AAP launches anti-OA lobbying organization (fwd)

[Stevan Harnad]

   From SOAF. See also Peter Suber's splendid, measured reply in
   OA News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_08_19_fosblogarchive.html#3651797581
19288416
   (more to come in Peter's September SOAN).

Exercise: See whether PRISM has managed to come up with ny substantive
point that has not already been refuted many times over, e.g. in:

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005)
Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence
and Fruitful Collaboration. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11160/

--

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:  Sara Firestone
212-255-0200, Ext. 257


New Initiative Preserving Research Integrity to Unite Scholars, Publishers

PRISM Coalition to Inform Public on Risks Government Interference Poses to
Science and Medicine


New York, NY, August 23, 2007: A new initiative was announced today to
bring together like minded scholarly societies, publishers, researchers and
other professionals in an effort to safeguard the scientific and medical
peer-review process and educate the public about the risks of proposed
government interference with the scholarly communication process.

The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine is a
coalition launched with developmental support from the Professional &
Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers
(AAP) to alert Congress to the unintended consequences of government
interference in scientific and scholarly publishing.

The group has launched a website at
http://www.prismcoalition.org , where it
articulates the PRISM Principles, an affirmation of publishers'
contribution to science, research, and peer review, and an expression of
support for continued private sector efforts to expand access to scientific
information.  ( http://www.prismcoalition.org/prism/about.htm )

"We are enthusiastic about this initiative and the potential of our new
website to educate policy makers and citizens about our efforts to increase
access to information, to alert them to the very real threat to peer review
that ill-considered government interference represents, and to explore the
ways in which we can safeguard peer review as a critical component of
scientific integrity," said Patricia Schroeder, president and CEO of
AAP.  "Only by preserving the essential integrity of the peer-review
process can we ensure that scientific and medical research remains
accurate, authoritative, and free from manipulation and censorship and
distinguishable from junk science."

Recently, there have been legislative and regulatory efforts to compel
not-for-profit and commercial journals to surrender to the Federal
government a large number of published articles that scholarly journals
have paid to peer review, publish, promote, archive and distribute.  Mrs.
Schroeder stressed that government interference in scientific publishing
would force journals to give away their intellectual property and weaken
the copyright protections that motivate journal publishers to make the
enormous investments in content and infrastructure needed to ensure
widespread access to journal articles.  It would jeopardize the financial
viability of the journals that conduct peer review, placing the entire
scholarly communication process at risk.

"Peer review has been the global standard for validating scholarly research
for more than 400 years and we want to make sure it remains free of
unnecessary government interference, agenda-driven research, and bad
science," said Dr. Brian Crawford, chairman of the executive council of
AAP's Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division.  "The free market of
scholarly publishing is responsive to the needs of scholars and scientists
and balances the interests of all stakeholders."

Critics argue that peer reviewed articles resulting from government funded
research should be available at no cost.  However, the expenses of peer
review, promotion, distribution and archiving of articles are paid for by
private sector publishers, and not with tax dollars. Mrs. Schroeder pointed
out that these expenses amount to hundreds of millions of dollars each year
for non-profit and commercial publishers.  "Why would a federal agency want
to duplicate such expenses instead of putting the money into more research
funding?" she said.

The PRISM website includes factual information and reasoned commentary
designed to educate citizens and policy makers, to dispel inaccuracies and
counter the rhetorical excesses indulged in by some advocates of open
access, who believe that no one should have to pay for information that is
peer reviewed at the expense of non-profit and commercial publishers.

Featured on the PRISM website are backgrounders on peer review,
dissemination and access, preservation of the scholarly record and new
approaches publishers are taking along with discussion about the risks of
government intervention to the sustainability o

Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> For a scientist, Stevan, you sometimes make some astonishingly broad
> generalizations. E.g., in response to Rick Anderson you wrote:
> 
> At 4:18 PM -0400 8/15/07, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> > (b) Every single one of those articles (without exception, and in stark
> > contrast to the rest of the digital domain) is written, and always has
> > been written, purely for the sake of research usage and impact, not for
> > royalty income.
> 
> > (d) All these authors want only three things: (1) to have their papers
> > peer-reviewed by an established peer-review authority (with a
> > track-record for quality and rigor) and (2) to have those peer-reviewed
> > papers (certified as such, by the name of the journal that implemented
> > the peer review) accessible online to every potential user on the
> > planet, with absolutely nothing blocking their (online) access -- least
> > of all whether the would-be user's institution happens to be able to
> > afford to pay for subscription access to the journal in which it
> > happened to be published.
> 
> Well, I can tell you of some authors whose articles we have published in
> our scholarly journals who have profited handsomely (in the thousands of
> dollars) from frequent reproduction of their articles in commercial
> anthologies and university course packs. (In one case recently we received
> a payment of $14,000 from CCC for a large amount of copying done from an
> edited volume in a number of universities overseas.) They have all cashed
> the checks we sent them, so presumably they did "want" the money even
> though they weren't motivated originally to write by the pursuit of
> profit.

Simple reply:

(1) That's certainly not the reason those authors wrote those articles.

(2) I didn't say researchers (or anyone) would not welcome a windfall
bonus, if it happens.

(3) How often do you think this kind of windfall hits the authors of the
annual 2.5 million articles published in the planet's 25,000
peer-reviewed journals?

> Below you say I'm confused about fair use in your "Fair Use Button"
> because I really don't like the implication it might have for books. Well,
> as I've just said in response to Peter's posting, I have no problem with
> an author supplying a colleague with a single copy of an article for
> research and teaching purposes, so we have no disagreement there in
> principle.

So what are we arguing about?

> (See my questions about responding to requests resulting in multiple-copy
> distributions, however.)

See my reply: The Fair Use Button is for free, one-on-one copies.

> But you are simply wrong that book authors are not interested in giving
> away their book content for free.

I didn't say none were. I just said many (most) aren't, whereas all
journal-article authors. without exception, are.

> In university press publishing many authors are paid no royalties, and
> some are even asked to supply subsidies, and these authors would have no
> compunction about giving away their books for free. They could readily
> fall under your three points about what scholarly authors really "want."

Eventually such books will probably come under the OA banner. But right
now, the only exception-free give-away domain is journal articles, and
that is where OA needs to focus first.

> Even some high-profile authors like Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler have
> persuaded their publishers to allow them to post their books online for
> free. So, as a generalization, that is much too broad.

My generalization was perfectly correct: All journal articles are author
give-aways; not all books are. That's all.

> So, too, is your flat assertion that "books are not peer reviewed." I
> guess you're not aware that to be a member of the Association of American
> University Presses a university-based publisher MUST have a process of
> peer review in place, and every book published by an AAUP-member press is
> peer reviewed.

I don't think the academic community will agree with you that books are
peer-reviewed publications. Books are reviewed, sometimes rigorously.
But that is not what is considered peer-reviewed publication by the
academic community.

To repeat: There are potential affinities between the peer-reviewed
journal article literature and certain scholarly/scientific books, and
OA will no doubt generalize from the former to some of the latter
eventually. But not yet. OA first has to prevail on its own
exception-free home turf: peer-reviewed research journal articles,
written for research impact, not for royalty income, without exception.

> That's about 8,000 per year!  Add to that the many thousands more
> published by academic commercial publishers, which may not be required to
> conduct peer review but generally do. So, peer review is NOT a
> differentiating factor between scholarly journals articles and scholarly
> books.

Sandy, nothing much hinges on this, but please conduct a poll on whether
a research finding can be charact

RE: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Velterop, Jan, Springer UK wrote:

> Peter Hirtle is right. Since a long time I have held the view
> that -- at least in the realm of peer-reviewed research
> publication -- copyright, particularly its transfer from author
> to publisher, is essentially used as a proxy for money. Often
> combined with real money in the form of e.g. page charges.
> Together, the transfer of copyright and real money charges are
> the price an author pays for the service of having his research
> formally published in a peer-review journal, which he needs,
> inter alia, for career and prospective funding purposes.

Actually (lest we forget), it's journal subscriptions that are paying for
all that. (And what the researcher/author needs in the online era is just
peer review. And that's what he's "paying" for by letting the publisher
charge to sell his work through the subscriptions, without even having
to pay a penny of royalties to the author. And that's also what the
peers are providing their review services (free) to the publisher to help
subsidize. Jan's long-held view is a complacent one: It makes it seem
as if the author and the referees are all supplicants to the publisher...)

> One could see the use of copyright as a proxy for money as
> inappropriate, but certainly in the print era it was a pragmatic
> and workable way of supporting the system of peer-reviewed formal
> research journals. Copyright, the property of the publisher after
> transfer, was converted into real money by exploiting the
> exclusive right to sell (access to) the material.

In the print era, subscription tolls were necessary in order to provide
access at all. And paper distribution and access was costly. In the
online era publishers are no longer needed in order to provide access.
They are only needed to provide (i.e., implement) peer review.

> In the web world, the situation is different. First of all,
> authors can quite easily disseminate their articles themselves on
> the web. That doesn't make them formally published in a
> peer-reviewed journal, but it does the job of spreading the
> knowledge. This is what preprints do, or at least can do
> (terribly antiquated word, 'preprints', but let's ignore that for
> now).

To repeat, what authors want is peer review. Peers review for free. The
publisher manages the process. In exchange they get to sell the paper
and online edition without even having to pay author royalties -- but
not to block the author from giving away his own work to those would-be
users who can't afford subscription access.

> Remains the issue of formal, official, publishing in a
> peer-reviewed journal. On the 'other planet' authors seem to
> expect publishers of journals to formally publish their articles
> in peer-reviewed journals (the reputations of which often took a
> long time to build up) for free, and to regard it as a right
> subsequently to be able just to add the label "formally published
> in journal XYZ" to their preprints in order to give those the
> needed authority and trustworthiness. The "Hop on the bus, Gus,
> the other suckers have paid for us" school of thought.

Jan seems to keep forgetting that on this planet publishers are making
ends meet, handily, by selling subscriptions.

> Open access is fundamentally incompatible with the use of
> copyright as a proxy for money to pay for formal peer-reviewed
> publication. I favour the transition to paying with plain money,
> and open access will be the entirely natural outcome of that.
> Technical and procedural problems exist, to be sure. But if the
> choice is between trying to solve those or to evade or even deny
> them, my vote goes to solving them.

As I have replied to Jan many, many times before, publishers can and
will be paid for peer review once researchers' institutions are no longer
being paid for it many times over by subscriptions (but not before). The
institutional subscription savings windfall will pay for the peer review
many times over. Right now, though, subscriptions are still paying the
(entire) bill (and its for a lot more than peer review). And authors can
and will and should already provide access to their work to all would-be
users who cannot afford the subscription access. Research is funded
and conducted for usage and impact, not in order to keep supporting
publishers in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

Stevan Harnad

Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> I actually agree, too, that the practice of an author sharing a paper with
> another researcher who requests it, one request at a time, should be
> considered as fair use-and should be allowed by all publishers anyway. But
> Stevan doesn't tell us what limits, if any, he puts on authors'
> distributing their articles once a contract has been signed and rights
> transferred. Does he, for instance, condone responding to a request to
> have the article posted on a listserv to 1,000 people subscribed to that
> listserv?

No, we're talking about one-on-one, individual sending of individual
eprints on individual request, for research use.

> Does he think it is ok for an author to sell an article for use in a
> course pack for a large course in a non-profit university, or in a
> for-profit university (like Phoenix)?

Absolutely not. We are talking about authors giving (not selling) individual
copies of their own postprints, for research use.

> Publishers would rightly object to the latter, but theoretically Stevan's
> "Fair Use Button" could be used to respond to such a request.

Someone could design a "sales button," but we certainly haven't. The
EPrints Fair Use Button simply emails a free copy if the author agrees
to the request. (This is about OA, remember?)

> And if Stevan doesn't think the latter is fair use, then isn't that a
> request for permission that he would then deny through his device?

It's not a request for permission; it's a request for a copy (and an
offer to provide it). No one spoke about selling eprints. If someone
wanted to teach a course with my eprint, I'd send the requester a copy.
I'd send it to individual students requesting it too. Putting it in a
course pack on the other end is not my business, and is between the one
who is trying to make that use of it, and the publisher. What I called
(and continue to call) Fair Use is my sending it to the requester, and
the requester receiving, downloading, storing and reading it for
his own individual use. I have no views on the other uses except to say
that this is all just interim nonsense, and that this coy, absurd "Fair
Use" interregnum -- in which 38% of postprints are ceremoniously deposited
as Closed Access instead of Open Access because of an embargo, and are
distributed instead via the Fair Use Button -- will soon pass, and 100%
of deposits will be immediately deposed as Open Access, as they should
have been all along. It is merely a sop, for those who can't bring
themselves to mandate immediate OA for all research output.

> Stevan then would, in effect, be doing what any publisher does, viz.,
> responding to individual requests and making judgments about what to allow
> for free and what to charge for or deny.

I, and the millions of other authors who have responded to reprint and
eprint requests by mail and email for over 5 decades would be making
judgments about whom to send eprints to and whom not. That's all.

Cheers, Stevan