Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy
Whether the cost is $500 per published paper or $1500 per published paper, there are some real costs in running a peer review and document archiving system - computer hardware an software and administrative staff time, at the very least. A review study that I undertook last year suggests that the true figure is closer to the $500 than the $1500, assuming a rejection rate of 50%. If rejection rates are very high, as in Manfredi la Manna's example, then the cost per *published* paper is higher. However, one has to ask whether, in a paperless sytem, rejection rates need to be so high! Under OAI, the cost of the archiving is borne by the author's institution. Removing journal subscription charges removes financial obstacles to access by *readers*. Access by authors is a different matter - the costs of peer review, however high or low, have to be borne somehow. If an author wants to publish in a prestigious journal, and journals have gone over to the author-pays system in ordr to provide free reader access, then the author needs to find a source of funds from somewhere. Suggesting that the author-pays system is no better than the old subscription- based system is unnecessarily negative. It *is* better because (a) the overall cost to the academic world is lower; (b) scholars in poor countries/poor institutions can read everything; (c) scholars' work can be made available on OAI-compliant servers. If, however, an author wants the prestige of having their work associated with a high-quality source, then the costs of the quality- control system have to be paid. So far as poor countries are concerned, maybe the international scientific and scholarly associaitions are best placesd to organise the necessary cross-subsidies? Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK. Quoting ept e...@biostrat.demon.co.uk: Alan Story wrote: Jan: Further on the question of open access by potential authors. A few questions re: BioMed Central waivers ( of the $500 article-processing charge):... My understanding is that both the BMC $500 charge and the PloS $1500 charge are to cover the costs both of document conversion and peer review and I am not sure what % of these figures is for peer review. I do not understand why peer review costs are considered to be so high, since the reviewers give their professional skills for free and the other costs are merely mailing and record keeping. The whole process can now be automated, as has been done by the Canadian journal, Conservation Ecology (www.consecol.org). See also www.arl.org/sparc/ for other tools for automated peer reviewing. Once such tools are set up, peer review costs must be almost nil. For developing country scientific organisations, replacing one unaffordable cost (tolls) by another unaffordable cost (APC) is of little encouragement. Even though the APC costs are substantially less, and may be eliminated for developing country authors (if they can 'make a reasonable case', and see the query from Alan Storey), one must hope that these efforts are interim means of getting from 'here' to 'there'. To ensure the international scientific community has access to ALL research ouput, there must be a true level playing field. Only then can the 'missing' research generated in the developing world, and critical for international programmes (in AIDS/malaria/tuberculosis/environmental protection/biodiversity/taxonomy/ biosafety/biopolicy) become part of mainstream knowledge. Only then can the isolation of the scientific community in under-resourced countries be overcome and international partnerships be established to the benefit of all of us. Carry out a search for 'malaria' on the non-profit distributor of many developing country journals, Bioline International, to see an example of the missing research. Use www.bioline.org.br and search from the homepage across all material on the system. My understanding has always been that the open access movement aimed to provide free access to institutional archives - free of costs both to the author and the reader. Any costs to be met would be borne by institutions, which have an interest in distributing their own research output in ways that make the greatest impact. Again, my understanding is that costs for setting up an institutional eprint server would be: an initial modest setting-up cost, some hand-holding costs for authors in preparing documents for the eprints servers, followed by low maintainenance costs. These could surely be 'absorbed' by most organisations. Essential peer review costs would be readily paid for by savings plus automation. And that sounds just fine for science in the developing world. Barbara Kirsop Electronic Publishing Trust for Development - www.epublishingtrust.org
Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy
There are two sides to the first world/developing world research divide: access to the First world by the Developing world (FD), and access to the Developing world by the First world (DF). An APC model solves the FD problem - as an author is paying the publisher to provide maximum dissemination through free-access, therefore (assuming the reader has access to the Web!) any researcher can access the paper regardless of their financial situation. The DF problem is more to do with journal-impact language barriers rather than the economics of the situation. In theory developing-world researchers - given the current system - are on an equal footing with any other world researcher. Arthur Smith (hope I'm not quoting out of context) has said in this list that the first world is currently subsidising the developing, as it is paying the vast majority of the costs (through subscriptions etc.), while the developing world pays very little of this but has the same potential to be published in the high-impact journals. No sustainable economic model can allow the developing world to have both free access AND be able to publish in those first-world, high-impact journals for free - not without being subsidised by the first world. That said, free (open) access *will* allow developing-world journals to play on a level playing field with the first. Once the literature is free-access, aggregating services can index both first-world and developing-world journals - and provide impact factors for both. All the best, Tim Brody - Original Message - From: ept e...@biostrat.demon.co.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 3:43 PM Subject: Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy Alan Story wrote: Jan: Further on the question of open access by potential authors. A few questions re: BioMed Central waivers ( of the $500 article-processing charge): . EPT is watching these discussions and trying to work out the impact of open access on developing country science. My understanding is that both the BMC $500 charge and the PloS $1500 charge are to cover the costs both of document conversion and peer review and I am not sure what % of these figures is for peer review. I do not understand why peer review costs are considered to be so high, since the reviewers give their professional skills for free and the other costs are merely mailing and record keeping. The whole process can now be automated, as has been done by the Canadian journal, Conservation Ecology (www.consecol.org). See also www.arl.org/sparc/ for other tools for automated peer reviewing. Once such tools are set up, peer review costs must be almost nil. For developing country scientific organisations, replacing one unaffordable cost (tolls) by another unaffordable cost (APC) is of little encouragement. Even though the APC costs are substantially less, and may be eliminated for developing country authors (if they can 'make a reasonable case', and see the query from Alan Storey), one must hope that these efforts are interim means of getting from 'here' to 'there'. To ensure the international scientific community has access to ALL research ouput, there must be a true level playing field. Only then can the 'missing' research generated in the developing world, and critical for international programmes (in AIDS/malaria/tuberculosis/environmental protection/biodiversity/taxonomy/ biosafety/biopolicy) become part of mainstream knowledge. Only then can the isolation of the scientific community in under-resourced countries be overcome and international partnerships be established to the benefit of all of us. Carry out a search for 'malaria' on the non-profit distributor of many developing country journals, Bioline International, to see an example of the missing research. Use www.bioline.org.br and search from the homepage across all material on the system. My understanding has always been that the open access movement aimed to provide free access to institutional archives - free of costs both to the author and the reader. Any costs to be met would be borne by institutions, which have an interest in distributing their own research output in ways that make the greatest impact. Again, my understanding is that costs for setting up an institutional eprint server would be: an initial modest setting-up cost, some hand-holding costs for authors in preparing documents for the eprints servers, followed by low maintainenance costs. These could surely be 'absorbed' by most organisations. Essential peer review costs would be readily paid for by savings plus automation. And that sounds just fine for science in the developing world. Barbara Kirsop Electronic Publishing Trust for Development - www.epublishingtrust.org
Re: Interoperability - subject classification/terminology
At 13:31 15/01/03 +, Pauline Simpson wrote: Following on from the OAI Geneva meeting - to open the discussion please see http://tardis.eprints.org/discussion/ Pauline, A thought-provoking page that helpfully outlines all the issues. A few points below, but first we need to make a distinction between works where the full text is not available digitally, and those where it is. So the question whether there is a need for classification boils down to: Yes for the former, and (mostly) No for the latter. By (mostly) I mean let's make it optional. That means, in the case of institutional repositories of research papers (the latter category), don't burden the repository with the need to maintain categorization as a core task. Leave that to services. If it's worth doing, then people will find the resources to do it, but it must not compromise the task of repositories, which is to make the texts available. If full texts are available, we have the chance to automate search and indexing, say full-text indexing or citation indexing. This is vastly more powerful and cost-effective, but we have to recognise it is not the same thing as classification. Full text indexing can begin to tell us what a text is *about*, rather than simply where it is located, the classical purpose of classification. Through knowing what a text is about, we can make connections with other works in ways that are much more flexible than is offered by classification. You ask: Can we rely on web search engines like Google to search deeply or accurately enough? At the moment, simply, yes. It's not the fault of Google that it can't index most of the journal literature. Where I think classification may continue to have a role is in interface design - you give examples. Classification can inform browsing. This brings us back to services. Services will produce interfaces. In principle, repositories do not need to produce user (as opposed to author or management) interfaces, although in practice there will be few institutional repositories that will be able to resist doing so, for good reasons, but again, they don't have to, and it should be optional and minimal. When you ask if the 'push' scenario should replace harvesting, that's interesting because it is counter to the framework OAI has put in place. That is, to reduce the burden on data providers at the expense of service providers, recognising that we have to make the entry threshold for authors and repositories as low as possible. That can make it difficult for service providers, see Liu et al. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april01/liu/04liu.html but overall it probably remains the best approach, especially if repositories concentrate on optimising the submitted metadata within the OAI framework. Steve Hitchcock Open Citation (OpCit) Project http://opcit.eprints.org/ 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 ___ OAI-eprints mailing list oai-epri...@lists.openlib.org http://lists.openlib.org/mailman/listinfo/oai-eprints
