Re: Napster: stealing another's vs. giving away one's own
Consumer Rip-Offs versus Author Give-Aways
Stevan harnad
In the Montreal Gazette today, William Watson (Economics, McGill
University) http://www.mcgill.ca/economics/faculty/watson/
unearthed this old chestnut again:
> [Providing and Using self-archived articles is like] Napster
> for nerds. That would be great if the journals and other
> distribution services charging for research were performing
> no useful function. But, in fact, they are providing a crucial
> function: intellectual triage... If everyone free-rode... how
> would these editors be compensated?
http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/editorials/story.asp?id=8BDD8265-FAED-4A08-B867-6137630738C5
Authors self-archiving their own peer-reviewed journal articles on the
web is not "napster for nerds" for the simple reason that napster is a
consumer rip-off whereas author self-archiving is a producer give-away.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#24.Napster
William Watson asks how the peer review could be paid for if everyone
could access the articles for free and no one paid the access-tolls any
more? The answer was in my article.
http://www.canada.com/search/story.aspx?id=8e912f55-eb8e-459e-8e7a-a7bd6d8dc995
Peer-review costs $500 per article. The journals earn $1500 per article
right now from access-tolls. That pays for peer-review plus a lot of
extras (such as the print version, digital markup, archiving, etc.).
If and when institutions no longer want to pay tolls for those extras
because they are happy with just the plain-vanilla self-archived
open-access versions instead, they will have saved 100% of their annual
toll-access expenses.
Institutions can then use 33% of those annual windfall savings to pay
journals to cover the peer review costs directly, for each outgoing
paper their own authors publish, instead of through access-tolls to buy
in the articles published by other institutions.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm
There are already 1000 "open-access" journals, recovering their costs this
way. http://www.doaj.org/
But there are still 23,000 toll-access journals. So self-archiving must
come first. It will provide open access for sure. Whether or when it
induces a transition from toll-access to open-access publishing remains
to be seen.
Stevan Harnad
Thread begins:
"Napster: stealing another's vs. giving away one's own"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0671.html
See also:
"Not Napster for Science" (by Peter Suber)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-03.htm#notnapster
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Hypermail Archive:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: Estimates on data and cost per department for institutional Archives?
On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Charles W. Bailey, Jr. wrote:
> DSpace has a broader scope than just eprints; however
> some cost data is available...
>
> Barton, Mary R., and Julie Harford Walker. "Building a
> Business Plan for DSpace, MIT Libraries' Digital Institutional
> Repository" Journal of Digital Information 4(2) (2003)
> (http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i02/Barton/). -
>
> ...the authors conservatively estimate a budget of $285,000 for
> FY 2003. The bulk of the costs are for staff ($225,000), with
> smaller allocations for operating expenses ($25,000) and system
> hardware expansion ($35,000). MIT's DSpace service offerings have
> two components: core services (basic repository functions) and
> premium services (e.g., digitization and e-format conversion,
> metadata support, expanded user storage space, and user alerts and
> reports). While core services are free, MIT reserves the right to
> potentially charge for premium services. For further information
> (http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-fed-test/implement/mellon.pdf)
>
> system development costs "included $1.8 million for development
> as well as 3 FTE HP staff and approximately $400,000 in system equipment."
(1) DSpace's "broader scope" is precisely what I meant by:
"if steam is to gather under institutional archiving
initiatives 'like DSpace' then they need to get their act
together and focus it specifically on the institutional
self-archiving of peer-reviewed research output."
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3415.html
(2) Other costs, for other uses, are irrelevant and should not be
factored in. (That includes all staff and operating expenses related to
those other uses.)
(3) EPrints cost an order of magnitude less to develop (and it was
developed, before DSpace, by the same person who developed DSpace,
Rob Tansley, but following specs that were specifically focussed on
the self-archiving of institutional peer-reviewed research output,
not other things).
(4) Creating and maintaining EPrint costs *two* orders of magnitude less
than the above figures for DSpace.
(5) None of these figures will answer my question about how much
self-archiving costs *per paper* until we reckon in the annual
institutional research article output.
(6) The biggest difference between DSpace and EPrints is that EPrints
does not offer a *business plan,* as above, but a plan for filling the
archives with the targetted content: the annual institutional research
article output.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#institution-facilitate-filling
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#researcher/authors-do
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#libraries-do
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#research-funders-do
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do
EPrints, in other words, is only about OA provision. DSpace is
about many other things. You will only mislead yourself and others
if you factor in the costs of all those other things in reckoning OA
self-archiving costs. DSpace and EPrints are equivalent insofar as their
OA self-archiving capabilities are concerned, and those are the only
capabilities with which those who are interested in OA provision need
be concerned.
(Before replying about preservation, digital content management,
courseware or electronic publication, please see the prior discussions
below!)
"EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Hypermail Archive:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: Estimates on data and cost per department for institutional Archives?
DSpace has a broader scope than just eprints; however, some cost data is available in the two documents I described below (from Current Cites volume 14, no. 12, December 2003): Barton, Mary R., and Julie Harford Walker. "[29]Building a Business Plan for DSpace, MIT Libraries' Digital Institutional Repository" [30]Journal of Digital Information 4(2) (2003) (http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v04/i02/Barton/). - Currently, there is a great deal of interest in institutional repositories, but little is known about their costs. This article outlines MIT's business plan for its well-known DSpace repository. Not considering software development and system implementation costs, the authors conservatively estimate a budget of $285,000 for FY 2003. The bulk of the costs are for staff ($225,000), with smaller allocations for operating expenses ($25,000) and system hardware expansion ($35,000). MIT's DSpace service offerings have two components: core services (basic repository functions) and premium services (e.g., digitization and e-format conversion, metadata support, expanded user storage space, and user alerts and reports). While core services are free, MIT reserves the right to potentially charge for premium services. For further information see: MIT Libraries' DSpace Business Plan Project--Final Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ([31]http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-fed-test/implement/mellon.pdf) ,which indicates that system development costs "included $1.8 million for development as well as 3 FTE HP staff and approximately $400,000 in system equipment." - [32]CB Best Regards, Charles Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development, University of Houston, Library Administration, 114 University Libraries, Houston, TX 77204-2000. E-mail: cbai...@uh.edu. Voice: (713) 743-9804. Fax: (713) 743-9811. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm
Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
This scriptural exegesis about "free" vs. "open" calls to mind the (alleged) words of a certain franco-austrian monarchess on the subject of brioche: "Let Them Eat Cake..." (M. Antoinette) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1525.html What research needs is toll-free access to all refereed research, immediately, to stanch its mounting impact-loss. It doesn't have it. Why on earth are we bickering about "open" vs. "free" instead of doing everything we can to hasten the stanching of that impact-loss, now? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif The BOAI definition of "open access" is not Holy Writ. We wrote it! We keep quoting back the same passages at one another, but we differ in our interpretation of them. I have already answered this point of Mike's several times over, but, for the sake of OA, I'm willing to say it yet again: Michael Eisen wrote: >s> On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Stevan Harnad wrote: >s> >s> There is nothing in the BOAI definition to support the "free/open" >s> distinction that some have since attempted to make. In particular, the >s> BOAI definition states that author/institution self-archiving of the >s> full-text of an article is one of the two ways to make that article open >s> access (BOAI-1 ["green"] and BOAI-2 ["gold"]). Proponents of >s> the free/open distinction have attempted to argue that BOAI-2 is >s> "open access" while BOAI-1 is merely "free access" (unless the author >s> negotiates something equivalent to the creative commons license, including >s> republication rights, as in some BOAI-2 journals). >s> >s> I have argued that this is not only *not* part of the BOAI definition, >s> but that it is unnecessary and would be a gratuitous deterrent if >s> taken to be a necessary condition for open access. > > I really don't want to beat this to death, and I think you and I are just > going to have to agree to disagree about the importance of redistribution > and reuse rights. However, I don't see how you can keep saying that the BOAI > doesn't support the distinction between free and open. The BOAI text can > speak for itself. > > "By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free > availability on the public internet, permitting any users to > read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the > full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them > as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, > without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those > inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only > constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role > for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control > over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly > acknowledged and cited." > [ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess ] As I have said repeatedly, every single capability listed in the first sentence above is provided by authors self-archiving their own full-texts on the web. Every single one. In the case of articles made OA through author self-archiving, the "other lawful purposes" simply does not include republishing by a third-party publisher, either on paper or online. That's all. Open access was always about open access, not about 3rd party republishing rights. (Moreover, with the article available to one and all -- for reading, downloading, copying, distributing *the URL* to others (so they can do likewise), printing, searching, linking, crawling, indexing, passing to software or any other lawful purposes -- it is not at all clear why any 3rd part publisher would want to republish and redistribute them!) The second sentence of the BOAI definition is vague, and it is not clear what the "should" means. Of course authorship and text integrity need to be protected. They are protected either way: whether the OA is provided by (1) publishing the text in an OA journal under a creative-commons license or by (2) publishing the text in an OA journal under ordinary copyright transfer, but the OA journal (being OA) contracts to make the full-text OA from its own website (as so many of the OA journals listed in DOAJ http://www.doaj.org/ do, and to retain republishing rights -- or is Mike suggesting that they not be counted as OA journals either, if they do not adopt the Creative Commons License?) or by (3) self-archiving the full-text on the author's own institutional website. As to the force of the "should" regarding republishing rights: it is vague, and if construed as "must," it is either in contradiction with the "any other lawful purpose" clause of the first sentence *or* it excludes all self-archived full-texts a priori if they do not renegotiate rights with their publisher: This would be to redefine BOAI-1: "Self-archiving one's own full text, free for all uses on the web, is *not* OA!" I assure you that if that far
Re: Free Access vs. Open Access
> > On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Stevan Harnad wrote: > > There is nothing in the BOAI definition to support the "free/open" > distinction that some have since attempted to make. In particular, the > BOAI definition states that author/institution self-archiving of the > full-text of an article is one of the two ways to make that article open > access (BOAI-1 ["green"] and BOAI-2 ["gold"]). Proponents of > the free/open distinction have attempted to argue that BOAI-2 is > "open access" while BOAI-1 is merely "free access" (unless the author > negotiates something equivalent to the creative commons license, including > republication rights, as in some BOAI-2 journals). > > I have argued that this is not only *not* part of the BOAI definition, > but that it is unnecessary and would be a gratuitous deterrent if > taken to be a necessary condition for open access. > I really don't want to beat this to death, and I think you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree about the importance of redistribution and reuse rights. However, I don't see how you can keep saying that the BOAI doesn't support the distinction between free and open. The BOAI text can speak for itself. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." I have been arguing that self-archiving where the original publisher restricts uses of the self-archived version of the paper falls outside the BOAI definition of open access. While I disagree strongly with you on this, I accept that you think there are tactical reasons to promote such restricted self-archiving. But I simply can not see how you can claim that making papers freely available in a way that explicitly prevents copying, distribution and many other uses is consistent with the BOAI definition of open access.
Re: EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?
This topic thread: "EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html Peter Suber reported the following in Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_01_11_fosblogarchive.html#a107394650955511367 "Outsell http://www.outsellinc.com/index.html has released 13 predictions for the information content industry in 2004. http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20040112005739&newsLang=en "Here's prediction #6: "The Open Access movement in scholarly and scientific publications will gain legitimacy." "In a separate, downloadable report to accompany the predictions, http://www.outsellinc.com/subscribe/freebriefsOutlook.htm Outsell says this about open access (p. 9): "The Open Access movement in scholarly and scientific publications will gain legitimacy as it transforms from a loose collection of disjointed initiatives into a new model backed by major universities and institutions worldwideAcademic institutions and the scholarly publishing world have been at loggerheads for years over the increasing cost of journal subscriptions. The irony is that most scholarly content is created by individuals employed by universities, who are then required to pay for it again in the form of published works. The new Public Library of Science is only the most prominent in a series of open-access challenges to the scholarly publishing industry, which finds itself in a real crisis situation as users and the organizations they work for start to revolt. As steam gathers under institutional archiving initiatives like DSpace, the infrastructure will be in place to support peer-to-peer from the get-go. Where there is a will, there is a way, and technology is providing the 'way' to enable creative new solutions for distribution, access, and sharing of scholarly content. Watch for even more radical and flexible knowledge-sharing initiatives in this space that will increasingly call into question the structure of an entire publishing sector." I only want to add that if steam is to gather under institutional archiving initiatives "like DSpace" then they need to get their act together and focus it specifically on the institutional self-archiving of peer-reviewed research output. Right now, DSpace, like EPrints, offers software, but unlike EPrints, DSpace offers absolutely no guidance or focus on what the software should be used for (i.e., how it is that institutions should go about designing and implementing a self-archiving policy). http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ "Archiving" is a big word, and means (far too) many things to (too) many people. Having MIT behind the self-archiving movement looked promising initially, but until and unless they get it into focus, DSpace will just continue to be a magnet for software downloads that generate everything except open-access peer-reviewed research output! (Having said that, I have to add that the EPrints archives so far are mostly near-empty too: http://software.eprints.org/archives.php 125 archives containing only 33,259 papers still averages only 250 papers per archive -- which is a far cry from each institution's annual peer-reviewed research article output! And in reality, even this is misleading, as there are a few EPrints archives with a lot of output and most of the rest with far less than 250! So even the "focussed" approach could stand to be more forceful!) This is not to say that open-access publishing (the "golden road" to open access) is doing any better! It is in fact providing far *less" open access annually than the "green" road of self-archiving (about one third as much). But it is at least operating nearer capacity (1000 out of 24,000 journals http://www.doaj.org/ is about 5%). Self-archiving could be providing the other 95% already. But the research community is passively waiting for imminent radical transitions to the golden publishing model -- they are alas not happening: the actual data are nothing like the chatter -- instead of taking matters into their own hands and providing open access overnight by self-archiving. What is needed is some vision, guidance and leadership: and a focused institutional open-access provision policy. That's not going to come from Outsell's financial prognostications. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0022.gif Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Hypermail Archive: http://
Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publication
But surely we don't want to settle for anything less than 100%! And what about those who are not served by the research libraries, wouldn't it be wonderful if they could get access as well? 'Enlightened licensing' may put us in a better position than we were in before, but it is still sub-optimal. David David C Prosser PhD Director SPARC Europe E-mail: david.pros...@bodley.ox.ac.uk Tel:+44 (0) 1865 284 451 Mobile: +44 (0) 7974 673 888 http://www.sparceurope.org -Original Message- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On Behalf Of Sally Morris Sent: 12 January 2004 23:54 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publication I think the CILIP response ignores the fact that new licensing arrangements from publishers have actually significantly increased the percentage of available literature which library patrons can now access. I'm not saying it's anything like 100 percent, but it is much improved Sally NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS - PLEASE UPDATE YOUR RECORDS. THANKS! Sally Morris, Chief Executive Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Phone: +44 (0)1903 871686 Fax: +44 (0)1903 871457 E-mail: chief-e...@alpsp.org ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org Our journal, Learned Publishing, is included in the ALPSP Learned Journals Collection, www.alpsp-collection.org
Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publication
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Sally Morris wrote:
> I think the CILIP response ignores the fact that new licensing arrangements
> from publishers have actually significantly increased the percentage of
> available literature which library patrons can now access. I'm not saying
> it's anything like 100 percent, but it is much improved
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0401&L=lis-cilip&T=0&F=&S=&P=2176
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3407.html
Licensing improves the return on the tolls for the HAVES who can afford
the tolls. Open access is about the HAVE-NOTS who cannot afford the
tolls.
The relevant facts are these:
(1) There are 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals worldwide, publishing
2.5 million articles per year.
(2) 23,000 of these 24,000 (>95%) are toll-access journals. (Tolls
are: subscriptions, licenses, pay-to-view.)
(3) It is true of every single toll-access article that (the institutions
of) most its potential users worldwide cannot afford access to it, no
matter how good the licensing arrangements. (Call that the worldwide
"HARVARD/HAVE-NOT" ratio.)
(4) The above (3) would continue to be true even if every one of the
toll-access journals were sold *at cost."
(5) Consequently it is true of every single toll-access article that
it is losing most of its potential research impact -- daily, weekly,
monthly, yearly, and cumulatively.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0025.gif
(6) Consequently, the research community and the progress, productivity
and impact of research require that toll-access for the HARVARDS be
supplemented with open-access for the HAVE-NOTS, regardless of the
licensing arrangements.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0047.gif
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#29.Sitting
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Hypermail Archive:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
Re: On the Need to Take Both Roads to Open Access
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Jan Velterop wrote:
> As a movement, open access could do worse than follow Stevan's strategy:
> publish in an open access journal when you can; if there is no open access
> journal for you, publish where you can and self-archive.
Amen!
"that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
-John Keats
> As a company, we have taken on the daunting task of delivering open
> access to the academic community...
Let us hope that in taking on this daunting task BMC will not do worse,
promoting only organic food and passing in silence over the part about
how to feed the starving: As long as BMC and PLoS have institututions'
and research funders' ears, they have a historic duty to tell them the
whole truth, and not just the part that is pertinent to the product they
are delivering.
> Stevan's been banging the drum for at least a decade now
Stay tuned! You ain't heard nothin' yet...
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Hypermail Archive:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
