Re: "Let Them Eat Cake..." (M. Antoinette)

[Albert Henderson]

[Moderator's Note: Good manners dictate that I give
 Albert the last word, so here he has it. No rebuttal
 from me. But now let this really be the end of it. S.H.]

on 21 Aug 2001 Stevan Harnad 
hoped for the last word:
 =

> Albert Henderson's postings are so wide of the mark that they
> tend to answer themselves, by self-caricature. Lately they are
> also eliciting flaming, so I'm afraid I have to re-invoke cloture.

Some university managers can't stand criticism
especially when profits are threatened. However
I have also received some very supportive private
messages from others.

> (Apologies to those on the list who will keep getting the
> rejected postings anyway, because they have been added to Albert's
> blind CC list.)

Stevan would like to preach only to the choir.
But there is another point of view.

> On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Albert Henderson wrote:
> =

> > I am against self-archiving as a substitute for
> > libraries, library collections, and librarians.
> > Every qualified researcher is (or can be) a member
> > of a major research library.
> =

> There are 2,000,000+ refereed articles published annually in 20,000+
> refereed journals. No library can (nor ever could, while we still
> reserve any resources at all for basic subsistence needs!) afford
> most of the 20K, and most can hardly afford any at all:
> =

> http://www.arl.org/stats/index.html

Let's be realistic. Not every journal in an ARL =

library is refereed. I for one am hard pressed to =

believe figures above, like 2MM refereed articles. =

The National Science Board, for instance, =

recognized about 80 thousand articles published =

annually 1995-97. Whose figure is correct??

Moreover, only if a university supported programs =

in every speciality -- past present and future -- =

would it need all the refereed journals in the =

world. A reasonably comprehensive collection is =

not beyond reach if spending on libraries keeps =

pace with spending on R&D at ARL institutions.

The core group of ARL libraries kept pace with the
growth of R&D spending in the 1960s (and for 200
years before) very nicely. University managers =

stalled library spending growth after they apparently =

convinced themselves that library photocopying could =

replace some subscriptions. [Henderson, A. Journal of =

the American Society for Information Science. =

50:366-379. 1999] Stevan promises that "self-archiving"
will eliminate library subscriptions once and for all.


> Albert Henderson's recommendation is worthy of Marie Antoinette.

The trouble with "self-archiving" is that it =

promises universities can eat cake and have it too. =


Beware of false prophets...


> > Moreover, self-archiving opens the door to
> > a mess of unreviewed articles which many
> > readers are unable to evaluate in terms of
> > poor preparation, error, misconduct, and
> > fraud. Again, quality of research and
> > education will suffer.
> =

> See the earlier subject thread in this Forum on not confusing
> toll-gating with gate-keeping:
> =

> Albert thinks it is toll-gating (Subscription/License/Pay-Per-View,
> S/L/P) that is somehow mysteriously maintaining the quality of
> research, rather than the more obvious candidate: the gate-keeping of
> peer review.

When universities shut the gate on library =

subscriptions via the budget, the students =

and research sponsors who have paid for =

excellent resources are betrayed. The faculty =

is undermined. Authors and referees lack
essential resources.

Publishers have been paid for their journals ever
since Henry Oldenburg founded the Philosophical
Transactions and put profits -- however meager --
in his pocket.

> He also thinks that the Have-Nots who cannot afford the gate-tolls
> should not get the peer-reviewed results of the gate-keeping either,
> even if their authors self-archive them for free, because, who knows,
> some of those authors might have lied! Far better to be denied
> access to it all while Albert keeps campaigning for diverting more
> funds (from somewhere) to pay more tolls.

I really don't know what "Have-Nots" Stevan
has in mind. An impoverished research program
loses its researchers to institutions with
adequate resources. Journal subscriptions are
probably the smallest expense. A university =

that cannot afford a research library should
stop pretending and do whatever it can do well. =


"Diverting more funds" from profits would pay for
decent libraries for U.S. research universities. =

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER

Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature

[Albert Henderson]

on 21 Aug 2001 Helene Bosc  commented:

> May I share my feeling ? I think that Albert plays a kind of Devil's 
> Advocate because he his just looking for "celebrity". He has succeeded : 
> look at the number of message and reactions he has generated on this forum. 
> His name is now as "famous" as Stevan's.

Thank you Ms. Bosc. My name will never be as well
celebrated as Steven's, since I lack the support of 
university managers who wish to cancel journal
subscriptions, shut libraries, and invest the savings 
in securities.

Moreover, it is Stevan who promises "something for 
nothing," based on myths and false premises, and is 
therefore more Devil's Advocate than I could ever be.

Best wishes,

Albert Henderson
Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000
<70244.1...@compuserve.com>

"Let Them Eat Cake..." (M. Antoinette)

[Stevan Harnad]

Albert Henderson's postings are so wide of the mark that they
tend to answer themselves, by self-caricature. Lately they are
also eliciting flaming, so I'm afraid I have to re-invoke cloture.

(Apologies to those on the list who will keep getting the
rejected postings anyway, because they have been added to Albert's
blind CC list.)

On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Albert Henderson wrote:

> I am against self-archiving as a substitute for
> libraries, library collections, and librarians.
> Every qualified researcher is (or can be) a member
> of a major research library.

There are 2,000,000+ refereed articles published annually in 20,000+
refereed journals. No library can (nor ever could, while we still
reserve any resources at all for basic subsistence needs!) afford
most of the 20K, and most can hardly afford any at all:

http://www.arl.org/stats/index.html

Albert Henderson's recommendation is worthy of Marie Antoinette.

> Moreover, self-archiving opens the door to
> a mess of unreviewed articles which many
> readers are unable to evaluate in terms of
> poor preparation, error, misconduct, and
> fraud. Again, quality of research and
> education will suffer.

See the earlier subject thread in this Forum on not confusing
toll-gating with gate-keeping:

Albert thinks it is toll-gating (Subscription/License/Pay-Per-View,
S/L/P) that is somehow mysteriously maintaining the quality of
research, rather than the more obvious candidate: the gate-keeping of
peer review.

He also thinks that the Have-Nots who cannot afford the gate-tolls
should not get the peer-reviewed results of the gate-keeping either,
even if their authors self-archive them for free, because, who knows,
some of those authors might have lied! Far better to be denied
access to it all while Albert keeps campaigning for diverting more
funds (from somewhere) to pay more tolls.

Meanwhile, "join" a "major research library" that can already afford
the 20K+ -- except that, alas, not only is there not one such library
for every "qualified" researcher on the planet to "join" but there
exists not one such library at all: and there never will be, except
should the click-through oligopoly dreamt of by some vendor-cartels
come to pass, with the planet paying a global site-license for the 20K,
as dictated by the vendor-cartel, and at the expense of whatever other
essential goods and services we would have to sacrifice to fund such
folly.

> Finally, your use of the term "give-away"
> is mistaken and misleading -- a major
> fallacy in this forum. Authors give nothing
> away. Although they are not paid in cash,
> authors exchange their reports for recognition
> and dissemination by editors that they value.

Albert has been many times given the chance to explain what the causal
connection is between the cash that is paid for the tolls to access the
refereed research that the author gives away (sic) for free and the
recognition (impact) that the author gets from having researchers
access that research. For the causality looks to be running in the
exact opposite direction: Limit access to only those who can afford the
tolls and you limit recognition (impact) by exactly the same measure.
Self-archiving can at last remedy this, but Albert is alas too
committed to the defense of toll-gating to understand the real causal
connection, and must instead simply repeat incoherent incantations like
the above one.

http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/

This Forum really has to get back to substantive matters. I'm sure
that, like Charlie Brown and Lucy's annual football, we will get drawn
into all this yet again, but for the moment, I think we've had
enough...


Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Sciencehar...@princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
 Computer Science fax:   +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southamptonhttp://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01):


http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html

You may join the list at the site above.

Discussion can be posted to:

american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org

Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature

[hb...@tours.inra.fr]

At 11:44 21/08/01 +0100, vous avez écrit:

On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Albert Henderson wrote:

> on Fri, 17 Aug 2001 Stevan Harnad  wrote:
>
> > The 36% referred to the number of authors that updated their reference
> > at that time: this is another irrelevant statistic (for Albert's
> > purposes), about which the author, Tim Brody, has already posted a
> > response to this Forum.
> >
> > http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/
> > http://opcit.eprints.org/ijh198/
>
> Now that this source is clearly involved in a
> propaganda campaign where conclusions are so often
> unrelated to the facts, who would take it seriously?
>

I put again what I asked in a previous post: why are you (are
you?) against providing public, Internet based access to the primary
"give-away" literature?


May I share my feeling ? I think that Albert plays a kind of Devil's 
Advocate because he his just looking for "celebrity". He has succeeded : 
look at the number of message and reactions he has generated on this forum. 
His name is now as "famous" as Stevan's.



--
Tim Brody
Computer Science, University of Southampton
email: tdb...@soton.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tdb198/




Helene Bosc
Bibliotheque
Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction
et des Comportements
UMR 6073 INRA-CNRS-Universite F. Rabelais
37380 Nouzilly
France

http://www.tours.inra.fr/
TEL : 02 47 42 78 00
FAX : 02 47 42 77 43
e-mail: hb...@tours.inra.fr

Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature

[Steve Hitchcock]

At 16:46 20/08/01 -0400, Albert Henderson wrote:

> http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/
> http://opcit.eprints.org/ijh198/

Now that this source is clearly involved in a
propaganda campaign where conclusions are so often
unrelated to the facts, who would take it seriously?


In fact the opposite is the case. Anyone who looks at these pages will see
that they are getting the unembellished raw data.

I'd like to take the chance to fill in a little background to this
particular work, which we called 'mining the social life of an eprint
archive', an original exploration of the arXiv phenomenon. It was produced
by two students - one of whom, Tim Brody, has contributed here; the other
was Ian Hickman - who worked with the Open Citation project last summer. As
someone who worked with them during this time, I found it both startling
and liberating. Yes, as a project we discussed the agenda for the work,
producing the questions that guided it and commenting on results. But what
you see is what two self-motivated students produced themselves and
presented in the way they chose to present it, which was to make the
results visible to all as they were produced.

As a project we could have hidden these data, presenting it more formally
for our own purposes. Is that the way research works? Perhaps it's not the
way the next generations of researchers will see it. Some of our papers and
presentations have offered preliminary interpretations
(http://opcit.eprints.org/opcitpapers.shtml). But so rich are these data,
and difficult to analyse, that we wanted to leave the work as Tim and Ian
created it. What we hope is that others will use it and build on it, in
turn informing our continuing work.

It is a long way from propaganda. Please don't be misled by comments to the
contrary.


Steve Hitchcock
Open Citation (OpCit) Project 
IAM Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865

Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature

[Steve Hitchcock]

At 16:46 20/08/01 -0400, Albert Henderson wrote:

I am not getting through. I should have asked,

Are there any valid reasons
to justify massive self-archiving?


Yes:
Improved access to data - faster, available everywhere, always
Higher productivity
Better journals
Better research

There is a tendency in this forum to become too concerned with the means
rather than the end - better research. Research must be progressive,
building on earlier findings, which is the primary purpose of dissemination
and publication. Publication is not the end. Publication is one of the
means. There are distractions, like the academic reward structure, which
viewed selfishly suggest the opposite, but ultimately if better research is
the goal then the means will take care of itself.


Steve Hitchcock
Open Citation (OpCit) Project 
IAM Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865

Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature

[T.D.BRODY]

On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Jim Till wrote:

But, what about reasons WHY the primary research literature should be
freed?  Here's my first attempt at a summary of some of the main reasons:

1.  It should be done:

 - Information gap: Libraries and researchers in poor countries can't
afford most of the journals that they need.

 - Library crisis: Libraries and researchers in rich countries can't
afford some of the journals that they need.

 - Public property: The results of publicly-funded research should be
publicly-available.

 - Academic freedom: Censorship based on cost rather than quality
can't be justified.

(and) - Easier access: A global repository of all scientific literature,
full-text searchable, and citation linked.

2.  It can be done:

- Open archives: Authors can self-archive their publications in open
archives.

- Cost issues: Both electronic journals and open archives can be
funded in a variety of ways.

- Branding issues: Essential quality control and certification need
not be sacrificed.

- IP issues: Desirable protection of intellectual property need not
be sacrificed.

What other important reasons have I neglected?

Jim Till
University of Toronto


--
Tim Brody
Computer Science, University of Southampton
email: tdb...@soton.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tdb198/

Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature

[T.D.BRODY]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Albert Henderson wrote:

> on Fri, 17 Aug 2001 Stevan Harnad  wrote:
>
> > The 36% referred to the number of authors that updated their reference
> > at that time: this is another irrelevant statistic (for Albert's
> > purposes), about which the author, Tim Brody, has already posted a
> > response to this Forum.
> >
> > http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/
> > http://opcit.eprints.org/ijh198/
>
> Now that this source is clearly involved in a
> propaganda campaign where conclusions are so often
> unrelated to the facts, who would take it seriously?
>

Dear Albert,

I would hope my research to be taken seriously in the light that it is
given: research into arXiv's metadata, of which 36% has a
"journal-ref" tag associated (with a much larger percentage within the
HEP fields).

> From this I would conclude that arXiv is central to the physics HEP
research field, and is replacing on-paper research as the preferred
communication medium (although by no means is replacing peer-review).

Beyond this, I would argue, propaganda style, that archiving research
papers in publically accessible Internet archives would be very useful
to the wider scientific community, for all the reasons that Till has
argued.

The motives for releasing research for we researchers in the "have"
world have little to do with library funding and everything to do with
easier, more efficient, fairer access, for both the author and the
reader.

The presumed cost-savings (here I am being cynical) through the use of
Internet archives are a useful carrot to encourage the more useful
aspects of Internet archives.

I put again what I asked in a previous post: why are you (are
you?) against providing public, Internet based access to the primary
"give-away" literature?

--
Tim Brody
Computer Science, University of Southampton
email: tdb...@soton.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tdb198/

Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature

[Albert Henderson]

on 21 Aug 2001 Steve Hitchcock  wrote:
 
> At 16:46 20/08/01 -0400, Albert Henderson wrote:
> > I am not getting through. I should have asked,
> >
> > Are there any valid reasons
> > to justify massive self-archiving?
> 
> Yes:
> Improved access to data - faster, available everywhere, always
> Higher productivity
> Better journals
> Better research
> 
> There is a tendency in this forum to become too concerned with the means
> rather than the end - better research. Research must be progressive,
> building on earlier findings, which is the primary purpose of dissemination
> and publication. Publication is not the end. Publication is one of the
> means. There are distractions, like the academic reward structure, which
> viewed selfishly suggest the opposite, but ultimately if better research is
> the goal then the means will take care of itself.

Better research and education are my primary concerns.

How will self-archiving produce better journals when 
it provides an excuse to further destroy journals' 
economic base (library subscriptions)?  

How will self-archiving produce better research when 
it mixes unreviewed articles with the formal 
literature?

"Self-archiving" worked in the 16th century, perhaps, 
when a relative handful of scientists exchanged 
letters. It may work today when a relative handful 
of physicists or mathematicians (who have the 
advantage of mathematical proof in their disciplines) 
exchange preprints within a narrow specialty. 

It will not work in biomedicine where practitioners 
and the majority of researchers depend on reviewers 
to sort out bad from good and where commercial 
conflicts of interest are a long-standing, profound 
problem.

Thanks for asking.

Best wishes,

Albert Henderson
Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000
<70244.1...@compuserve.com>

Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature

[Albert Henderson]

on 21 Aug 2001 T.D.BRODY  asked

> I put again what I asked in a previous post: why are you (are
> you?) against providing public, Internet based access to the primary
> "give-away" literature?

I am against self-archiving as a substitute for
libraries, library collections, and librarians. 
Every qualified researcher is (or can be) a member 
of a major research library. 

The history of libraries and photocopying 
technology has taught us that university 
managers will cut library spending based on
no more than a hint of "savings" and put
the "savings" in the bank. Since 1970, 
research universities have cut their library 
shares of spending in half in spite of
faculty pleading to maintain collections.
Resource sharing at some level fails to
provide the goods. Financial gains are
lost in the unmeasured quality of research
and education.  

Moreover, self-archiving opens the door to
a mess of unreviewed articles which many
readers are unable to evaluate in terms of
poor preparation, error, misconduct, and 
fraud. Again, quality of research and 
education will suffer. The quality of the
practice of medicine will also suffer.

Finally, your use of the term "give-away" 
is mistaken and misleading -- a major 
fallacy in this forum. Authors give nothing 
away. Although they are not paid in cash, 
authors exchange their reports for recognition 
and dissemination by editors that they value. 

Thanks for asking. I hope I have cleared
up my position a little.

Albert Henderson
Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000
<70244.1...@compuserve.com>

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.
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