Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
The one important point I read there is: « You can put your paper on your own Web site if you want. The only thing we insist on is that if we publish your article you don't publish it in a Springer or Wiley journal, too. In fact, I believe we have the most liberal copyright policy available. » Is that what the Elsevier copyright form says ? Furthermore, he did not say anything about putting it on another web site. On an open archive managed by someone else ? But the question was not asked. Unfortunately. Bernard On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 03:58:57PM +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote: > On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Richard Poynder wrote: > > > interview... with Elsevier Science chairman Derk Haank... > > in April's Information Today: > > http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm > > richard.poyn...@dsl.pipex.com > > http://www.richardpoynder.com > > The interview is interesting and shows the Elsevier chairman to > be very reasonable, open and well-intentioned. > > I think that this confirms yet again that it is and always has been a > waste of time and energy to demonize and vilify publishers like > Elsevier, who really are not any better or worse than any other > company, but just happen to find themselves in an anomalous business, > with large profits but an unusual confluence of interests, including > conflicts of interest, in a radically changing technological setting. > > Instead of misdirecting more time and energy into trying to portray > Elsevier as venal, it would be infinitely more constructive -- and more > likely to help resolve the large and growing conflict of interest > between what is best for research and researchers and what is best for > research journal publishers in the online era -- to focus instead on the > empirical points Derk Haank makes in the interview. Two of these are the > most relevant ones: > > (1) What are the products and services that research and researchers > want and need from research journal publishers in the online era, and > what are their true costs? > > (2) Will researcher/institution self-archiving, in providing free > online access to the full texts of all existing 20,000 research > journals (over half science/tech/medicine, and 1500 of them Elsevier > journals) eventually alter the current system (its products, services > and costs), or will it simply exist in parallel to it? > > This is a very reasonable question. It is clear that Elsevier is not > trying or intending to block the freeing of access to the entire > research journal literature through self-archiving. Elsevier is simply > assuming that either self-archiving will not take place on any > significant scale, or, if it does, it will have no appreciable effects > on the overall structure of research journal publishing. > http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do > > And this is all very reasonable and welcome! It confirms that the Budapest > Open Access Initiative (BOAI) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ should > proceed with vigor in reaching its goal of Open Access. As soon as BOAI > succeeds the goal of open access is (by definition) attained: it is > no longer true that any researcher, anywhere, fails to have online > access to the full corpus of 20,000 research journals because his > institution cannot afford the access tolls. > > The further question of whether or not the research journal system > will remain more or less as it is now under these new open-access > conditions is an empirical question -- and one on which [NB!] nothing > urgent or important for research and researchers worldwide depends! Once > online access to it all is free for all, any continuing journal price > rises will become an irrelevant side-show for research and researchers, > for they will have free access to it all. The conflict of interest will > be resolved. > > Regarding BOAI Strategy 2 > http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals > (the establishment of alternative, open-access journals -- > self-archiving is BOAI Strategy 1), it is quite understandable that > established journal publishers like Elsevier should hope that there > will be no success: To hope otherwise it to wish success onto one's > competitors! But here too it is an empirical question whether the > research/researcher side of the PostGutenberg conflict-of-interest -- > the side that is increasingly pressing to have, at long last, the lost > research impact that access-denying toll-barriers have cost them for > 350 years, now that access-barriers are no longer necessary -- will > resolve the conflict of interest not only by self-archiving its > refereed research online, but also by creating new open-access journals > (and converting established ones) for that research, and preferring > those journals to the established toll-based ones for submitting to and > publishing in. > > The way to answer such empirical questions is not for researchers to > continue to sit and deprecate Elsevier and the status quo, but to
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review - NOT!)
On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Mark Doyle wrote: > P.S. I hadn't noticed that Stevan had once again changed the subject > line of a thread biased to his own point of view. My thread > has nothing to do with "implementing peer review", but with implementing > archiving in a non-publisher based manner. This kind of thing > is what makes me a reluctant participant in the debates here. Mark's original posting had been on the thread "Re: Excerpts from FOS Newsletter," which does not describe the discussion topic but is merely a thread for Excerpts from the FOS Newsletter. The "Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)" to which I redirected it has been covering this topic in this Forum now continuously for 2 years. Many postings have appeared on this thread that have different views about costs and essentials. The purpose of a thread-name is to allow later users of the archive to follow a continuous line of discussion. I'm quite happy to let Mark's "NOT!" stand henceforth, if it makes him feel less reluctant about participating. [I actually think this is a much-neglected but important function of a moderator. Not to bias the tenor of the thread-names, but to keep related items under a continuous header rather than letting them go off willy-nilly in directions that are not transparent from or even unrelated to the thread-name. I have silently changed many idiosyncratic or unrepresentative subject headings in this Forum from its inception in 1998 with an eye to making it more integrated and navigable to later users.] I'll reply to Mark's substantive points a little later. Stevan
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review - NOT!)
P.S. I hadn't noticed that Stevan had once again changed the subject line of a thread biased to his own point of view. My thread has nothing to do with "implementing peer review", but with implementing archiving in a non-publisher based manner. This kind of thing is what makes me a reluctant participant in the debates here. Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society do...@aps.org
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Greetings David, On Friday, March 29, 2002, at 05:25 PM, David Goodman wrote: Mark, In what respect are PDF and especially TeX archives flawed? A uniform TeX archive built upon high level macros providing tagged information might be a good archival format well into the future. However, the key concepts here are "uniform" and "macros". arXiv.org is very far from uniform and this makes the collection rather unwieldy. I have no doubt that TeX the program is maintainable into the future. However, migration to new formats that take advantage of new features can be hampered by the limitation of what the author submitted. Thus, TeX by authors using a good macro package can produce internally hyperlinked PDF files, but authors who don't use the packages don't get to migrate to the new features. An XML format wouldn't have this problem. Searching and linking are much more robustly done when the source is marked up. TeX can be used this way. In fact, under my direction at the APS we have developed REVTeX 4 which, if used, correctly, provides almost all of the tagging needed to extract a fully tagged XML file. However, authors still need to apply it correctly and many do not. As for PDF, it really depends on how it was created. Word-generated PDF files can have font problems on various platforms and newer versions of Acrobat Reader sometimes create problems for existing files causing characters to be dropped. We have had to redistill PDF files that were created with particular versions of the Adobe distiller for our own journals because it there was a flaw that made them render incorrectly in some PDF viewers. Other users occasionally report problems when they print the documents (missing characters, blank pages, etc.). Good PDF from TeX can be difficult to produce and the naive approach (dvips -> distiller in the default configuration) produces awful results. PDF is also not marked up for reliably extracting information that could be used for linking articles. Adobe has added new features to PDF to help here, but again, the authoring tool or someone has to add the markup. PDF presumes a particular final formatting aspect. It can't be reworked to be displayed to take advantage of a new technology (we are talking 20 years out). Bottom line is that PDF is pretty much a proprietary format that must be tested in many viewers and even then, there are many subtleties to producing good PDFs. The only thing I could find from your posting that they were deficient in is the provision of links. But this can be incorporated into the preparation of text, especially if all the documents are on OAI repositories. Right, but my point is that only publishers (or librarians in the case of SLAC/SPIRES for instance) incorporate them. Much of this can be automated but there is a labor component for the hard parts. But I also have in mind features like "find all papers that cite M. Doyle". The other part that might be missing is an organization that will permanently stand behind the repository. I do not think anyone regards commercial publishers as sufficient, and in response they are beginning to make arrangements with more durable organizations. Societies might be sufficient, if they are strong societies like yours'. But surely you could just as well adopt the responsibility of maintaining ArXiv as you accept the responsibility of maintaining your current journals. Yes, but we do have to pay for it. I would rather see a partnership between APS and libraries to maintain the archive. The we could externalize the cost (rather than internalize more costs making it harder to move away from the subscription model). I consider publishers' platforms universally a nuisance, and so do our users. Their use is increasing, because publishers do their best to direct users there as a form of self-advertising. If a user has a reference, the user wants to go to it, or at least the journal, not the publisher's home page. Hmm, almost all major publishers are in CrossRef and this almost always goes to a wrapper page with at least the abstract and a link to the full text. I wouldn't call that "self-advertising" (that is really cynical). There are good reasons to go to a wrapper page as well (even if the articles themselves are free as in arXiv.org) - the articles may be available in different formats or there may be useful features such as linking or citing articles or pointers to errata and other related papers that the user should be aware of. APS interfaces are decidedly bare bones and users usually compliment them for being so. Anyway, from the APS point of view we are taking users to the version we certify as being peer reviewed. We wish it could be free to all, but we don't have the economic model to accommodate this at the moment. The various features for personalization are of limited value when they are linked to a single publisher. They might be of great value if they offered universal coverage, and the APS could well pr
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Greetings, I'm going to be brief in my response since I don't really have much time to devote this. Stevan keeps misrepresenting what I have said. I have not advocated waiting on self-archiving at all. Only that in parallel and as part of initiatives that create self-archiving or alternative journal solutions, attention should be paid to true electronic archiving. It doesn't matter if this is "relatively new" - it is a cost today and anyone serious about taking advantage of electronic publishing to revolutionize scholarly communication knows that is important. My only interest is in getting this cost recognized and true archiving implemented widely so that such costs can be externalized by publishers like the APS so that we can make a transition to open access. The soapbox (and resources) of something like BOAI should be used do something concrete beyond just creating free PDF or HTML archives which we all know how to do and we all know are cheap. The current economic model for peer review and archiving is very much still tied tightly to publisher restricted access to the article content. Undermining this without developing a true alternative to what the current system provides is naive and may lead to a true loss for the scholarly community. Open access is an APS objective, but it is nigh impossible until there is an alternative economic model in place for doing the two things we deem most important - peer review and creating a true electronic archive (note that disseminating that archive is not a requirement, but again there are no viable alternatives at this point). If the costs continue to go unrecognized or are omitted in the debate, then it is impossible for us to make a transition without throwing away some aspects that we (as representatives of our members) already know to be essential. The projects Stevan points to are quite admirable. But they are an 80/20 approach - 80% of the linking etc. is trivial, the remaining 20% quite difficult. The last 5% is usually impossible without labor. With a proper XML archive, you get a 100% solution all at once. Publishers already automate what they can. Stevan argues that only open access and peer review are essential and the rest is details about implementation. I find this incredibly naive and for me to believe this I would have to throw away my last eight years of experience both working on arXiv.org and at a publisher. Implementation is much more difficult and costly without proper infrastructure. Advocating partial solutions to the full problem (i.e., just focusing on open access) will not lead quickly to the proper infrastructure and it ironically makes it much harder for well-intentioned publishers like the APS to develop and move to an open access model. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society do...@aps.org
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Richard Poynder wrote: > interview... with Elsevier Science chairman Derk Haank... > in April's Information Today: > http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm > richard.poyn...@dsl.pipex.com > http://www.richardpoynder.com The interview is interesting and shows the Elsevier chairman to be very reasonable, open and well-intentioned. I think that this confirms yet again that it is and always has been a waste of time and energy to demonize and vilify publishers like Elsevier, who really are not any better or worse than any other company, but just happen to find themselves in an anomalous business, with large profits but an unusual confluence of interests, including conflicts of interest, in a radically changing technological setting. Instead of misdirecting more time and energy into trying to portray Elsevier as venal, it would be infinitely more constructive -- and more likely to help resolve the large and growing conflict of interest between what is best for research and researchers and what is best for research journal publishers in the online era -- to focus instead on the empirical points Derk Haank makes in the interview. Two of these are the most relevant ones: (1) What are the products and services that research and researchers want and need from research journal publishers in the online era, and what are their true costs? (2) Will researcher/institution self-archiving, in providing free online access to the full texts of all existing 20,000 research journals (over half science/tech/medicine, and 1500 of them Elsevier journals) eventually alter the current system (its products, services and costs), or will it simply exist in parallel to it? This is a very reasonable question. It is clear that Elsevier is not trying or intending to block the freeing of access to the entire research journal literature through self-archiving. Elsevier is simply assuming that either self-archiving will not take place on any significant scale, or, if it does, it will have no appreciable effects on the overall structure of research journal publishing. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do And this is all very reasonable and welcome! It confirms that the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ should proceed with vigor in reaching its goal of Open Access. As soon as BOAI succeeds the goal of open access is (by definition) attained: it is no longer true that any researcher, anywhere, fails to have online access to the full corpus of 20,000 research journals because his institution cannot afford the access tolls. The further question of whether or not the research journal system will remain more or less as it is now under these new open-access conditions is an empirical question -- and one on which [NB!] nothing urgent or important for research and researchers worldwide depends! Once online access to it all is free for all, any continuing journal price rises will become an irrelevant side-show for research and researchers, for they will have free access to it all. The conflict of interest will be resolved. Regarding BOAI Strategy 2 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals (the establishment of alternative, open-access journals -- self-archiving is BOAI Strategy 1), it is quite understandable that established journal publishers like Elsevier should hope that there will be no success: To hope otherwise it to wish success onto one's competitors! But here too it is an empirical question whether the research/researcher side of the PostGutenberg conflict-of-interest -- the side that is increasingly pressing to have, at long last, the lost research impact that access-denying toll-barriers have cost them for 350 years, now that access-barriers are no longer necessary -- will resolve the conflict of interest not only by self-archiving its refereed research online, but also by creating new open-access journals (and converting established ones) for that research, and preferring those journals to the established toll-based ones for submitting to and publishing in. The way to answer such empirical questions is not for researchers to continue to sit and deprecate Elsevier and the status quo, but to go ahead and implement BOAI Strategies 1 and 2. At the very least, the outcome will be Open Access at last. The rest remains to be seen (but is far less urgent or consequential). Stevan Harnad 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 or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess
Interview with Derk Haank
Hi, A while back I sought from members of this mailing list suggestions for questions to put to Michael Mabe, of Reed Elsevier, for an interview I planned to do for Information Today (www.infotoday.com). For a number of reasons the interview was eventually conducted with Elsevier Science chairman Derk Haank, rather than Michael Mabe. The resulting interview is published in April's Information Today, and can be viewed at: http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm Thanks to the many people who suggested questions/issues to cover. Richard Poynder Richard Poynder Freelance Journalist Phone: + 44 (0)191-386-0072 Mobile: 0793-202-4032 E-mail: richard.poyn...@journalist.co.uk E-mail: ric...@dial.pipex.com E-mail: richard.poyn...@dsl.pipex.com Web: www.richardpoynder.com
