OA is a supplement, not a substitute, for refereed research
journals. No "credible alternative intended": just a remedy for
access-denial.
And the goal of OA itself is not to "rein in journal prices" but to
provide online access for all users, not just the ones whose institutions
can afford the journal prices.
So you are again conflating the problem of journal affordability with the
problem of research accessibility.
> Without (2), goals (3), (4), and (5) are irrelevant. If we pay for
journals anyway, we can achieve (3) by maintaining a database of links to
the formal literature. Secure in the knowledge that their journals are not
in jeopardy, publishers would be happy to provide (4) and (5).
Without lowering prices, access-denial to users whose institutions cannot
afford subscriptions is _irrelevant_?
Keep paying their subscriptions and journals will provide access for those
who can't afford to pay for it?
Perhaps what you mean is that if all subscribing institutions promised to
keep paying the asking price in perpetuo, then journals would agree to
make all their contents OA?
But who would (or could) make such a (foolish) promise?
> A scenario consistent with this analysis is unfolding right now. The HEP
community launched a rescue mission for HEP journals, which lost much of
their role to arXiv.
The HEP community is the only one in the world that has already provided
(green) OA for itself without the need for a mandate. Hence there is
effectively no more access denial worldwide for the HEP subset of the
journal literature. The HEP community has effectively solved the
accessibility problem.
What the HEP community does as a follow-up, to address the affordability
problem, is of far less concern and relevance to the rest of the scholarly
and scientific community, which is still afflicted with access denial (and
its resultant loss in research usage, progress and impact). What the
non-HEP world needs is OA.
But it should be mentioned that the SCOAP3 project is effectively the one
that I called in question above: No institution can or will guarantee that
it will keep paying for subscriptions in perpetuo. So the jury is still
out on whether such a scheme is sustainable. But we already know it is not
scalable beyond HEP, because the non-HEP world has not yet even taken the
first essential step, which is to provide green OA.
That's why green OA mandates are needed.
Publishing reform will take care of itself thereafter.
> The SCOAP3 initiative pools funds currently spent on site-licensing HEP
journals. This strikes me as a heavy-handed approach to protect existing
revenue streams of established journals. On the other hand, SCOAP3
protects the quality of the HEP archival scholarly record and converts HEP
journals to the open-access model.
It's a consortial "membership" solution about whose sustainability and
scalability there are, as noted, good reasons to have doubts.
But it is irrelevant. Because HEP already has (green) OA, unmandated,
whereas the rest of the scholarly and scientific world does not.
> Are Open-Access Journals a Form of Vanity Publishing?
>
> If a journalâs scholarly discipline loses influence or if its editorial
board lowers its standards, the journalâs standing diminishes and various
quality assessments fall.
Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16
(7/8).http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/
ABSTRACT:
 Plans by universities and research funders to pay the costs of Open
Access Publishing ("Gold OA") are premature. Funds are short; 80% of
journals (including virtually all the top journals) are still
subscription-based, tying up the potential funds to pay for Gold OA; the
asking price for Gold OA is still high; and there is concern that paying
to publish may inflate acceptance rates and lower quality standards. What
is needed now is for universities and funders to mandate OA self-archiving
(of authors' final peer-reviewed drafts, immediately upon acceptance for
publication) ("Green OA"). That will provide immediate OA; and if and when
universal Green OA should go on to make subscriptions unsustainable
(because users are satisfied with just the Green OA versions) that will in
turn induce journals to cut costs (print edition, online edition,
access-provision, archiving), downsize to just providing the service of
peer review, and convert to the Gold OA cost-recovery model; meanwhile,
the subscription cancellations will have released the funds to pay these
residual service costs. The natural way to charge for the service of peer
review then will be on a "no-fault basis," with the author's institution
or funder paying for each round of refereeing, regardless of outcome
(acceptance, revision/re-refereeing, or rejection). This will minimize
cost while protecting against inflated acceptance rates and decline in
quality standards.
Harnad, S. (2011) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to
Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 21(3-4):
86-93 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818
ABSTRACT:
Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global
research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate
(green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal
articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for
gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA
eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA
pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only
squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA.
Stevan Harnad
EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS)
