Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publication
on Tue, 9 Mar 2004 Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: The first phase of the hearings is now over. This phase has been on publishing, and has heard evidence from publishers -- both Toll-Access (TA) and Open-Access (OA). The Royal Society's contribution will, I believe, prove to be a bit of a historic embarrassment for that venerable institution, the first of the scientific journal publishers (along with the French Societe des Savans). The RS's testimony is alas rather short-sighted and not very well-informed, and repeats many of the familiar canards about OA: The comment is inaccurate. Henry Oldenburg was the first to publish a scientific journal, a project he hoped would return 150 pounds a year. It was not until 1752, long after Oldenburg died and long after it was proven profitable, that PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS was taken over by the Royal Society which raised its dues by two guineas to cover production costs. JOURNAL DES SCAVANS, which also started publication in 1665, was an organ of both Academie des sciences and Academie des inscriptions et Belles lettres. Its scope went far beyond science, being managed by historians. Despite its association with the two academies, JOURNAL DES SCAVANS was first published by Jean Cusson, a bookseller, from 1665 to 1714. Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 Contributor HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES. AN ENCYCLOPEDIA (ABC-CLIO 2002) 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Invoking Cloture (Again) on Serials Crisis = Library Underfunding
Invoking Cloture (Again) on 'Serials Crisis = Library Underfunding' http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0920.html [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This is to confirm that I am (yet again) invoking cloture on Albert Henderson's (AH's) recurrent theme. Since the inception of this Forum in 1996, this theme has already derailed discussion many times. It is easily stated: Give More Money to Libraries (Out of the Money that Someone, Somewhere, is Wantonly Withholding) This has been used to argue that there is no serials crisis (just the wanton withholding of money by someone, somewhere) and now it is being used to argue that there is no access problem (just the wanton withholding of money by someone, somwhere). The argument invariably becomes intemperate after a while, usually against that shadowy someone, somewhere (see posting below). On this occasion, the very real and important question of the affordability of OA journal author-charges today by authors in developing countries is again being diverted towards the conspiratorial notion that someone, somewhere, is withholding the requisite money. Until AH specifies the unused pot from which the money can be taken so that every university and research institution on the planet can pay whatever tolls are charged by all of the planet's 24,000 journals so that every one of its researchers has toll-free access to ever one of the articles published therein (*and* the further money to ensure that all institutionally unaffiliated researchers worldwide likewise have toll-free access to every one of those articles) the posting below will be AH's last word on this thread. Rebuttals to AH will also not be posted, so please reply to him off-line. You may still continue to receive his postings, because AH maintains an blind.copy.recei...@compuserve.com list to which he branches them, in case cloture is re-invoked. (I don't doubt that new threads will emerge in the future where this same refrain will be re-introduced, and hence that this will not be the last time I have to re-invoke cloture! The interested historian should do a google search on: site:www.ecs.soton.ac.uk amsci henderson cloture ) --- S.H ] on 2/10/2004 4:43 PM Jean-Claude Guedon, wrote: In response to Albert Henderson, let me stress the following points: 1. The trend I was referring to was the growing support of a growing number of various granting agencies for financial support for the OA business plan as exemplified by BioMed Central and by PLos; This is a miniscule movement compared to library and RD spending trends. I feel the big picture must be taken into account. Miniscule? Have you looked at the list of granting agencies involved in the Berlin declaration? Miniscule? Do you know how much money the Wellcome Trust spends on research each year. Such spending is hardly comparable to billions total spending on libraries, cuts in library spending or, more significantly, the cost of reading (estimated by King et al at 6.4 times libraries and over 5 times the cost of authors). 2. If we look at the growing number of open access journals and the growing number of open access repositories, including OAI compliant personal pages, and if we look at OA harvesters, I would say that movement is still a minority movement but that it is growing well and even fast. I would add that the growing frustration of a number of academics with the behaviour of various publishing houses is leading to an interesting revolt. The latter does not always coincide with open access, at least not yet, but it certainly gets one step closer; The frustration is rooted in the failure of universities to meet their obligations to support research and education with decent libraries. The universities have campaigned long and hard using myths and slogans as the core of propaganda aimed at shifing blame to publishers. Only the most naive and trusting could accept any of it. No, the frustration is the kind of frustration you witness when whole editorial boards move to create a new, alternate solutions to the absurd and obscenely - yes, I insist on the word (see below) - price commercial journals. My impression has been that such revolts are based on misinformation spread by university managers and competitors. I recently read an incredibly ignorant editorial, for example, by Tony Delamothe and Richard Smith Open access publishing takes off [BMJ 2004; 328: 1-3]. The fact that BMJ accepted it for publication only demonstrates how scientists fail to use their intelligence outside their disciplines. 3. The OA movement may be commercial, but it does not have to be. Comparing it to a dot.com is inaccurate at best; OA so far has shown little success in the real world as Stevan has repeatedly pointed out
Re: Author Publication Charge Debate
on 2/6/2004 Jean-Claude Guédon wrote: I believe Stevan has said most of what is needed to answer your message. For my part, I will focus on OA journals and would like to underscore the fact that this particular way to move to open access will require some concertation among a variety of ploayers. It is not simply a matter of an author dealing with the business plan of an OA journal; libraries are saing money with OA journals and could perhaps be persuaded to put back some of those savings in the publishing circuit by contributing to institutional access deals with such publications. Alternatively, universities as a whole or research centres could explore doing the same. Finally, agencies that allocate research grants can certainly build policies favouring the support of publishing costs, especially in the case of OA journals. This is a trend which seems to be growing at this point in history: the Hughes Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Gesellschaft, among others, have moved ahead on this front. We have over 30 years of statistics that demonstrate the trend has been in the other direction: (a) higher education institutions have systematically reduced spending on libraries; (b) the savings have gone to the bottom line - profitability - rather than research or education; (c) agencies that sponsor research have not approached reforming the library component of indirect cost application. They never have, even though the US Science Policy Act of 1976 directs top agencies to take an active interest in science communications. They are clearly more interested in the employment of scientists than in their productivity. Moreover, authors are generally ignoring the OA movement. Many others cannot afford to subsidize publication -- OA or otherwise. It appears to me that the OA movement is one more dot.com scheme gone bust. There is an alternative solution. Productivity should be the goal of the science community - authors, sponsors, readers, publishers, librarians, and the institutions that profit from grants. The OA movement has missed the mark by seeking financial efficiencies rather than effective science. The OA discussions fail because them include research claims but not the totality of science publishing. If we learned anything from Sputnik, it was that infrastructure -- including digests, reviews, libraries and library research and computerized index/abstract services -- deal with the chaos of research claims better than the every-researcher-for-himself/herself approach envisioned by OA. There is simply too much for any researcher to read, to digest and to evaluate. Readers that lack institutional connections can hardly begin to prepare credible research in most fields. Researchers need tools to prepare research. If 'tolls' provide tools and infrastructure directed at productivity, then 'tolls' should be embraced, as they were for hundreds of years. The alternative OA approach is this: If higher education institutions were to realign library spending to match the growth of RD, I believe publishers of research would be comfortable in permitting broad free access. A solid case should be made for governmental support of the indirect cost of libraries as a policy of science spending, since library research is essential for the preparation of science. It is a reasonable task. In the US, a mere four percent of all academic libraries control 40% of spending. These are the libraries that dominate the customer lists of academic research journals. They number about 140 institutions. OA activists, including the major disciplinary associations, could be more effective by persuading a few hundred universities and a dozen agencies to support productivity in science than by trying to convince millions of authors to reject the social bonds that determine where they submit their papers. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 a...@chessnic.com Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000
Re: Author Publication Charge Debate
on Tue, 10 Feb 2004 Jean-Claude =?iso-8859-1?q?Gu=E9don?= jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: In response to Albert Henderson, let me stress the following points: 1. The trend I was referring to was the growing support of a growing number of various granting agencies for financial support for the OA business plan as exemplified by BioMed Central and by PLos; This is a miniscule movement compared to library and RD spending trends. I feel the big picture must be taken into account. 2. If we look at the growing number of open access journals and the growing number of open access repositories, including OAI compliant personal pages, and if we look at OA harvesters, I would say that movement is still a minority movement but that it is growing well and even fast. I would add that the growing frustration of a number of academics with the behaviour of various publishing houses is leading to an interesting revolt. The latter does not always coincide with open access, at least not yet, but it certainly gets one step closer; The frustration is rooted in the failure of universities to meet their obligations to support research and education with decent libraries. The universities have campaigned long and hard using myths and slogans as the core of propaganda aimed at shifing blame to publishers. Only the most naive and trusting could accept any of it. 3. The OA movement may be commercial, but it does not have to be. Comparing it to a dot.com is inaccurate at best; OA so far has shown little success in the real world as Stevan has repeatedly pointed out in this forum. 4. If there is one way to increase scientific productivity, it is with open access. Impact figures that begin to trickle in show much greater use of OA literature and, of course, OA literature allows much greater numbers of scientists to get involved in current debates, even in poor countries; Better preparation is needed, not more sources -- many unrefereed -- and the possibility of researchers presuming they can get by without access to the reviews and information services that are available only through institutional connections. 5. How one could ever conflate OA with every researcher for himself is beyond my understanding. OA involves a great deal of distribution, but it also rests on a great amount of coordination, standardization and interoperability. The task of reading and evaluating cannot be done alone or by reliance on what has been released to OA. Many scientific fields require a task force and an excellent library to evaluate the literature. This is also true of much technology and social sciences but not so much in the Humanities. 6. Claiming some (obscure) link between OA and isolation from institutions is also very strange : universities themselves are setting up facilities to help faculty set up individual web sites... You must not be speaking of readers who hope to bypass their inadequate and nonexistent library collections. 7. If toll provide tools, we should also ask: can tools be financed in ways other than tolls and do we get the best tools with tolls. The answer is yes on both counts; Charging authors is a toll, is it not? 8. As for Albert Henderson's mantra about raising library budgets, the answer remains the same: of course, so long as it will not allow a number of publishers simply to increase their profit margin beyond the already obscene levels that have been repeatedly observed. Have you actually read the public operating statements of any publisher? Profits are hardly 'obscene' by any standard. This is what I mean when I speak of myths and slogans. If publishers' profits were 'obscene,' you and everyone else would own shares. Publishers' profits have never come close to profits reported by private research universities in the United States. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 a...@chessnic.com ature. This is also true of much technology and social sciences but not so much in the Humanities. 6. Claiming
Re: Author Publication Charge Debate
on Tue, 10 Feb 2004 Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: [snip] It does seem ironic, though, that a spokesman on behalf of the developing world (ARS) should be making common cause with a publicist for toll-access publishers (AH) who has long argued that the solution to the serials crisis is to find money (from somewhere) to give to libraries, so they can keep paying the rising journal prices. (It has repeatedly been pointed out that find money, somewhere, to pay the rising prices would be a universal formula for propping up the prices of all products and services, if there were the money, somewhere.) There was no problem linking library and RD spending during the 1960s, when political pressures demanded better science. It would seem fundamental to any school child that spending on libraries used to prepare RD must be a part of RD policy. It was only after Western men walked on the moon that universities felt comfortable cutting money from libraries and sending it to the bottom line. The money is there, in the surpluses that show up clearly in tax reports and in the statistics of income and expenditure. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 a...@chessnic.com
Re: Author Publication Charge Debate
on Sat, 10 Jan 2004 Michael Eisen mbei...@lbl.gov wrote: It's a fundamental misconception to frame the issue this way. Framing this as a reader pays v author pays question makes it sound like their is some fundamental conflict between the interests of readers and authors who, I probably need not point out to this audience, are mostly the same people. The question is not who should pay - readers don't pay now and authors wouldn't pay under the open access model - in either case, the overwhelming majority of the money that supports scientific publishing comes from the governments, independent funding agencies, universities and other research organization that support research. You cannot include universities as organizations that provide money to support research. While they do pay something sometimes, the growth and vitaility of academic RD comes from sponsored grants. There is a clear conflict, pointed out by British economist David Brown, between universities -- as agencies that fund libraries -- and agencies that fund research. [David J. Brown, Electronic Publishing and Libraries. Planning for the Impact and Growth to 2003. London: Bowker-Saur. 1996] Library spending has grown far behind RD since 1970. Page charges (author pays) are direct costs of grants. Library costs (reader pays) are indirect costs of grants. In practice indirect library costs of research grants are administrative factors having nothing to do with research or researchers. The question is how should they (the institutions that fund science) pay? What system best advances their interests as sponsors of scientific research. Should they continue using a system (the reader pays model) that is economically inefficient, unnecessarily expensive and needlessly restrict who can access to the papers that describe the results of the research they have funded, or should they use a system that will almost certainly be cheaper, will ensure that everyone in the world has immediate free access to their scholarly output and will encourage (rather than inhibit) creative new uses of the scientific literature. It would seem that the cost of science libraries should be budgeted as part of RD spending. It is not, even though page charges and libraries are acknowledged by US Federal research grants. No one can tell us why budget policies are blind to the obvious. What the reader-pays system does, in contrast to author-pays open access, is (A) to compile, present, and deliver news, recognition, and opinion customized to its readers' interests and (B) to encourage innovation on the part of publishers, particularly publishers of reviews and information services whose participation brings some order to the chaos of research claims. We would not have translation journals, electronic databases, review journals, or full-text aggregators without libraries' economic support. It also supports libraries collections and librarians whose activities I consider essential to the training and development of able researchers. The author-pays open access ideal, which delivers nothing, has been fostered by too many non- researchers whose stated goal is the elimination of publishers and library costs. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Scientific publishing is not just about administering peer-review
on Fri, 17 Oct 2003 Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk wrote This is fair comment, but many of the desirable features mentioned by Albert are provided by retaining the identity of individual journals, with their named academic editors and editorial boards, in the online Open Access era. The cost of maintaining a subscriber list, on the other hand, disappears if a journal is operated on an Open Access basis. My point exactly. The service to readers disappears right along with the cost. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Scientific publishing is not just about administering peer-review
on Thu, 16 Oct 2003 Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk wrote: I haven't reposted Etienne's post ans Stevan's answers, but I'd just like to say that I think we are getting to the heart of the matter now. If we mostly agree that peer review (including within that term the activities of the academic editor, the editorial board, and the referees of a journal) must remain, and that the administration of peer review has a cost, the remaining activity of professional, paid editors is copy-editing. Is copy- editing necessary? I think it is useful to have focussed in on this as a key issue within the question of the cost of the essentials. Copy editing is an important function for some journals and not for others. The essential element missing from the discussion is that of delivery. Journals deliver content to subscribers/readers on a regular basis. They may also put research into context with editorials, letters, comments, notices of meetings, abstracts, reviews, and so on. There is a cost of maintaining subscriber lists. In contrast, the various free open access schemes leave readers entirely on their own. No service, no cost. The major cost of the journal system, documented by Donald King et al., is not the cost of producing journals. It is the cost of finding and reading information. The major information challenge of science for over a century has been the abundance of public reports of discovery. It has been the job of the journals to organize, present, and deliver according to special interests of readers. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . .
Self-archiving publications containing quotations
sh So copyright is certainly not the problem. mf That may be true for certain disciplines, but I can attest that in the mf humanities, where we cite original literature, we find it expensive and mf sometimes impossible to make our research internet accessible. sh All disciplines cite original literature. sh That publisher copyright is not an obstacle to the sh self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles is true of sh *all* disciplines. Humanities are not an exception. The difference between the Humanities and science has nothing to do with citations. Humanities scholars must use quotations to make their points. Quotations often involved copyrighted materials. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Self-archiving publications containing quotations
on Thu, 12 Jun 2003 David Goodman dgood...@princeton.edu wrote: Since citation of a limited amount of material for criticism is fair use in the print world, and, at least in US copyright law this extends to all formats unless restricted by contract, all that is necessary to do is to specify that the rights of fair use cannot be limited by contract. (It's changing one word, but of course a major policy reversal). One cannot really apply a limited amount of material, to claim fair use, to the quotatation [or reproduction] of a picture, a short poem, a letter, etc. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Journal expenses and publication costs
on Fri, 17 Jan 2003 Jan Velterop j...@biomedcentral.com read me wrong: [ Reply to Albert Henderson on thread: Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2633.html ] The nice thing about input-paid open access as practised by BioMed Central is that the juxtaposition of universities (the bureaucracy, in Henderson's terms) and sponsors of research (the faculty acc. to H.) disappears. This interpretation is far from correct. The bureaucracy exists both in universities and in the sponsors of research. The sponsors of research are mostly government agencies, foundations, and other NGOs. The sponsors receive research proposals, make grants, and administer policies. The faculty prepare proposals, execute the research, edit the journals, and referee both proposals and claims of results. This open access publishing model is beneficial for universities looking for cost reductions as well as for sponsors of research looking for better dissemination of the research results. In fact, for both it offers dramatic improvements. According to preliminary figures from David Goodman for Stanford alone, the savings, if all articles were published in the kind of open access publishing model BMC uses, would amount to more than 7 million dollars every year. And for the researchers publishing in our open access journals it means download figures of hundreds, sometimes thousands per month, and rising; figures that leave traditional journals far behind. The open access model promises the end of libraries and librarians as reductions in library spending reach a final conclusion. Such an end to library spending will very likely mean an end to journals, the economic power of faculty, including learned associations, editors, and political leadership. More downloads are not necessarily better, since the main cost of information is the cost of readers' reading and associated activities. Tenopir and King point out the cost of readings far exceeds the cost of journals and its potential for saving. This is where publishers' delivery of select material to a select audience outstrips the various open plans which force the reader to consider unrefereed and quack articles. The bureaucracy -- universities and sponsors -- cares little about wasting people's time as long as they can claim they are doing science. On the other hand, the faculty is frustrated by economies that result in inefficient and ineffective research and education. As Thorsten Veblen put it, the prevailing counterargument by the bureaucracy may be paraphrased as in order to serve God in the end, we must all be ready to serve the Devil in the meantime. In short, the Faustian Bargain. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com .
Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy
on Tue, 14 Jan 2003 Barbara Kirsop e...@biostrat.demon.co.uk wrote: 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. British Economist David J Brown pointed out that the interests of universities (what you call institutions) differ from those of research sponsors (Electronic Publishing and Libraries. 1996. p. 42). This accounts for the huge gap between growth of research and library spending: the library crisis. Universities will bear the cost of archives if they promise relief from library spending. The motive of universities is profitability and power of bureaucracy over faculty. This has been described many times over by observers ranging from Max Weber and Thorsten Veblen to Robert A Nisbet and Edward Shils to President Eisenhower and Newt Gingrich. In the present context, it was demonstrated by the 'windfall' profits taken from library spending (justified by fair use photocopying) over recent decades. In spite of opposition by faculty and academic senates, research universities cut library spending from 6 per cent to less than 3 per cent. They put the 'savings' into already bloated reserves and administrative spending. In 1969, many universities held up payment of publishers' page charges as a hedge against cuts in defense-related grants! In contrast, the sponsors of research are motivated to support dissemination. In the U.S., federal research grants pay publishers' page charges. The online 'archive' of physics preprints originated at the U.S. Dept. of Energy. An imitation was proposed by the National Institutes of Health. Both projects are now out of the hands of government agencies, being clearly in conflict with a long-standing policy that holds that the government has no business offering services that can be provided by the private sector. Research sponsors often conduct peer review prior to making grants. The process is not much different from editorial peer review in many respects. Some agencies also review papers authored in-house prior to release as preprints or submission to journals. The problem with U.S. government agencies, I have found many times, is that their review and other activity is limited and biased by their missions as they see them. The spectre of a university running peer review of its own research work raises considerable doubts when compared to the blind editorial review run by learned journals. Certainly, all research units should review their work with the aid of faculty and other researchers. However, it is not until the work is considered from the outside that it may be accepted as meeting the norms of its discipline. This is where associations and other publishers provide unique services. Not only do publishers provide peer review but an active dissemination channel that delivers select information to a select audience. The institutional archive, in contrast, is passive and chaotic, relying on the reader to search and evaluate a rising tide that probably includes unreviewed drafts and quackery. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: The Economist: Publish and perish
%. It is easier to sort things in mathematical journals. My own estimate is that perhaps only 1% of papers in Communications in Mathematical Physics is junk. I can be wrong, of course. If I am to tell from my own experience, it is good to have a variety of journals. Depending on my paper, how much time I am going spend on it, whether it is a technical paper that will survive any scrutiny, or more speculative or controversial one, when it certainly will make some referess hostile because it it presents a competitive theory. Referees and editorial boards consist of human beings, and sometimes (often?) will lack either the necessary objectivity or patience. It is good to have highly ranked and difficult to publish journals, but sometimes, when in the library, and in search for fresh and crazy ideas to fuel my own thinking, I would browse through low rank and exotic journals, sometimes with a success. Such use of a wide range of resources, including low-ranked journals, by Müller and Bednorz in their Nobel prize-winning work was documented in American Scientist in 1996 by Gerald Holton et al. Notably Müller and Bednorz were highly secretive, not disclosing their findings even to colleagues at IBM, until they had published in the real sense. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . . .
Re: Invoking Cloture (Again) on Serials Crisis = Library Underfunding
I must point out that every source of statistics clearly shows that college and universities now allocate to libraries only half of their 1970 level of spending. That _must_ have some impact on how many librarians are employed in the academic sector. It must affect librarians' career prospects. While David and other managers on this forum defend decimated collections and mediocre resources, there are any number of students, faculty, post-graduate researchers, and academic senates who have passionately decried the sorry state of library resources at major 'research universities.' Unfortunately, many students, faculty, and researchers tolerate the management line. They bypass the library for online information, unaware of or inured to the poor quality of their results. This attitude cost the life of a research subject at Johns Hopkins last year -- an institution with a good library and many librarians. Neither the principal researcher nor the peer panel that ok'd the research bothered to check the literature beyond a very few online resources according to the Baltimore Sun. In short, the open access movement continues to threaten library spending with promises of a windfall that can only sink to the 'bottom line' of institutional profitability. Worse, it imperils the quality of education and research while making claims of excellence. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Responses to Walt Crawford's reflections on FOS
on Mon, 7 Oct 2002 Peter Suber pet...@earlham.edu wrote: In the October issue of _Cites Insights_, Walt Crawford comments on several open-access initiatives, including SPARC's Create Change, PubSCIENCE, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and its FAQ. Here are some responses to his comments on the BOAI FAQ. [snip] Walt writes: About halfway through the FAQ is one of those dangerously simple statements. Open access does not require the infusion of new money beyond what is already spent on journals, only a redirection of how it is spent. Does redirection mean stripping away the money that libraries spend retaining runs of print journals and the librarians that deal with the serial literature, as well as the voluntary abandonment of print journals? The answer is no. The redirection we have in mind is to pay for the dissemination of articles rather than for access to them, or to pay for outgoing articles rather than incoming articles. Dissemination fees should be paid by those sponsoring an author's research --for example, foundations, governments, universities, and laboratories. As these institutions agree to pay for more and more outgoing articles, then everyone gains --these institutions themselves, as well as libraries and individuals around the world-- by paying for fewer and fewer incoming articles. Obviously the answer is yes, not no. Libraries and librarians support incoming articles. If spending switches to outgoing articles, libraries will be out of business and serials librarians will be out on the street. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Invoking Cloture (Again) on Serials Crisis = Library Underfunding
[No reply to this, but having given Albert the last word again, we will have to invoke cloture yet again, as intemperateness seems to have set in. -- S.H.] On Thu, 12 Sep 2002 Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: A rare opportunity to agree 100% with everything Albert writes! ah It is far more likely that the availability ah of preprints will become another excuse for ah backoffice budget misers to force the ah cancellation of more subscriptions. True. But fortunately, there will be plenty of institutional windfall access-toll savings out of which to pay the remaining essential costs -- much reduced, but non-zero -- in the open-online-access era. It is nice to have such consensus. Unfortunately it is marred by a but which signals a promise often made by Stevan of an economic windfall that would serve authors and readers. It has no basis in reality. The record demonstrates no evidence that windfall access-toll savings go to support essential costs. On the contrary, following the introduction of the plain paper copier and legislative recognition of fair use, the profitability of higher education institutions in the U.S. increased by exactly the same amount that was ruthlessly cut from library spending. In short, any savings from the use of technology will be claimed as productivity by the lunatics who have taken over the asylum. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
Re: Garfield: Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication
On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Stevan Harnad wrote: Publishers are essential contributors to the implementation of peer review, but their art and skill does not lie in the making of the judgments. Those judgments are made by the peer-reviewers -- researchers who give away their services for free, just as the authors are researchers who give away their research papers for free. Publishers recruit and train editors. Publishers may also support editors' office, meeting, and travel expenses. Editors recruit referees, solicit their advice and evaluate their reports. No automated server can ever replace editors, publishers, and their active approach to critical prepublication review. It is far more likely that the availability of preprints will become another excuse for backoffice budget misers to force the cancellation of more subscriptions. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Garfield: Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication
on 9/12/2002 David Goodman wrote: One thing I certainly agree wutg Albert about, is that the critical role of a publisher is to appoint an editor. Everything else about the publication's quality depends on the manuscripts the editor can acquire and the standards the editor sets. So why do publishers make large profits, while editors merely receive office expense reimbursement? Editors who compete for editorial positions are paid primarily by their institutions which, it seems, value having editors use their addresses. As for profits, we are a capitalist society, are we not? Profits are good. Even Princeton turned profits of $500 million or 45 per cent of revenues in fy1999; $1452 million or 70 per cent in FY2000.* These figures are far, far beyond post-tax profits of any publisher! Best wishes, *figures from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Garfield: Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication
Stevan Harnad: This is precisely why the copyright law's definition of publication has nothing to do with the researcher's definition of publication, and it was to the researcher's definition of publication that Gene was referring; that is the ONLY sense of publication that has any relevance whatsoever to what Gene was saying. Keith: OK, so this whole discussion hinges on the contract definition of publication, which can be clearly defined by contract language. Therefore, it has little to do with what the academic community believes publication means, so long as the publishers clearly define what publication means in their respective contracts. The point of your reply seems to indicate that this is not a copyright issue, but a contract issue. I think that will make your stance more palatable to the members of this list - and should clarify to the publishers that they may want to revisit their contract language if they want to avoid hassles involved with enforcing their respective pre-publication rules. The question here has nothing to do with copyright or contracts. It is an editorial policy -- the wisdom of rejecting research that was released prematurely -- by certain biomedical publishers. The critics all seek to publish first without regard to whether work has been reliably reviewed. It would be refreshing to have them admit it for once. Journal editors have the right to reject submissions for any reason including failure to respect their policies. Airing this issue in the copyright forum only demonstrates how confused the advocates of unvetted preprints have become. My impression has been that their agenda is 'less spending for libraries' no matter what the cost to public health, the research community and those who earn their living as a benefit of copyright. The journals that have followed this policy have been very successful in every sense. They are well-cited and highly regarded by authors and readers. Their imprimateur on an article is a mark of prestige. They are more than sound financially thanks to high circulation and robust advertising. The policy, known as the Ingelfinger rule after the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, has survived despite numerous attempts to blacken it. The rule asserts that unvetted research claims may mislead the health community and the general public into ineffective if not unsafe practices. Authors who wish to be published in presigious circumstances comply with the rule. They will not talk to news reporters or 'self-archive' [a misnomer] in advance of publication. There is no doubt that circulating a paper on a well-trafficked public preprint server is a form of publication, even if it does not meet the scholars' use of the term as denoting recognition and presentation by an established editorial board. The use of the term archive to describe the act of posting to a server acknowledges the intent to publish, in imitation of the long established Archives of group of journals. The open [access] archive movement is an arrogant attempt to raise the status of informal publication by according automated servers an inflated status. Its advocates crave to stand near to publishers whose art and skill depends on making a sophisticated series of judgments. The movement attempts to do so, of course, by mythologizing copyrights within the publishing process, promising authors the moon, and trading on the ignorance of the learned community (most of which could not run a candy store) about business. For example, the use of the term archive seeks to assure authors and readers that archived material is not ephemeral, in spite of the fact that drafts submitted to journal editors are often revised before formal publication or rejected outright. Preprints may be cited. Indeed, they are cited and may form the basis for new research and authorship as if they were formally published. Critics of the embargo policy, all of whom compete with the policy for authors' attention, haven't a chance. With no standing with journals' editors, the critics would like to convince authors to boycott the journals, either by defying the policy or by shunning such journals in their submissions. Boycotts by authors are a joke. Authors are more interested in being recognized by established editors than in pursuing a utopian vision. Last May, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported: Few of the 30,000 scientists who pledged to boycott journals that don't make their content free online after six months have actually followed through on that threat, and few journals have changed their ways. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Garfield: Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication
[Moderator's Note: Normally it is unsportsmanlike to use the moderator's prerogative to prepend a pre-emptive reply to a comment, but as Albert is clearly not reading the postings to which he is replying, time will be saved if it is wearily pointed out in advance that (1) Albert's minor point about certain potentially hazardous clinical research was already taken into account -- explicitly and in advance -- in Dr. Garfield's own quotation below, and that (2) Albert's secondary defense of the Ingelfinger Rule in all other fields of research as journalistic scoop-protection is precisely what the cited references on the Ingelfinger Rule and the New England Journal of Medicine below were rebutting -- if any rebuttal of such an arbitrary defense of suppressing access to scientific research on pop-journalistic grounds was wanted. It is noteworthy that Nature magazine dropped the Ingelfinger rule some time ago http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do and there are indications that Science magazine too will eventually have to follow suit -- leaving only the New England Journal of Medicine still trying to keep its authors playing by the Rule... SH] I believe that posting and sharing one's preliminary publications [is] an important part of the peer... review process and does not justify an embargo by publishers on the grounds of 'prior publication'. It was not the case before the Internet, and except for unusual clinical situations, has not changed because of the convenience of the Internet. (Garfield, 2000) Stevan Harnad fails to give Eugene Garfield full credit below. Dr Garfield is indeed an outstanding information scientist and innovator. He is also President and Editor-in- Chief of The Scientist, a newspaper that emphasizes advances in research. http://www.the-scientist.com/masthead.htm News organizations that aim to scoop breaking news, like The Scientist, The New York Times [NYT] and The Medical Tribune, are often frustrated by the Ingelfinger rule of the New England Journal of Medicine [NEJM] and other primary journals. The rule, named after the NEJM editor who devised it, calls for rejecting any submission that was released in any medium including press releases, interviews, etc. Observing the rule, scientists won't talk to reporters about work which they plan to submit to NEJM et al. In 1991, Dr. Lawrence K. Altman of the New York Times ran an article -- more like a 'rant' -- excoriating the Ingelfinger rule under the title With lives at stake, issue is secrecy of data. The reason for the rule given by NEJM, et al., is that unvetted research may yield false conclusions. While this poses little danger in some fields, in biomedicine it may be a menace to public health and safety. Moreover, it is clear that many news organizations are irresponsible, given to breathless announcements that the general public takes to be endorsements of cures for cancer, heart disease, old age, etc. While I don't think The Scientist and NYT are in the category of breathless irresponsibility, it is clear that they and most preprint readers are not equipped to evaluate research claims as thoroughly as the editors of NEJM et al. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com -- From: Stevan Harnad Re: Garfield: Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication These two papers by Eugene Garfield -- founder of the Insitute for Scientific Information, Current Contents, Science Citation Index, and originator of the Citation Impact Factor -- might be of interest to the Open Access community: I believe that posting and sharing one's preliminary publications [is] an important part of the peer... review process and does not justify an embargo by publishers on the grounds of 'prior publication'. It was not the case before the Internet, and exceot for unusual clinical situations, has not changed because of the convenience of the Internet. (Garfield, 2000) Garfield, E. (2000) Is Acknowledged Self-Archiving Prior Publication? Presented at Third International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Mar 17 2000 http://www.wvu.edu/~thesis/Presentations/Garfield-Web-Publishing.pdf Garfield, E. (1999) Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication. The Scientist 13(12): 12 (June 7, 1999) http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1999/June/comm_990607.html I am of course in complete agreement with Eugene Garfield -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45 -- and would demur only on one point -- minor for what Gene is saying, but rather major for what should be motivating researchers to self-archive in the first place -- namely, that self-archiving DOES provide far greater visibility in the on-line age than on-paper publication alone does. This too
Re: Paying Referees?
on 19 Aug 2002 Manfredi M.A. La Manna m...@elsss.org.uk wrote: In my view, paying referees for the prompt return of full reports is an essential part of a successful entry strategy in a market with enormous barriers to entry. Especially in economics where the publishing process is extremely protracted (for an excellent paper on this topic, see Glenn Ellison's The slowdown of the economics publishing process, http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/gellison/files/jrnem.pdf). Ellison's data is interesting, but he fails to take into account some fundamental economic facts. For example, he repeated claims no change in the economics profession since 1970. Actually it has grown substantially. EconoLit has recorded more than three times growth of annual published journal articles since 1970. Lotka's law suggests there must be many more authors today. In this respect, economics is not different from other fields. Robert K Merton noted declines in the relative amount of space available for publication. In 1971 he pointed out that journal space in the social sciences was not increasing beyond the increase in numbers of scholars, in contrast to the situation in physics. In economics, the number of pages available in top journals has probably increased less than the increase in potential authors. This should be easy to verify. In fields like physics, where rejection rates are low, he noted that editors appear to be willing to risk errors and to publish papers that do not measure up rather than to overlook work that may turn out to be original and significant. We also know that all academic serials have suffered huge cancellations since 1970, thanks to the inequity between library spending and the growth of RD spending that drives authorship and publication (as noted by British economist David J Brown). Many journals outside of the physical and bio sciences constricted their growth in order to avoid increasing their prices. They stimulated the creation of new niche journals that fostered the twigging of new specialties. In short, the top economics journals must become more selective and demanding than they were in the 1960s, when every major institution had many subscriptions. Like a reduction in a pipe, financial constriction creates pressure on the input side. In mathematics, for comparison, the backlogs of accepted papers were so outrageous that the code of ethics adopted by the math society declared that editors must inform authors of delays. Moreover, Merton also explained why researchers have traditionally participated in the referee process for free. He observed the evaluation process in some detail. Ellison's article would have benefited from reference to Merton's work. In a paper first published in in 1971, Merton pointed out that economics has a much higher rate of rejection than physical and biological sciences and a lower rate than the humanities. He said, for the journals in the humanities and social sciences, it is the potentially acceptable paper which is problematic. [Institutionalized patterns of evaluation in science, reprinted in THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE. U Chicago Press] From all of this I can see why some social science publishers are able to demand submission fees and must pay referees. The IBM journal mentioned by Andy Odlyzko is an exceptional case. It has always been, of course, a serious publicity element. Its production manager in the 1960s was a friend of mine. Its budget never depended on subscription income. As such, no expense would be spared. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com .
Re: Paper not accepted by a journal - still a pre-print?
on Wed, 7 Aug 2002 Eberhard R. Hilf h...@physnet.physik.uni-oldenburg.de wrote: [snip] By the way, the 'preprint idea' was born by Enrico Fermi in 1932, a famous physicist, who boosted his career by deciding to send copies of his documents by mail to all relevant to his work laboratories in the world. That was very well received. This is a doubtful claim. I wouldn't nominate Fermi before considering the 17th century French Friar, Father Marin Mersenne who distributed scientific communications to an equally select mailing list. James Burke summarized, In 1644 Torricelli wrote to a colleague and friend in Rome, Michelangelo Ricci, to explain an experiment ... Ricci, realizing that current Church opinion in Rome would not take kindly ..., made a copy of Torricelli's letter and sent it to a priest in Paris, Father Marin Mersenne. This man was an extraordinary Minorite friar who ran a kind of scientific salon, to which came many of the more radical thinkers of the day. Following his habit of copying letters he received and circulating them among his many scientific contacts throughout Europe, Mersenne became known as the postbox of Europe. It was precisely for this reason that the copy of Torricelli's letter ended up in Mersenne's hands, and sure enough the first thing he did was send another copy of it to a friend who was interested in the same problem [Connections. Boston: Little Brown. 1978. Reprint with new introduction 1995. ISBN 0-316-11672-6. p. 74] Actually, I doubt Mersenne was the first any more than Fermi ... Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Book on future of STM publishers
On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Fytton Rowland wrote: It has always been quite easy (if you have the money) to get a book printed. Publishers are not printers. The business of getting a book printed is only one (and not the most important) of a publishing company's functions. By the same token, putting a work on the web is not the most important publishing function. Editing to improve the quality of the raw product from the author is one of the important ones, and marketing to bring it to the attention of those who might be interested in its content is the other. I believe that both of these functions remain important in an electronic-only environment. In addition, the publishers' primary contribution would be their (selection and) investment. Spending mondy conveys a level of recognition that lifts the work far beyond the chaos of vanity self- archiving. For readers and buyers it is a dramatic change in signal-to-noise. It also commits the publishers to obtaining a return on their investment achieved through the hard work of dissemination, distribution, marketing, salesmanship, and whatever else one might call the toils of publishing. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Book on future of STM publishers
on Thu, 18 Jul 2002 Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk wrote: This is an interesting point. In some disciplines, there is a tradition of writing journal articles based on one's PhD research -- some of them perhaps published before the thesis is written -- while in other fields the practice is to turn one's thesis into a book. However, the thesis itself, in its original form as an examination document, is usually made publicly available in the library of its home university, and is indexed in various secondary services such as Dissertation Abstracts. If universities in future mostly have OAI- compliant servers, and theses are submitted in electronic as well as printed form, there seems to be no obstacle to each university mounting its own theses on its server for free worldwide access. But... Stevan often makes the point that his concern is purely with the scholarly journal literature, which is given away by its authors, and which should be avialable free of charge to other scholars. He goes on to say that this argument does not apply to other kinds of publication for which authors are traditionally paid, which is the case with books, even scholarly books. On that argument, having to pay 30 Euros for Meier's book is o.k. Hmm... So, if we are in a discipline that uses journals, free access is o.k.; free access to the raw thesis is also o.k.; but if the discipline is one that has the tradition of a book based on the thesis, then free access is not o.k. What do others think of this line of argument? The fundamental flaw in Stevan's position is that it discounts the receipt of value -- recognition and targeted dissemination -- exchanged by the journal author. If one recognizes that the journal publisher does provide such value, the journal author is on the same footing as the book author. No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money, as Samuel Johnson observed. Steven's position is out of bounds. The question is moot. In the case of the dissertation, the acceptance is of a lesser value, since it is student work. Most books derived from dissertations require a good deal of additional work before they are publishable in the usual sense and recognizable by the world beyond dissertation examiners. The future of STM publishing is a great topic for magazines that have a short shelf life. They can attract a curious readership and sell lots of advertising by puzzling over questions without answers. I for one have serious doubts whether the future of any industry niche would be a fit subject for a student dissertation. Most predictive visions offered decades ago by experts are today only meaningful as evidence of lobbying and other promotional efforts. Book or dissertation, I would expect to shelve this topic near astrology. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
on 2 Apr 2002 jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Let me respond in the body of the text below. Le 1 Avril 2002 09:58, Stevan Harnad a écrit : 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 would rather say that he is clever and tries to avoid direct confrontation. 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. It seems to me that a company that is intent on maintaining as high a profit rate as it can in the context of social transactions (information largely produced by public money, given away by their authors, reviewed freely by peers, and bought by libraries or research labs with largely public money) has to face the fact that its legitimacy will be hotly contested. I do believe that the intensense barrage if criticisms levelled at Elsevier and other similar companies has something to do with the Elsevier Chairman and his apparent reasonable stance... The 'profit motive' argument might have some standing if the private research universities that dominate sponsored research did not sport profits double those reported by Elsevier and other publishers. These universities have cut library spending by half in order to inflate their financial hoards. Moreover, universities have $1 billion in patent revenue now (which they did not have in 1980), resulting from sponsored research. They deprive library users of information generated by the rest of the world only because they have become skilled at academic 3-card Monte. Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 a...@chessnic.com
Re: Peer Review Reform Hypothesis-Testing
On Sat, 23 Feb 2002, Sergio Della Sala and Jordan Grafman wrote: We are convinced that peer-review is central to scientific credibility. However, as it stands the process is far from watertight. Is there any way we can improve it by suggesting any modification, either radical or minimal? Time is ripe for such a discussion to be launched (see the JAMA and BMJ four congresses on peer review in biomedical publication: www.jama-peer.org). Many papers presented at the JAMA/BMJ congresses and other sources point to a problem that I call insularity. That is ignorance of, ignoring or avoiding inconvenient information. This includes national and language biases as well as the sort of short-sightedness that led to the death of a subject at Johns Hopkins last year and commercial biases that typically omit studies that contradict the desired conclusion. To combat insularity, several medical journals adopted the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials [CONSORT]. One of the recommendations was that authors state general interpretation of the data in light of the totality of the available evidence. A study at the Prague conference showed little evidence that authors complied or that authors were able to compel it. The little time reportedly spent by referees, according to other studies, suggests they would not catch many omissions and blind spots. The Achilles' Heel of peer review is that referees are no better informed than authors. Of course, it is the sponsors of research who call the tune. The totality of the literature is overwhelming. That includes not only primary reports but review articles. The sponsors appear to tolerate a shallow review in proposals and preparation, and little more in conclusions. More intensive screening, evaluating, digesting, and review of all lines of research is essential. Many reviews reflect an erroneous consensus, such as the notion in the 1940s that research on steriods was at a dead end. I have written more on this in SOCIETY 38,2 47-54 (J/F 2001), if anyone is interested. I would also be happy to provide references to studies of peer review that actually shed light on the problem and its solution. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Clarification of parasitism and copyright (David Goodman)
Why do David and Steven put cost-cutting above quality? 30 years of cost-cutting has undermined peer review, authorship and education. Poor libraries are only part of the new regime that replaced tenured faculty with part-timers. Steven's proposals promise to cut costs. They will certainly eliminate librarians as well as collections, replacing the lot with automation and added burdens shifted to authors and readers. As for peer review taking care of itself, any experienced editor will testify that useful peer review comes through searching, soliciting, and editing -- not pure volunteerism. The best referees are busy, too busy to go looking for something to do. Unfortunately, the real parasitism in academe is in the culture of bureaucracy, as Max Weber pointed out. Its obsession with cost-cutting seeks expansion of administrative power based on financial hoarding. For students and researchers, parasitism means promises of rich delicacies followed by delivery of pablum and starvation. It is the libraries, after all, that have provided 'free access for all' to the research literature. More than that, libraries have winnowed the wheat from the chaff. (Why would any professional librarian or researcher support self-archived chaff??) Private research universities, in particular, have hoarded far more money than they need. Why aren't we talking about spending some of it and improving the quality of research and education??? Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com -Forwarded Message- From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum, INTERNET:seria...@list.uvm.edu To: [unknown], INTERNET:seria...@list.uvm.edu List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: 2/8/2002 5:19 PM RE: Re: Clarification of parasitism and copyright (David Goodman) -- Forwarded message -- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 15:00:23 -0500 From: David Goodman dgood...@phoenix.princeton.edu Subject: Re: Clarification of parasitism and copyright (Stevan Harnad) Most of us are attached to the idea of peer review. Indeed, even those who wish to change peer review radically almost always wish to retain it in some form, however diffuse. But the question of how to pay for peer review is not distinct from the question of what form it takes. Extending on Stevan's argument, if we could reduce the costs of it to zero, we would have a totally free system. (Except for the trivial costs of distribution.) If we did, we would not need to be concerned with the question of who should pay for it. How to accomplish this is another question to be settled in the proper fashion by experimentation and analysis, not verbal argument. I do not want to reopen the question of the various possibilities for this on this forum. I do want to remind everyone that we should in planning our new information world not assume any impassable barriers. I do not know whether whatever system we eventually adopt will be the truly best--it may well prove expedient to accept less than that. I doubt whether the final model we adopt -- not to speak of the best possible system-- will be any of the specific proposals anyone has made so far. I remain of the opinion that Stevan's proposals are the best way to proceed for the immediate future, and there is nothing to be gained by waiting until we solve all the possible issues. David Goodman Research Librarian and Biological Sciences Bibliographer Princeton University Library dgood...@princeton.edu609-258-7785 -- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 03:55:55 + From: Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk Subject: Clarification of parasitism and copyright ... So the parasitism is not a copyright issue. It is another issue, and a double one: (a) How to pay the essential costs of peer review? and (b) How NOT to pay for any MORE than the essential costs of peer review, if that is all researchers want and need? And here the growth in the practice of author/institutional self-archiving can perform two functions: (i) it immediately frees access to the entire refereed literature and (ii) it puts pressure on journals (subscription cancellation pressure, because of competition from the author's self-archived free version) to cut costs and downsize to the essentials (peer review) while at the same time creating the institutional revenues (the windfall savings from cancellations) to pay for those essential costs, as a SERVICE, on the institution's OUTGOING research papers, instead of as a PRODUCT: the institution's INCOMING library serials subscriptions. Finally, the reason I now favor institutional self-archiving over central self-archiving is that the university is the natural entity to drive, mediate, reward, and benefit from the transition
Clarification of parasitism and copyright (Stevan Harnad)
on Thu, 7 Feb 2002 Marcia Tuttle tut...@email.unc.edu forwarded: Re: Clarification of parasitism and copyright (Stevan Harnad) -- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 03:55:55 + From: Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk Subject: Clarification of parasitism and copyright [snip] Finally, the reason I now favor institutional self-archiving over central self-archiving is that the university is the natural entity to drive, mediate, reward, and benefit from the transition: It is the university and its researchers and research output that benefit from maximising their research impact by making it freely accessible to all would-be users by self-archiving it. It is the university and its researchers and research that benefit from having all refereed research from other universities freely accessible to its researchers (something its library serials budget could never have afforded) and it is the university that stands to gain from the annual windfall savings from serials cancellations, only a portion of which (~10-30%, or $200-$500 per paper) will need to be re-directed to cover peer review costs per outgoing paper, once the journals have downsized to the essentials. What Stevan will never admit is that university managers have plundered library budgets since the 1970s in anticipation of windfall savings from interlibrary photocopying. Any windfalls go right to the bottom line. University profitability has never been greater. Doubling library spending would not harm any academic program. In spite of strong opposition from faculty senates and individual researchers, the cancellation projects proceeded. Libraries now have half the share of academic spending that they enjoyed in the 1960s. Impoverishment impacts not only collections but staff. The profession of academic librarianship is at risk. Stevan's proposals would replace libraries and librarians with computers -- many off campus. Moreover, researchers have never faced such an impossible challenge to acquire and digest new knowledge as they do today. Because of poor library collections, many research projects have their own subscriptions, paid by grants and unavailable to library patrons. Preprints are not considered archival, as journals are. They have the aroma of conference papers and abstracts. Steven's solution promises to serve up sewage to researchers now drowning in peer-reviewed information. He fails to admit that the oxymoronic preprint archives proposed for biomedicine and social sciences will attract trash, quackery, and fraud mixed in with papers of value. NIH's e-Biomed program was soundly rejected by the scientific community largely for this reason. What works in relatively small and mathematically-oriented fields would stumble badle elsewhere. Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com past editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On 19 Dec 2001 Arthur P. Smith apsm...@aps.org wrote: On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Albert Henderson wrote: on Fri, 14 Dec 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: 4. Whereas all refereed research should be fully accessible on-line without cost to all would-be users worldwide, it is nevertheless not altogether costless to produce. The main change is that dissemination and archiving cost incomparably less on-line than on-paper and hence the on-line dissemination/archiving costs per article effectively shrink to zero. http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 You can claim to save only 9 cents per article with online distribution! 9 cents per article per subscription. For a journal with 2000 print copies produced, that's $180 per article. For a journal producing and selling only one print copy, yes 9 cents would be your savings. At least that's the only way one can possibly understand the numbers in: Not true. The publisher must treat the 9 cents as a variable cost, rising or falling with the numbers of subscribers. As such, the variable is of little concern, even if increased numbers of articles force the total price upward. Saving the variable runoff cost, as claimed, is particularly laughable because it comes at the cost of expensive infrastructure and shifts of production (paper, energy) to the reader. King, McDonald and Roder estimated the pre-Internet costs of U S science journals. They put per-article prerun costs at $1050 in 1977; runoff costs were $0.09. [SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS IN THE UNITED STATES. 1981. p. 218-219] It does matter what factors are being included in quoted numbers! Per article in the recent discussion really meant per article, not per article per subscription, or price per page to the library, as is often quoted. You are missing the point. Members of the policy community, particularly those controlling library budgets, bear a major responsibility for the rises in subscription prices related to nonvariable costs of production. The publisher faces a fixed cost ($1050 per article in 1977) that rises 'per-subscriber' when the numbers of subscribers decrease (as they have for 30 years). Each subscriber must contribute more to support this fixed cost as a result of subscription cancellations. It means that the 'price per page' rises. Moreover, the science policy that constantly increases RD spending should acknowledge its major role in total library subscription costs. Each library subscriber must pay more as the numbers of articles increase, about 5 per cent each year (as they have for 336 years). The fact that libraries are unable to meet this challenge testifies to a gaping hole in the sincerity of policy insiders. Thank you for your comment. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: The Ultimate Danger of SkyReading/Writing
Stevan refuses to acknowledge that libraries are the free source of the refereed literature. When he floated his idea around 1990, publishers had little online and the library crisis propaganda campaign was still fresh. Today, major publishers have their journals online. To access them online, one must simply be joined to a decent library. In short, there is no need for self-archiving refereed articles, except perhaps as an author's way of responding to requests for reprints. Moreover, authors lack the skills and training of publishers and librarians. There is no chance that _all_ authors can be coaxed into 'archiving' _all_ their papers in an orderly fashion. Unruly contributions, including unrefereed drafts and quackery, will be the norm. More often, great lacunae in what we like to call the scientific record will be an intractable problem. The researcher who depends on author 'archives' will suffer. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: The Ultimate Danger of SkyReading/Writing
. The answer to the challenge is more effective journals and libraries, not undermining them. It is more library spending, not a glib windfall, that we need. Thanks for your comments. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
The Ultimate Danger of SkyReading/Writing
On 26 Nov 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: And let us not confuse interactive on-line commentary (the labile medium) with the refereed research corpus itself, which is, if you like, the lapidary textual (skyreading) database on which the rapidfire skywriting can be based (if/when one wishes). Peer review itself is one of the intrinsic brakes on the process. The confusion comes in the link between the 'freeing' of the scientific record and the debasement of libraries, the demolition of journals, and the shifting of costs from institutions to individuals. The confusion comes when 'liberation' as a utopian goal results in 'anarchy' with all evils permitted in lawlessness. Peer review, if any, will operate differently in Harnad's 'sky' than it does currently The freedom of self-archiving informal communications together with formal publications will admit any paper from any author without consultation of editors and referees. Any refereeing of informal communications is done publicly or, more usually, not at all. The absence of criticism may leave the impression that errors, duplications, omissions, and rhetoric represent the norms of research. A great deal of research is poorly prepared, as most editors will affirm. Self-publishing will sully the record. Informal interaction will have little value. My impression is that most researchers would rather present better supported claims than attack someone else's work in print. Clearly, under Harnad's proposals, the burdens of judgment, together with library costs, are shifted from the community to the individual. This would be the unfortunate reversal of policy going back to the beginning of history -- the policy that has supported libraries as the disseminators of free information. Who has the capacity to plow through all the unrefined self-published claims and comments? No one. This, the challenge of dissemination and not the exhaustion of ideas (predicted by Holton, Horgan and others), will be the end of science. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote: 6. How to get around restrictive copyright legally http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim I have a great doubt about the legality on the second statement in the section 6.1 (saying that an author is not bound by any future copyright transfer agreement). How do you arrive at that conclusion? Which law says that you are not bound by any future copyright transfer agreement? I would point, instead, to the following passage as misleading: 6.5. If 6.3 is unsuccessful, archive thecorrigenda Your pre-refereeing preprint has already been self-archived since prior to submission, and is not covered by the copyright agreement, which pertains to the revised final (value-added) draft. Hence all you need to do is to self-archive a further file, linked to the archived preprint, which simply lists the corrections that the reader may wish to make in order to conform the preprint to the refereed, accepted version. If this were true, the standard language of copyright agreements would refer to all prior versions of the work. If the work covered by the copyright agreement is substantially the same, using the same language, title, references, etc., then the earlier version is also covered. The exception would be passages deleted from the earlier version. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations
on 15 Nov 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: sh 6.5. If 6.3 is unsuccessful, archive thecorrigenda sh Your pre-refereeing preprint has already been self-archived sh since prior to submission, and is not covered by the copyright sh agreement, which pertains to the revised final (value-added) sh draft. Hence all you need to do is to self-archive a further file, sh linked to the archived preprint, which simply lists the sh corrections that the reader may wish to make in order to conform sh the preprint to the refereed, accepted version. sh 6. How to get around restrictive copyright legally sh http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim AH the [above] passage [is] misleading: AH [if it] were true, the standard language of copyright agreements AH would refer to all prior versions of the work. AH If the work covered by the copyright agreement is substantially the same, AH using the same language, title, references, etc., then the earlier version AH is also covered. The exception would be passages deleted from the earlier AH version. sh Albert Henderson unfortunately continues to misunderstand the point sh here, and I think I know why. He continues to think in completely sh unreconstructed Gutenberg-era terms, as if the Internet and the sh digital revolution had never happened, and we were simply speaking sh about straightforward cases of present and past print-on-paper sh publication. sh The case he always has in mind is an author, asked to transfer sh copyright, while another publisher, a prior one, continues to sh print and publish and sell the text in question. sh In such a case, the copyright holder can go after the other publisher, sh to get him to stop printing or selling the text. sh But that is not at all the case here! There is no other publisher. sh The AUTHOR HIMSELF has publicly archived HIS OWN TEXT on-line sh BEFORE THERE WAS ANY COPYRIGHT TRANSFER AGREEMENT. Steven is so dazzled by technology he believes that there are special exceptions in what he calls the 'post-Gutenberg era.' There is nothing special, in terms of copyright, in posting a work to an Internet server. The author may be obligated by a copyright transfer to delete what he has archived (an inappropriate term for unreviewed drafts) and to defend the copyright that protects authorship from piracy and plagiarism. I would consider any continuing distribution of unauthorized copies should be considered piratical and subject to whatever prosecution and penalties may exist in law. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature
on 21 Aug 2001 T.D.BRODY tdb...@ecs.soton.ac.uk 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 . . .
Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature
on 21 Aug 2001 Steve Hitchcock sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk 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: Let Them Eat Cake... (M. Antoinette)
[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 har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk 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 RD at ARL institutions. The core group of ARL libraries kept pace with the growth of RD 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 EDUCATION each year
Re: Reasons for freeing the primary research literature
on 21 Aug 2001 Helene Bosc hb...@tours.inra.fr 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
Re: Financial Times Article on Self-Archiving: 23 July 2001
on 1 Aug 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Albert Henderson wrote: sh virtually all of the self-archived preprints in arxiv are sh submitted to refereed journals, revised... [etc] http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/ In his analysis of the papers on the LANL server, Tim Brody tells us: The proportion of papers that have got Journal-ref entries is 36.87%. This would include those that are submitted after formal publication rather than being first submitted as preprints. Thank you for your help. It appears that the physics situation is much the same as the informal literature studied by Garvey and others. All that datum tells you is what proportion of the papers have the final journal citation inserted by their authors, not what proportion are submitted or published. Virtually speaking, physicists and mathematicians are so different from other scientists ... Great. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Financial Times Article on Self-Archiving: 23 July 2001
on 31 Jul 2001 Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk commented: From the recent Harnad/henderson controversy (sorry about the late response, I've been on vacation): virtually doesn't make it so. Garvey and Griffith found two thirds of the technical reports produced in 1962 had not achieved journal publication by 1965, and, apparently, the contents of the vast majority of these reports were never submitted for journal publication. Many authors of such reports indicated that 'no further dissemination of the information was necessary.' ... This raises some questions about the ultimate value of the information in these reports and its relevance to the established body of scientific knowledge. [from Garvey, COMMUNICATION: THE ESSENCE OF SCIENCE. Pergamon 1979] The Garvey Griffith study was a seminal piece of information science research in its time, and is still worthy of respect today as part of the historical context. This particular paragraph from it, however, was talking about technical reports, the grey literature, not the published refereed journals. Many technical reports are still produced, especially by companies in the science-based industries, often for internal use only for reasons of commercial confidentiality. Sometimes these become openly available years later, once their content has (for example) been protected by patenting. They are useful sources of scientific information, and their certificate of quality is, in effect, the name of the company producing them. Various projects around the world (e.g. the MAGIC project in the UK) are working on improving electronic access to grey-literature information. But this is a different literature from the refereed journal literature, whose authors are predominantly from academic and other not-for-profit institutions, and different arguments apply. The quotation is pointed directly at the continued use of the mislabeled archive of physics/math preprints, just moved into the private sector, as a very modern model of successful self-archiving. My comment also quoted and directly followed Harnad's passage reading: But virtually all of the self-archived preprints in arxiv are submitted to refereed journals, revised in accordance with the referees' recommendations, and if the author judges the changes substantive, the corrected final draft is self-archived too; otherwise, the reference is merely updated to make it the formal journal bibliographic citation. Garvey and Griffith's first findings of the disconnection between informal and formal publication was in the area of psychology, where industrial activity is minimal. A more recent study, of biomedical conference proceedings, also found many papers never submitted, never published. I also cited a recent study of medical research: A recent study produced similarities to this data and also called into question the value of citing informal papers as if they were a part of the formal literature. [Callaham, M.L., et al. J A M A 1998. 280:254-257] Thanks for helping me clarify that studies of historical significance continue to be relevant. Why not produce hard evidence that Harnad's above claim is true: But virtually all of the self-archived preprints in arxiv are submitted to refereed journals, revised in accordance with the referees' and applies to the science literature generally??? Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . .
Re: Financial Times Article on Self-Archiving: 23 July 2001
on 31 Jul 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Albert Henderson wrote: Why not produce hard evidence that Harnad's above claim is true: sh But virtually all of the self-archived preprints in arxiv are sh submitted to refereed journals, revised... [etc] and applies to the science literature generally??? Here's some (already cited in reply several times): http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/ In his analysis of the papers on the LANL server, Tim Brody tells us: The proportion of papers that have got Journal-ref entries is 36.87%. This would include those that are submitted after formal publication rather than being first submitted as preprints. Thank you for your help. It appears that the physics situation is much the same as the informal literature studied by Garvey and others. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons
on 26 Jul 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, George Lundberg wrote: i certainly can agree with one point the market will decide howeveri would not count on any windfall savings unless there is a secure on-going revenue stream and that is, of course, a fundamental problem with any giveaway product I am not quite sure what George means here (nor what he is taking me to mean): Note that most of this is hypothetical: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm The part that is not hypothetical but certain is: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm The (hypothetical) windfall savings would be those of the university libraries, from S/L/P cancellations, if (hypothetically) the online availability of the self-archived (giveaway) version of all refereed articles (if/when most or all of them are indeed self-archived) were to cause a catastrophic drop in the demand (hence revenue streams) for the S/L/P version (on-paper, publisher's PDF, publisher's online enhancements). A portion (be it 10% or 30%) of those university windfall savings could then be used to pay the costs, on a per-paper submitted/accepted basis, to maintain the revenue streams for the sole remaining essential service from refereed journal publishers, namely, the implementation of peer review. This free access argument continues a fraudulent promise of exellence to disguise financial goals. University managers are often at odds with faculty governance and the influence of faculty associations. They gladly undermine the power of faculty rooted in publications and publishing businesses. Hardly hypothetical is the financial windfall _alreadly_ realized as a result of cancelations justified by photocopying and the expansion of fair use. Universities cut library spending in _half_ over the last 30 years. By this means they increased their profitability as an examination of financial statements and statistics easily demonstrates. Hardly hypothetical is the wave of red tape, poor service, reduced staffing and decimated collections. It is not only users of journals who suffer but authorship, university press publishers of monographs, database users, and the sponsors of research and education. It is also librarians who prefer the academic environment but were pushed out of it. Clearly, it is the universities who have raised the economic barrier of the budget to cut researchers off from information. Clearly, universities did not use the savings extracted from library budgets to pay for expanded benefits. If anything, the average wait for interlibrary photocopies and the average failure rate deteriorated. Clearly, universities are hoarding financial assets while letting intellectual concerns go to pot. There is nothing hypothetical here. Fortunately, defenders of copyright have saved the libraries from complete destruction -- so far. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
on 26 Jul 2001 David Goodman dgood...@princeton.edu wrote: About the likely factors, from the standpoint of a librarian: Librarians will not cancel the conventional journals if they are used. They will (at least if they are rational) cancel them when they show no use. It is also of course likely that they will cancel them because of cost, especially if the cost per use figure is particularly high. What good librarians should and do look at, is not primarily the opinions of their users, but the actual beavior of their users. Expensive unused publications get canceled. The most any library can expect is enough money to buy what the users do use, and not also everything they think they are using or think they ought to be using. We do not buy for our own personal reading; we buy as agents for the users to acquire what they need in the format they prefer. The shortfall in support of research is probably why so many scientists use grant money to purchase subsriptions to the journals that are not supplied by their libraries. This is too bad for students and other investigators, present and future, since subscriptions and books purchased with grant money are under no obligation to be shared. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: PubScience under threat
On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Mark Doyle wrote: This gov't should not be involved is a slippery slope. What happens to funding for: 1) Harvard-Smithsonian's ADS service 2) PubMed, Medline, and PubMedCentral 3) arXiv.org All of these are more than worthy of gov't support in my opinion and so is PubSCIENCE. There is no mandate that out-moded business models should be preserved at all costs. To be sure this is the real point of attacking PubSCIENCE. SIIA wants to push us down that slope. It has been a long-standing policy that our government should not compete with the private sector in publishing -- no more than it should provide electricity or food for the general population. Proposals for such utopian services were sharply rejected by Congress and the Administration following Sputnik. The present batch of projects were created without policy hearings or Congressional approvals -- thereby doomed by their sponsors from the very first day. The projects cited service a prosperous elite. By virtue of handsome subsidies, they amount to welfare for rich, heavily subsidized tax-exempt institutions as well as for competitors abroad. If left to grow, it is likely that free government dissemination services would justify further reductions in university library spending. They would be seen as substitutes for expensive journals just as was the embrace of library photocopying in the 1976 Copyright Act. They also discourage, by their free or cheap predatory pricing, private innovation and investments in adequate coverage. The record of government intrusion in information is pitiful. Look at the National Library of Medicine which, over 100 years ago covered the entirety of biomedicine. By its own analysis, its coverage dropped near 90 percent. Moreover, its service is badly outdated. A team of researchers was forced to wade through 10,000 cites 1980-1995, for instance, to locate a few hundred articles related to whiplash related injuries. Another example of government foundering is the library cataloging dominated by the Library of Congress's archaic MARC standard. It is stuck in the days when catalogs were located near browsable stacks; superficial catalog information could be tolerated. State-of-the-art online cataloging is now dominated by private industry: Amazon.com, BN.com, etc., not the government. If there is a policy cause to be taken up at the grass roots, it is this: Science agencies support library spending through grants as an indirect cost of research. Unfortunately, overhead support does not reflect the actual use of libraries or the needs of researchers. It is no more than an administrative slush fund. The responsibility for this probably falls to the university representatives who negotiate indirect cost rates and those who advise the Administration. But then, where were the librarians and the associations of scientists when these back-room deals cut the library user out of the picture? This is where reform is long overdue. Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
on Thu, 28 Jun 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote:
Unfortunately, Albert Henderson's suggestions are so repetitive and
predictable that they can be responded to by number. These responses
are themselves equally predictable (and a fortiori, repetitive), but
they differ from the points to which they are responses in that they
take the point into account, and advance the analysis one step further,
whereas alas Albert simply takes a step back every time, and simply
reiterates, without processing or reflecting on the substantive
responses he has received repeatedly -- indeed, without giving any sign
of their having entered his sensorium at all.
Two algorithms will generate just about every point Albert keeps
making in this Forum (and the points both keep generating are just
plain incorrect):
(1) The serials crisis is an artifact of (conspiratorial)
underfunding of libraries, and would be solved if this underfunding
were terminated. [Fallacy: No conspiracy; no underfunding; no funds
available or deliberately withheld.]
Don't take my word for the underfunding of libraries.
There is considerable literature documenting the underfunding
of libraries after 1970: The Fry-White study (1975), National
Enquiry on Scholarly Communication (1979); Richard Talbot (1984),
ARL Serials Prices Project (1989); A M Cummings et al (1992);
Okerson Stubbs (1992) -- just to cite a few studies not
including my own. [I will gladly provide full cites to anyone
wishing for a depressing afternoon.]
My own comparison of declining library spending with
increased profitability -- well documented statistically
-- suggests funds have been deliberately withheld. [I will
gladly share my sources -- all published.]
Who said conspiracy? Please give us your source. If
I were to choose a word, it would be culture. Ironically,
the culture of university administrators places a higher
value on hoarding financial assets than it does on library
collections. Here is a culture, like the management
culture pre-workers' compensation and fire safety laws, that
relies on workers to take care of themselves. University
managers are failing to meet their obligation to excellence
in research and education.
(2) Nothing relevant has changed since the Gutenberg [print on-paper
dissemination] Era. [Fallacy: everything has changed; authors can now
disseminate their REFEREED {sic} research for free for all, online, by
self-archiving {sic}]
Technology gave us another new tool a decade ago. No revolution
need follow. The essentials of copyright and the social
construction of science have not toppled. Nor will they.
[snip]
Have a nice weekend.
Albert Henderson
Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000
70244.1...@compuserve.com
.
.
.
Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
on Tue, 26 Jun 2001 Christopher D. Green chri...@yorku.ca wrote: Albert Henderson wrote: Money is not the only token of value. One of the key fallacies that burdens this forum is the failure to recognize the economic exchanges that course through the research communication process. Publishers exchange recognition and dissemination services for the copyrights of the articles they publish. Every economist I know agrees. Problem is, the *publisher* confers nothing of the kind. The extra value if provided by the scholars who serve as editors, reviewers, etc., and just like the authors, they typically do so at no cost to the pubisher. Nice work if you can get it. More than nice, vital. The Indian Academay of Sciences started its own physics journal, PRAMANA, because European and American journals did not sufficiently engage Indian scientists in peer review. I have no doubt that the need to participate was a factor in the creation of PHYSICAL REVIEW in 1893 (funded by Macmillan) when the U.S. was far from the mainstream of science and there was no American Physical Society. I also have no doubt that the development of the American Physical Society was hastened by the willingness of Macmillan to provide financial and organizational support for the new journal. Best wishes, Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
As Thosten Veblen wrote of university managers, The last resort of the apologists for these more sordid endeavours is the plea that only by this means can the ulterior ends of a civilization of intelligence be served. The argument may fairly be paraphrased to the effect that in order to serve God in the end, we must all be ready to serve the Devil in the meantime. [The Higher Learning in America. Originally published 1918 by B. W. Huebsch, Inc. Reprinted 1993 by Transaction p. 9] If libraries and librarians have been economically abused it has been at the hands of university managers far more than publishers. The aim of this forum, it seems clear to me (whether Harnad et al. are ready to admit it) is to end spending on libraries as soon as author-archiving can be offered as a substitute for ownership. Like many described by Nicholson Baker in DOUBLE FOLD, well intentioned librarians and others have turned into shills for every alternative to the process of formal dissemination of research. Where is the passionate advocacy in support of fairer budgets for libraries, rather than justifying financial surpluses that serve no educational purpose? Best wishes, Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com -Forwarded Message- From: September 1998 American Scientist Forum, INTERNET:september98-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org To: [unknown], INTERNET:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: 6/27/2001 11:48 AM RE: Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research At 01:19 PM 6/26/01 -0400, Albert Henderson wrote: on 26 Jun 2001 Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk wrote: More seriously, taking Henderson's point about economic exchanges that course through the research communication process, I suggest that Elsevier, Springer, Taylor Francis, etc., and also the American Chemical Society and other large not-for-profit publishers, should each set up a Foundation into which the put a large proportion of the profits from their scholarly publishing activities. These Foundations would then support research in a wide variety of academic disciplines, competed for in the usual way by academics submitting grant proposals. This would bring the companies concerned well-deserved recognition, and would also return to the academic community some of the hard cash taken out of it by exorbitant journal prices. There is no need for a new financial hoard. Every major university already has accumulated profits and gifts that serve no educational purpose. THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE just published a lengthy description of Harvard's $19 billion, by Johanna Berkman (June 24 2001 p. 38-41). Read and weep. If Harvard's collection development had kept pace with the published output of science after 1940, its library would hold twice as many volumes as it does. Its endowment (shudder!) might possible have a few less $billion. Best wishes, Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com It is clear that Albert Henderson cannot be shaken in his belief that universities are immensely wealthy institutions that perversely refuse to spend their money on adequate library resources. This picture is not recognisable to us in the UK, nor, I suspect, to most academics in state univesties in the USA. My own university is a reasonably well-regarded medium-sized UK university. Its annual turnover (not profit, turnover!) is around 120 million pounds; its budgeted surplus (required for fiscal prudence by our University Council, in order to increase cash reserves, following a period of building construction) is about 2 million pounds per year. The cash reserves are about 20 million pounds (i.e. equivalent to about two months' routine expenditures). All the rest of the university's assets are real estate (its campus and the buidings on it) and the buildings' contents, including of course the library's collection. Harvard must be one of the wealthiest universities in the world -- hardly a typical one, anyway. But remember what endowment means. These are funds that are held as capital, and the university spends the interest on that capital on its running expenses. At current interest rates that is still probably 1 billion dollars a year or so, if the figure of 19 billion dollars capital is correct. A lot of money; but they do have to pay their faculty salaries, the running costs of all their buildings, scholarships for students, and everything else needed to run one of the world's highest-quality universities. And however rich or poor you are, that is not a good reason for allowing someone else to rip you off! Fytton Rowland. ** Fytton Rowland, M.A., Ph.D., F.I.Inf.Sc., Lecturer, Deputy Director of Undergraduate Programmes and Programme Tutor
Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
on Fri, 22 Jun 2001 Alan Story a.c.st...@ukc.ac.uk wrote: As soon as someone suggests you know it really is a crazy system under which commercial publishers acquire, at no cost, all intellectual property rights to the work of authors which is produced by the often-unpaid labour of academics (because they love their subject area) and by the money of taxpayers (academic salaries, fellowships, libraries, prior education, etc.) and student tuition fees you get accused of taking clearly an anti-library anti-science position. Not at all clear to me, Albert, just as it was not clear to a lot of people some centuries that the earth was flat just because people said it was. Also not clear is that saying that unpaid authors give away their copyrights doesn't make it true. Money is not the only token of value. One of the key fallacies that burdens this forum is the failure to recognize the economic exchanges that course through the research communication process. Publishers exchange recognition and dissemination services for the copyrights of the articles they publish. Every economist I know agrees. By the same token, the value of self-publishing is of lesser value because it is unselective and offers little archival promise in spite of the mis-use of the word by Harnad and Gisparg. Thanks for helping me clear this up. Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
on Fri, 22 Jun 2001 Alan Story a.c.st...@ukc.ac.uk wrote: The ALPSP may call their deal a model licence...but instead it should be called a Model-T (as in circa 1930 Model-T Ford ) licence. Yes, the author gets the possibility of retaining copyright, but the publisher is assigned (at no cost to the publisher it should be underlined) ALL of the other rights, including digitalisation rights, re-publication rights, rights regarding non-profit educational uses of the work. Hence, AFTER hard copy publication ( and hence not conflicting with Harnad's subversive proposal), the publisher has the right to prevent any open archiving by an author(X) or her/his work and the right to charge the students of X's colleague a copyright royalty fee for the non-profit educational use of that article. In other words, a tiny tad better than the standard contract available with most commercial publishers...but still a Model T in the contemporary era. Any license should grant only one right to a publisher: a first hard-copy publication right. And not a tad more. Clearly an anti-library anti-science position. It was the outspoken interest in electronic formats by major science research libraries, more than any other group, that encouraged science publishers to invest in digital dissemination. Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Review Journals
The shortage for post-graduate researchers, practitioners, and policy makers is in state-of-the-art reviews that are comprehensive and authoritative. For instance, the standards of many medical journals for reporting expensive clinical trials (CONSORT) recommend that authors state general interpretation of the data in light of the totality of the available evidence. JAMA editors emphasized this commitment to quality by asking authors to use a checklist that includes this recommendation. Unfortunately, as Fytton Rowland pointed out last week, it is the research sponsor - for example, the NIH - not the journal, that calls the tune. A study reported at the International Congress on Peer Review held at Prague in 1997 showed little evidence that authors complied or that journal editors were able to insist on it. (I can supply cites for anyone interested.) This shortage undermines authorship and credibility of grant proposals. It also casts a shadow of bias and insularity on research results. Insularity, of course, comes with the burden of too-many-to-count unevaluated, undistilled reports of primary research -- including journal articles as well as unreviewed preprints. One of my engineer friends calls this a signal to noise problem. The greater the noise, the greater the energy must be to obtain a clear signal. At the risk of repeating the obvious, author-archiving preprints contributes more to the problem than to the solution. Newt Gingrich, speaking as a politician rather than a scientist, emphasized the policy implications of incoherence. However, the problem that he perceived has been recognized for decades as impairing the producitivity of research. It continues to fester as many scientists, like bureaucrats, prefer to work harder rather than smarter. Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Self-archiving downstream
being that in many ways the knowledge--this is sort of the Santa Fe Institute [inaudible]--but the knowledge base is actually beginning to come together across a very broad range of disciplines and create some kind of resonance that allows us to talk to ourselves. I would describe it very differently, and in maybe a simpler way. I believe we need to be conceptually thinking about electronic encyclopedias. That is, if you go out to NIH and say, 'tell me what you're learning on the human genome project-tell me how many years it will be until the average practicing doctor knows it.' The gaps are enormous. If you say, all right, if we were to go around at the National Academy of Sciences, and say, 'tell me the areas in which there are paradigm level developments occurring, and let's list all of them.' How many of those should an informed, sophisticated person know about? What's the vehicle for knowing about it? [snip] Clearly, well-informed, well-written reviews and commentaries solve not only this problem of coherency. The charade of doing science is exposed by evaluations of work done and by clarifying the work that needs to be done to get results. A good comprehensive review may require a task force that spans several specialties in order to bring perspective and depth to the resulting report. It would seem obvious to do such an evaluation before spending a cent on equipment, technicians, and supplies. Oddly, the practice is to do science first and ask questions later (if at all). That's probably why review journals are so heavily used and cited. That is also probably why so much research is of little consequence in the advance of knowledge. I, too, believe that this is a problem that must be attacked from the top by policymakers. It will take a new vision that comprehends the entirety of the science process and the value of information as an ingredient. In contrast, the prospect of author self-archiving promises to simply add to the mire of incoherence and chaos. Unfortunately, Speaker Gingrich stepped down shortly after making his statement, for reasons entirely irrelevant. The House Science committee went back to business as usual, to maximize the benefits accrued from their lobby constituencies in my humble opinion. Science continues to lack leadership. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . .
Re: Copyright, Embargo, and the Ingelfinger Rule
. Librarians who cared have either taken stronger positions against impoverishment of their libraries and flaccid standards. Or, they have gone into industry where researchers who need information fare better than faculty senates. Best wishes, Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
on 31 May 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: On Wed, 30 May 2001, Albert Henderson wrote: [snip] I am saying that after the transfer of copyright, the article must be withdrawn unless the agreement provides for continued publication of the preprint form of the work. This is all predicated on prior PUBLICATION, where publication is constured to be the same sort of thing as that secondary publication which now calls for the withdrawal of the primary one. That's all Gutenberg gibberish. Legally, even a hand-written copy on toilet paper or a lavatory wall is publication (and protected by copyright); so is a radio reading, which can be taped by countless listeners. What on earth would the author's obligation to withdraw all of that from the ether amount to? After transferring the copyright to a publisher, the preprint publication is not only a means of infringement but an invitation to infringe. The author must delete the 'preprint' of the work from the preprint server. Speaking more generally, it is clear that there is a sense of publication when a work is made available on an Internet database. This medium is different from printing and distributing a number of copies. It differs from print, in this context, in that it can begin and also end on the author's command. When the author asks a publisher to invest in the work, transferring the copyright to leverage that investment, the author has a duty to remove the alternative form of the work from public access when the copyright is transferred. Most large learned publishers have invested heavily in online versions of their journals. With the amazing increases in sponsored research spending, research institutions should have sufficient overhead support to purchase access to everything and to attract the sort of investments in post-Gutenberg innovations that have advanced communications over the last 500 years. Best wishes, [snip, snip, snip] Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
Re: Zen response to e-Archiving Challenge
RE: Re: Zen response to e-Archiving Challenge on 30 May 2001 Peter D. Junger jun...@samsara.law.cwru.edu wrote: Albert Henderson writes: : By providing the means to make copies of a work after transferring : its copyright and without the consent of the new copyright owner, : the author contributes to infringement. He/she is also probably in : violation of the transfer agreeement or worse. : : My impression is that the owner of the means of infringement, in : this case owner of the Internet server, is also liable after being : informed that copies are being made without the copyright owners' : consent. It is unusual for authors to ``transfer'' the entire copyright in an article to a journal. Normally all that is assigned is the right of first publication in a journal. Is the situation really so different in the case of scientific journals? I am only speaking of learned journals. Your normally refers to mass media and first serial rights. Learned journal contracts that I have seen generally transfer the copyright as a work made for hire and return to the author limited rights, for example, to use the material in class and in a monograph of which the author is the sole originator. Contributory infringement is not likely to apply to a publication of a copy of the work before the assignment of the copyright. In fact, that could not possibly be a contributory infringement. If you publish a copy of a copyrighted work that may be infringement; it isn't contributory infringement. But anyway if the author publishes a copy of the copyrighted work before he assigns the copyright, that publication is not an infringement. I am saying that after the transfer of copyright, the article must be withdrawn unless the agreement provides for continued publication of the preprint form of the work. The claims, as I read them, that the preprint is somehow different than the work affected by the copyright transfer, are unrealistic if not downright misleading. They remind me of the folks who argue that 5th amendment protections against self-incrimination support not filing tax returns ... Again, in the case of the publication of preprints, since preprints are published before the assignment of copyright, that publication cannot be a violation of the ``transfer agreement,'' whatever that is. The impression that the owner of the Internet server may be liable is perhaps based on the safe-harbour provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which says that the owner of the server will not be liable if he removes the copy after being informed it is claimed to be a violation of copyright, but the safe-harbour provisions do not say that the server owner is liable if he does not remove the copy. That me be a subtle distinction, but it is very important. Especially in the case of pre-prints, which are not an infringement of the assignee's interest in the copyright, because they were published before the assignment. My impression, that the owner of the Internet server may be liable, refers to the period following the transfer of copyright and notice to the server. Continuing to publish is a act of contributory infringment. Thanks for chiming in. I hope our readers are edified. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Zen response to e-Archiving Challenge
on 29 May 2001 Charles Oppenheim c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk claimed: Albert Henderson stated: First, the transfer of copyright covers all copies before and after. Copyright does not differ much from the cake you cannot eat and then have. Second, AGU et al. v. Texaco proved infringement all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. This is no different. Copyright infringement takes place when person B *copies* a work owned by person A. In this case, person B is the original author, and person A is the publisher to whom person B has assigned copyright of a *later version* of the paper. So infringement cannot have taken place. The real question is whether person B was in a position to assign copyright to person A, and if (s)he was not, then there is a potential breach of contract, but not infringement. Copyright infringement cannot take place where no copying of a document took place. I will try to make myself clear. By providing the means to make copies of a work after transferring its copyright and without the consent of the new copyright owner, the author contributes to infringement. He/she is also probably in violation of the transfer agreeement or worse. My impression is that the owner of the means of infringement, in this case owner of the Internet server, is also liable after being informed that copies are being made without the copyright owners' consent. AGU versus Texaco was a case concerning fair use in photocopying of published journal articles. It was nothing to do with preprint (or any other type of) archives. The discussion we are having is nothing to do with fair use. In AGU vs Texaco, fair use was the defense, not the plaintiff's claim. The case involved infringing photocopies of journals to which the defendant had subscribed. It seems to me that making copies of journal articles not purchased in any form would be an injury at least one notch higher. I am not an attorney, of course, so if any with a copyright practice would like to chime in, please do so. In response to my comment: Blaise Cronin did some important research about ten years ago that showed that US academics' salaries were directly correlated with their citation counts. Since citation counts are (it is universally agreed) a measure of a scientist's impact, I think the relationship IS proved - unless Albert has evidence contradicting Cronin's results? Albert replied: Cronin and Overfelt focused on a single SLIS department and produced a table that compared full professors with assistants and associates on a given day. They did not set out to study the relationship of cites to income, nor did they do so with their data. Their aim was elsewhere. They emphasized, The conclusion must be that most other top-ranking library and information science schools have less impressive track records than Indiana and so on. (JASIS 45:61-72 1994) They also pointed out that the most highly-cited LIS journals are not refereed. Is that the work you had in mind?? No, it is not. The article I was referring to *was* about income. If you would enlighten us with a cite, we would be grateful. Albert also noted: The application of Lotka's law by Price, which I referred to above, would seem to stand. Alas, Lotka's Law is nothing to do with academics' earning power. In other words, the distribution of productivity of scientists has nothing to do with the distribution of their earning power. Albert's other points were so off topic, there is no point in responding to them. Thanks anyway for your interest. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Zen response to e-Archiving Challenge
will solve scientists' communication problems. Even Paul Ginsparg has noted that an intellectual non-automated approach is needed. The literature is too massive and chaotic, the scientific community is too broad and unruly, and the ability of any individual (no matter how large the ego) to keep on top is doubtful. Like the responsibility for workers' safety, the burden of intelligence must be supported from the top. Like the issue of safety, the people at the top would just rather save money. Sputnik, like the Shirtwaist factory fire, shook them out of this groove for a while. I agree with this comment, but hope that novel techniques, such as proposed in the Semantic Web, will address this issue in the future. A well-established technique is called the review article. In order to prepare one properly, one must have full access and financial support. Medical editors' CONSORT standards have called for authors to assess the results of clinical trials in light of the totality of the available evidence. (According to a report at the Prague meeting on peer review, authors seem to ignore this demand.) FALLACY 6. Authors' income results from the impact of their findings. While publication helps substantiate a scientists capcity for research, there is no provable relationship between authorship and income. The most prolific authors achieve tenure early on. Most gainfully employed authors produce only 1 or 2 papers in their lifetime. Many scientists and engineers publish nothing at all. Well-paid industrial technical consulting is more likely to involve trade secrets rather than open communications. I recall that the Association of Research Libraries Serials Prices Project also stepped in this hold, accusing researchers of excessive publishing! Blaise Cronin did some important research about ten years ago that showed that US academics' salaries were directly correlated with their citation counts. Since citation counts are (it is universally agreed) a measure of a scientist's impact, I think the relationship IS proved - unless Albert has evidence contradicting Cronin's results? Cronin and Overfelt focused on a single SLIS department and produced a table that compared full professors with assistants and associates on a given day. They did not set out to study the relationship of cites to income, nor did they do so with their data. Their aim was elsewhere. They emphasized, The conclusion must be that most other top-ranking library and information science schools have less impressive track records than Indiana and so on. (JASIS 45:61-72 1994) They also pointed out that the most highly-cited LIS journals are not refereed. Is that the work you had in mind?? The application of Lotka's law by Price, which I referred to above, would seem to stand. Thanks for responding. Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Zen response to e-Archiving Challenge
on 25 May 2001 Stevan Harnad har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: The posting by Albert Henderson, rather than illustrating fallacies on the part of others, is merely illustrating the errors to which one is prone when one has a conflict of interest (between what is really the case, and what one is advocating -- in Albert's case, as we all know, the advocacy is on behalf of certain parties' interests...). If anyone has read my writings fairly over the years, they should conclude that I have advocated on behalf of libraries and their users more than any other segment of the learned community. That has been my intention. That sometimes means criticizing well-meaning but destructive ideas, organizations, and individuals. I am not a lone critic. My references go back to Thorsten Veblen and Max Weber. Perhaps Stephen Harnad and his cohort will -- like Verner Clapp, Patricia Battin, and Fremont Rider -- eventually suffer at the hands of Nicholson Baker if he goes on to write the sequel to this season's hit expose, Double Fold. Finally, let me make it very clear that I am not receiving any payment for my advocacy. I am on no payroll. I receive no other kind of gratuity. I have not accepted any consulting assignment for some time. Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Zen response to e-Archiving Challenge
Re Reinhard Wentz's challenge [copied below]: Fallacies abound in this forum. We should all be able to identify many of them, asserted and implied, without needing to read the New Scientist. The following come to mind: FALLACY 1. Scientists give away their reports and copyrights. Any economist that I have discussed this with disagrees. Scientists (and scholars) exchange their reports for effective dissemination services and the unique recognition provided by publishers who organize new knowledge with authority. Obviously the exchange has value to both parties. Authors struggle to be accepted by the publishers of their choice. Publishers compete for authors but may reject work and require revisions. FALLACY 2. Authors can legally leave the preprint version of an article up by adding corrigenda after transferring copyright to the publisher. No copyright attorney that I know would agree with this. It is a clear case of wilfull infringment. Having transferred copyright, the author is obligated to delete the preprint or be a party to Napster-like infringment. Moreover, the preprint server is probably also liable. FALLACY 3. Use of the word archive to describe unreviewed preprints. Archive has long been associated with peer-reviewed journals such as Archives of Internal Medicine and with research libraries that are selective about what they keep. This usage is a pathetic plea for status, much like sewage processors claiming to be water recovery plants. Speaking of sewage, the problem with the usage is that mixing unreviewed preprints with published papers will confuse readers. You wouldn't offer sewer water side by side with 7-up and Coke and offer it to your trusting children, would you? The misleading usage is an open invitation for fraudulent promotion of unsafe and ineffective products presented as research. Freedom of speech issues do not excuse the reckless and uncaring mixing of dangerous material with original research. Another problem is that the word archive is being used to market the displacement of libraries, librarians, editors, and publishers with the notion that a computer can replace them all, and very cheaply. FALLACY 4. Peer review is certification of quality. But not of results. Most peer review of published articles is done in a few hours and without examining the authors' original data. Because of the impoverishment of their libraries and the slowness of interlibrary loan, referees are unable to check unfamiliar works cited in a paper under review. Yes, referees are not likely to be experts on the topic they review according to one study published recently. FALLACY 5. Do-it-yourself Self-archiving by authors will solve scientists' communication problems. Even Paul Ginsparg has noted that an intellectual non-automated approach is needed. The literature is too massive and chaotic, the scientific community is too broad and unruly, and the ability of any individual (no matter how large the ego) to keep on top is doubtful. Like the responsibility for workers' safety, the burden of intelligence must be supported from the top. Like the issue of safety, the people at the top would just rather save money. Sputnik, like the Shirtwaist factory fire, shook them out of this groove for a while. FALLACY 6. Authors' income results from the impact of their findings. While publication helps substantiate a scientists capcity for research, there is no provable relationship between authorship and income. The most prolific authors achieve tenure early on. Most gainfully employed authors produce only 1 or 2 papers in their lifetime. Many scientists and engineers publish nothing at all. Well-paid industrial technical consulting is more likely to involve trade secrets rather than open communications. I recall that the Association of Research Libraries Serials Prices Project also stepped in this hold, accusing researchers of excessive publishing! FALLACY 7. Universities are too poor to maintain self-sufficient collections. In the United States, at any rate, it is clear that higher education institutions have increased their profitability at the expense of their libraries for over 30 years. FALLACY 8. Science budgets cannot afford dissemination. Science budgets seem to aim for high employment and a high rate of grant renewals. Why? Dwight Eisenhower (former president of Columbia University) pointed out that the government contract has replaced curiosity as a motive. Newt Gingrich once noted that science bureaucrats don't care about results. A science policy that cares about results cannot afford not to support libraries as the core of a private enterprise market that responds -- far better than any bureaucrat -- to wants, needs, and demands. The 1960s were a golden age of science in the US partly because the growth of spending on science was matched by spending on libraries. Is 8 enough for now? Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Top 10 reasons why print journals have a future
on Sat, 7 Apr 2001 J.W.T.Smith j.w.t.sm...@ukc.ac.uk wrote: This may be slightly off-topic but for many hard science subjects (in both UK and US universities) the cost of journal subscriptions can be 90 or more percent of their library budget. In this case the 'flea' has almost consumed the 'dog'. The priorities of libraries spending were forced into view by ruthless cuts in university spending on their libraries. Universities that proudly devoted 6 percent of their spending on libraries in the 1960s now part with less than 3 percent. In the UK, statistics reported by the Universities Funding Council and the Publishers Association reported a similar drop. While cancelling thousands of journal subscriptions, these institutions also cut back on purchases of books. In 1992, Ann Okerson and Ken Stubbs projected this trend and offered this conclusion: If the curve were extended even further, by 2007 ARL libraries would stop buying books entirely, and only purchase serials; by 2017 they would buy nothing (Publishers Weekly 239,34 (July 27) p 22-23) In the meantime, profits of all higher education institutions in the US doubled. Among the private research universities, unspent income has averaged 20 to 25% of total revenues in recent years. Yet another reason we need a fundamental change in the distribution of research results and related forms of academic publishing. The current system is not only illogical its also expensive. The expense to the sponsors of research resulting from ignorance, insularity, duplication, and error is likely to be far greater than the potential for library spending. The damage to library dissemination undermines authorship, peer review, and the training of researchers. Research proposals are made and OKed without the benefit of a comprehensive review of what's been done. In spite of guidelines established by editors, results and reported and conclusions drawn without such a review. Most of the erosion of effective preparation and dissemination has resulted from the short-sightedness of administrators willing to sacrifice excellence. The fundamental change needed would be new leadership that values quality in research and education over retained earnings. Moreover, most of the innovation in effective dissemination for over 300 years has come from entrepreneurs -- not bureaucrats. The e- revolution -- which includes hardware as well as software -- is a pretty good example of the fertile contributions of private investment. Best wishes, Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
Re: Validation of posted archives
on Thu, 22 Mar 2001 Greg Kuperberg g...@math.ucdavis.edu wrote: On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 06:18:42PM -0500, Albert Henderson wrote: In short, I would not be so sure that LANL's service is not filled with rubbish. It takes some chutzpah for an outsider to speculate that established, self-respecting authors are writing rubbish. Indeed there is no good reason to speculate at all, since it's all out in the open. For example here are the 19 articles (+ 5 cross-listings) in the geometric topology category in the math arXiv in February: http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/math.GT/0102 Which ones are rubbish? The one by Alexander Dranishnikov? The two by Stavros Garoufalidis and Jerome Levine? The one by Hugh Morton? I know these people. Whatever shortcoming of their work you have in mind, I'd be happy to let them know. Time will tell. All papers can't be wonderful. In the classic article on the value of comprehensive reviews, Conyers Herring reported his study of published articles in solid state physics. Only half retained value after 5 years. Some were found to be in error or duplicating other work. Other studies of the literature report similar results. A task force at McGill rejected the majority of studies it reviewed as bad science. There is a distribution of quality in every field, of course -- a social phenomenon. Take heart. Herring recognized, the literature is not all garbage: There is a lot of gold. He also pointed out that primary papers can be distilled to a 10th of their original bulk in reviews. PHYSICS TODAY 21,9:27-33 Sept 1968 Best wishes, Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Validation of posted archives
on Wed, 21 Mar 2001 Tim Brody tdb...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Guillermo Julio Padron Gonzalez wrote: The name of a journal is part of the validation of a published paper. We all use the rigorousness of the peer review and the editorial crite-ria of the journals to judge about the validity of a published paper. I agree that there can be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions. It is clear that nobody has the time or the willingness to dive into each paper to find out whether it is the final version of a validated paper or it is just electronic garbage. The fact is that a non-administered archiving system may cause a proliferation of non-validated, duplicated, misleading and even fraudulent information in the web and there will be no way to identify the valid information, so the readers will go to validating sites, v. g. the publisher site. Unless OAI included some kind of validation... I hope you do not mind me adding to this discussion. If I may clear up perhaps a confusion about the protocol OAI: OAI is a protocol for the distribution of Metadata, much the same as TCP/IP is a protocol used by the Internet to distribute information. I would no more expect OAI to provide me with guarantees about the content than I would TCP/IP about this email. (As an aside, OAI does not provide any facility for the distribution of full-text papers (it can merely distribute 'pointers' to papers).) Therefore the validation, or otherwise, of papers and their heritage rests with the application(s) that use OAI. As an example of an Open Archive that has had ample opportunity to be filled with rubbish; (correct me if I am quoting wrong), arXiv has, in its ten years, only had to delete 2 papers out of 160,000. This would suggest that either arXiv has a very efficient staff or this is not really a problem (or, as I suspect, both). The LANL server is undoubtedly efficient, but probably not effective in screening out useless material. Mathematical proofs validate much of its content but contribute little to usefulness. Moreover, the peer-reviewed journals in physics have a much higher acceptance rate than journals in other fields. In short, I would not be so sure that LANL's service is not filled with rubbish. More important, physics and mathematics are far removed from topics useful to quacks who promise to treat everything from aching backs to zodiacal destiny. LANL's most effective feature perhaps is its use of XXX -- an insignia that keeps out children who are protected by parental controls from Internet peril. Best wishes, Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
Re: Information Exchange Groups (IEGs)
on Tue, 30 Jan 2001 Jim Till t...@uhnres.utoronto.ca wrote: [snip] So, this final paragraph summarizes my overall 'position' (it doesn't seem to me to be a very controversial one!). I can only suggest that those who are interested in an historical perspective on the IEGs, and on the origins of a 'preprint culture' in high-energy physics (HEP), should read the article themselves, and not rely only on a highly-condensed interpretation provided by someone else. For anyone who missed my point (and I apologize for not making it ultra-clear) what is controversial, and what I find insulting to all science editors, is Till's interpretation that makes reference to the Star Chamber -- found in the paragraph that precedes his conclusion. Under the heading Some Ancient History, Till starts the passage by telling us, Concerns about the control of the quality of information disseminated by various means have a long and fascinating history. For example, the requirement that books] be licensed for printing (by the privy council or other royal nominees) was introduced in England in 1538. Anyone familiar with this history would understand that this was political censorship -- not science, scientific quackery, or the concerns of science editors. Science is about the accurate reporting of discovery, while political censorship goes quite the other way. Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Information Exchange Groups (IEGs)
community than presume savings in library spending. References: Garvey, William D. Communication: The Essence of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press. 1979. Ginsparg, Paul. Winners and losers in the global research village. 1996. [http://arxiv.org/blurb/pg96unesco.html] Price, Derek J. de Solla. Science since Babylon. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961. enl. Ed. 1975. Weber, Ellen J., Michael L. Callaham, Robert L. Wears, Christopher Barton, Gary Young. Unpublished research from a medical speciality meeting. J A M A 280,3: 257-259. 1998. =0= Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Recent Comments by Albert Henderson
on Sat, 27 Jan 2001 Andrew Odlyzko a...@research.att.com wrote: The recent exchanges, primarily between Albert Henderson and Greg Kuperberg, with some additional remarks by David Goodman and others, commingle two issues: 1. Ease of access: Electronical resources are much easier to use, so are increasingly preferred and becoming much more widely used than print ones. However, commercial publishers have been moving rather rapidly towards making their journals available online through various subscription, consortium, and other pricing plans that make them available to scholars in convenient form on their desktop. Thus the continuation of the publishers' role in processing scholarly articles and collecting revenues for this does not preclude access that is better than what we have had in the past, at least for scholars at institutions able to afford their wares. This access would not be as easy, nor available as widely, as free distribution, but it would still be an improvement. An interesting question is whether publishers (both commercial and professional society ones) would have moved to online publication as fast as they did if it were not for the journal crisis, with libraries cancelling their subscriptions in response to escalating prices and budgets that did not keep up. I expect that in the end the publishers would have moved in this direction anyway, as the logic of more convenient access and, even more importantly, the attraction of partially disintermediating the libraries by reducing those libraries' huge internal costs would have become obvious. However, it might very well have taken them longer than it did. When I entered learned publishing in 1964, all the major scientific publishers had computerized their back offices with machines that used IBM punch cards for input. In the following decades they constantly upgraded back office fulfillment technology to take advantage of every new generation of equipment. The ISBN was developed in the 1960s specifically to make computerization easier. The ISSN appeared at the same time. At the time, most large publishers had RCA facsimile machines which burned treated paper -- the predecessor of the plain paper fax -- while a Xerox 914 could be found on every floor. Telephone switches that replaced the plug-in switchboard operator were also quickly adopted by publishers. Publishers moved print production to photo-offset lithography in the 1960s. This ultimately made possible author-prepared pages for rapid communications journals and research monographs. The price indexes prepared by Blackwell North America suggest to me that these developments made possible lower average prices. In the mid-1970s I worked with Bowker, a leader in computerized bibliography, to use its BOOKS IN PRINT file as the basis of Pergamon's annual price list. It saved the duplicative tasks of typesetting and proofing, as well as manual indexing. Pages and indexes were prepared by Bowker's computers and printed on an offset press. Learned publishers joined in Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP), an idea that was perhaps suggested by photo-offset technology. Publishers computerized their promotional catalogs as soon as PC-based databases would accommodate the demands for longish tagged text, verbose descriptions, and images. Libraries, I might add, seem to be stuck in a replication of the 3x5 card online with constrictions that would be unacceptable to any publisher. The Ango-American Cataloging card format was good when the patron could walk to a shelf and browse. Online, it is very poor indeed. Publishers' editorial offices and processing were also computerized as early as possible. First the Wang machines. Then ATEX and other typesetting programs. Information services were the first electronic publishers, delivering tapes until online services were feasible. By 1980, AIP was able to tag the bibliographic headers information of each article in its dozens of journals and dump it into its abstracts journal -- also selling a copy to the Department of Energy (if memory serves me well) for inclusion in government databases. Publishers were also, during the 1960s and 1970s, eager to provide microform copies to supplement printed versions of journals, thanks to the interest of libraries. Many publishers contemplated serious investments in electronic distribution during the 1980s. The APS had a task force. ACS ran some experimental program. One of the commercial firms that I worked with had a stable of publications on electronic media
Re: Recent Comments by Albert Henderson
on Science Technology has been dominated by industrial interests. Best wishes, Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Recent Comments by Albert Henderson
on Fri, 26 Jan 2001 Greg Kuperberg g...@math.ucdavis.edu wrote: There is a lesson in this trend for open archival. The readership in each discipline wants a giant electronic super-journal. The market is moving in that direction whether decision-makers like it or not. Should it be a subscription-based monopoly? Research universities have a monopoly on sponsored research contracts in the United States. Vannevar Bush made it clear that these universities were charged with the responsibility to conserve and disseminate knowledge. [SCIENCE THE ENDLESS FRONTIER] If the universities have failed to hold up their side of the social contract, should they retain their accreditation? The trend towards open archives is no more than a part of the wholesale downsizing and outsourcing that has replaced tenured faculty with part-timers maintaining videotape lecture courses -- distance and otherwise. The is little care for excellence, only the financial bottom line. Related to the idea of an electronic super-journal, Eugene Garfield proposed a brilliant idea about 50 years ago. (SCIENCE 122:108-111, 1955) His idea turned into the multi- disciplinary Science Citation Index which revealed the intellectual roots and connections supporting scientific discovery. It also enabled researchers to locate relevant sources that were beyond the scope of narrow bibliographies. Perhaps the most interesting use he proposed, a use that he emphasized, was to identify post-publication peer review, critical notes that countered poor research and unsubstantiated claims in earlier writings. It is unfortunate that the economic base of SCI, largely academic libraries, betrayed his concept, an assumption that the goals of scientific communication were axiomatic. The coverage of SCI has grown very little over the past 30 years because it commands a subscription price that is high enough to attract many challenges. While the SCI continues to serve, it would probably serve better if it fully embraced the growing literature. There are rationales that less is more, that SCI covers the cream of science, that sources beyond SCI's coverage fail to meet some standard of excellence. In other words, we are told that the remainder is not worthy of our attention. To me, this reasoning must also conclude that most of the growth of financial input -- US academic RD increased twelve-fold since 1970 -- is wasted. Moreover, and my point: if the fourfold increase in journal articles since 1970 is not worth our attention, then don't the unreviewed postings on free preprint servers risk a real waste of time for any reader who values his/her time and energy? Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Recent Comments by Albert Henderson
on Thu, 25 Jan 2001 Greg Kuperberg g...@math.ucdavis.edu wrote: On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 09:50:42AM -0500, Albert Henderson wrote: You have my sympathy. Thanks but I don't need it. I don't think that the university is short-changing me. My access to math research is as good as it ever was thanks to MathSciNet, which is unfortunately proprietary but not expensive; the math arXiv, which is free; and home pages and other Internet sources. Maybe. Here is a note from my book, ELECTRONIC DATABASES AND PUBLISHING on a publisher's response to the library crisis: In an effort to contain costs, the publishers of Mathematical Reviews decided in 1989 to keep the number of reviews at approximately 1989 levels. In order to do this and maintain comprehensive coverage of the literature within the scope of Mathematical Reviews, they increased the percentage of items that are not given reviews p. 219. Shields Library is a Taj Mahal among campus buildings. It has tons of books and an ample, efficient, smiling staff. It has nice furniture and beautiful computer terminals. If it doesn't have absolutely every math journal, it has most of the important ones. That it is so big and unwieldy is the real problem. Spending more money on Shields would not bring it down to a human scale, nor would it bring it any closer to my office. In any case it isn't far away. It wouldn't beat the Internet no matter how much money they spent on it. I agree with you that the administration should listen to the departments more on library spending. The math and physics departments would probably cut library spending in favor of their own budgets if they could. The main reason that Shields goes beyond the utilitarian minimum is to recruit undergraduates, and even more their nostalgic parents. That could be a fine reason to spend money, but it's not for the benefit of my research. As I said, your most recent piece in Society does lie somewhere in Shields. Why not also put it on your web page like everyone else does? Golly. I don't have a web page. Nor would I infringe on my publishers' copyrights. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Recent Comments by Albert Henderson
of the norms of professional conduct. Wiley told me that Barschall was not using federal money. I don't know whether Barschall was paid for his work--nor for that matter whether Henderson is being paid for his--but again, payment is no *necessary* indication of biased results. In the early years of African historiograpohy, many ingenuous fieldworkers sought information from informants by paying for it. This was bad practice and could only impugn the flood of results. HOWEVER, if further scrutiny demonstrated that certain data were correct, the issue of payment then falls into the sociological rather than the epistemological domain. Scientists go for glory, according to sociologist R K Merton. Barschall certainly got plenty of glory from librarians and the business managers at AIP/APS. Frazier was elected president of Association of Research Libraries if I am not mistaken. Barschall was not the first to discover differences in unit prices of physics publications. The National Academy of Sciences had done it around 1970. I am certain anyone could 'discover' that similar ranges of unit pricing for music, fashion, cars, etc. Any number of similar examples might be adduced, but why pile Pelion upon Ossa? The point is simply that impugning Barshall's motives is wasted effort and a very poor substitute indeed for impugning his results. What were his results? In my opinion: Barschall and his organizations were sued and their files were opened to discovery and the shameful acts I described. Legal costs ran to the millions that would have been better spent on dissemination. UMW wasted scarce resources confirming Barschall's insipid hypothesis by replicating his work. AIP has been unable to explain to my satisfaction why it has not addressed the failure of science policy to address the impoverishment of the university libraries used for government research. The idea of kilowords per dollar has become a dark joke. I have been unable to get any librarian to admit to using kilowords per dollar as an acquisitions tool. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . . .
Re: Replies to questions about electronic journals
on Mon, 2 Oct 2000 Steve Hitchcock sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: The problem for many online-only journals is that they are electronic *format* but print journal in concept, i.e. they only differ only in delivery mechanism, which isn't sufficiently distinctive. For different reasons, both the hybrid model and many online-only journals are too reverential to the established journal model. Those who want electronic journals to achieve (1)-(9), especially (9), have to be more open to new models. Well, there go the savings. The main economic argument for online vs. print has been savings in distribution all else being equal. By fully embracing the potential of the digital technology, the cost of the first copy rises, displacing distribution economies and then some. Baumol and Blackman observed that increased use of computers provoked new labor-intensive work, causing a cost disease (JASIS. 1983. 34:181-191) It was not long after that industry termed the phenomenon the Productivity Paradox. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
abuse meant to compete and deprive the victims of opportunities. And the outsider might be tempted to laugh out loud at the notion that the downtrodden commercial publishers represent the underclass, or, in terms of class struggle, the proletariat. Desperately frivolous statements like this can only have the effect of destroying whatever credibility there might otherwise be in a given argument. Personally, I think it is much too kind to argue (per Rouse) that the commercial publishers altruistically stepped in when they perceived a failure of nerve on the part of academic publishers. To be sure, they were quicker off the mark, more attuned to the spoor of the dollar, but it is a matter of blaming scholarly organizations (and not just those in STM) for shortsightedness. It is time to correct the prescription by seeking aggressively to recapture what the scholarly community gave up without a struggle so many years ago. Thanks for proving my earlier point. Your last assertion is an example of those petty class struggle myths based on (and requiring) ignorance of the facts. History documents rather clearly that commercial publishers, starting with Henry Oldenburg, have always been important, valued members of the scientific community. Even the vaunted PHYSICAL REVIEW was first published by Macmillan, well before the American Physical Society was founded. Any doubt about this will be resolved by examining the first 100 years of PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS and PHYSICAL REVIEW. Springer, Elsevier, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft (ancestor of Academic Press) also come to mind as having imprints with historical precedence. Henderson notes that [c]ommercial publishers . . . attracted many editors and authors of the highest quality. What is missing from his formulation are the reasons for this. Could we have more details? 1099 forms? The answer is that when proponents of novel research are snubbed and shunned by their colleagues, they are welcomed by commercial publishers who are willing to underwrite expenses for years before seeing a profit. What other options, short of starting their own association, do they have? Many new commercial journals simply represent the failure of associations to address the needs of their members. No 1099s needed. Finally, Henderson speaks of the embarassment [sic] that scholarly organizations must have felt at the inability to keep pace with the demands of the publish-or-perish system. Maybe they did--or maybe they just hoped to stem the tide of more and more about less and less. What I meant was that the policy of not starting any new journals became an embarrassment (thank you so much for the spell check) for the American Chemical Society when other publishers' new ventures provoked loyal members. The members probably demanded to know why ACS was sitting on the sidelines while important data was being disseminated by its competitors. Wouldn't you? My impression was that ACS had suffered from the political influence of editors who thought they could monopolize editorial power and finesse the librarians who were complaining not only about the general proliferation of new journals but about ACS's two-tier pricing! Universities would easily keep pace with the demands of RD if they would recognize that libraries are a part of science and budget accordingly. When they have done this it worked. Several hundred years of library growth kept pace with the exponential doubling of journal articles until the Faustian bargain was made, turning management of higher education over to non-faculty professionals. When universities fail to budget adequately for libraries, as they have since 1970, they simply make the research community miserable. Are the larger university profits and administrative expansion worth the trouble? Yes, of course they are -- but only to the management team. What does an administrator care about the troubles of researchers, librarians, and publishers? What influence does the academic senate have any more? Thanks for reading my text and for your comments. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . .
Re: Recent Comments by Albert Henderson
:on Fri, 15 Sep 2000 Ken Rouse kro...@library.wisc.edu relied on many unfounded assumptions when he wrote In a recent communication (9-11-00) Albert Henderson defended the role of traditional print publishers as the guarantors of quality control. In so doing he did acknowledge that Publishers could do more to speed their processes and improve their standards. This is doubtless true of all publishers in some degree, but what's missing is any mention of the very distinct records of bottom-line versus non-profit publishers with respect to quality control. Since Mr. Henderson, I understand, is a frequent consultant for for-profit publishers the omission is perhaps not so surprising. This contrast of commercial and association publishers is as mythical as the claims by graduates of private universities that they are better quality than those of state schools. It is the class struggle all over again. Is there a single reliable study of bottom-line versus non-profit publishers with respect to quality control?? Of course not. Nor have I read of any difference discerned by Garvey, Herring, Merton, and others who have studied peer review. Nor have I seen anything of the sort in the congresses sponsored by JAMA and BMJ in recent years. There is no doubt but what quality control has been a major concern of the non-profit, largely society publishers since they were founded. I would argue in fact that their fixation on quality when their journals were overwhelmed by the tremendous expansion of STM research after 1950 or so was a significant factor leading to the current crisis in scholarly communication. In their determination to publish only the best, they failed to respond to the need for new outlets for new and expanding fields. That's not correct. The problem with associations is that the individuals who often dominate politics cannot tolerate outsiders. Associations force new associations and journals into existence. Many radicals seek financial and business services from commercial publishers who see new ideas as opportunities. For example, American Institute of Electrical Engineers drove the followers of Marconi and Tesla to form the Institute of Radio Engineers. AIEE and IRE later merged becoming IEEE, but not without driving early programmers to form the Association of Computing Machinery. Another famous example: around 1970, the American Chemical Society decided to not start any new journals! That was their policy for 12 years or so, until it became an embarassment. Commercial publishers addressed the demand for niche publications and attracted many editors and authors of the highest quality. Enter the commercial publishers. Let's give credit where it's due. The new commercial journals fulfilled a real need and for a time they were even great bargains, but an inherent conflict of interest soon became apparent in many cases. The for-profits could not help but notice that the more they published, the more money they made. Sorry to say, this had serious implications for quality control. As if PHYSICAL REVIEW and AIP journals had high rejection rates and made no money. Really!! By painting an entire class of publishers as poorer quality you sully the reputations of not only well-respected editors but authors. Is there any objective evidence? To be sure, there are a number of commercial journals which maintain very high standards. In general these tend to be journals that are associated with a society whose reputation is invested in the continuing quality of the publication. Unfortunately, there are many more examples of high cost commercial titles of very mixed quality. Particularly offensive are those that contain a high percentage of conference proceedings, many of which would never be purchased by libraries if they had any choice in the matter. Another myth. Conferences and their proceedings are valuable. In some fields, particularly applied technology, they are the final word. They also appear more quickly BECAUSE of minimal review. Including them in a journal issue or supplement means they are indexed by the major information services and accessible to researchers who were unable to attend. In some ways, Rouse's position reminds me of the dairy industry 100 years ago. Only cream had value. It was delivered to creameries every week or two and often was old enough to grow hair. The nonfat milk was discarded or fed to animals. Like cream
Re: Recent Comments by Albert Henderson
on Sat, 16 Sep 2000 J Adrian Pickering j...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: At 10:37 15/09/00 -0400, you wrote: technology to free the scholarly literature. A modest way to begin breaking down that resistance, I believe, might be the following: the establishment by professional societies of servers that would make all the conference papers produced at their meetings freely available electronically to all who need them--and in a timely fashion! This would pre-empt the present one year or more lag in the publication of conference papers in print journals. Absolutely agree. The professional societies *are* supposed to be furthering their profession - that is their raison d'etre. I have always felt that learned publications belong in the hands of the profession they support. Personally, I'm not very sympathetic to commercial-publisher run journals. If the profession believe a particular major 'thread' of their activities requires learned communications then they should sponsor it. However, many professional bodies have slipped into bad habits (overseen by the professions themselves) where they have become dependent on the income generated by their publishing (and conference) activities. This is going to be very difficult to reverse. Starting with Thorsten Veblen's THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA (1918) and perhaps earlier, the criticism of universities putting financial interests first has been accurately leveled. Veblen wrote, it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Financial reports showing an average after-tax profit of 25 per cent of revenue reported by U.S. research universities help demonstrate this point. In addition to huge profits by institutions with major research sponsorships, we found that by cutting library spending over the last 20 years, higher education institutions increased their profits by roughly the same amount. You can inspect these data at: http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/1051760.shl Now it is clear that the provosts and backoffice gnomes are greeneyed over publishers' income, whether it be the shareholder profits of commercial publishers or retained surpluses of associations. The once collegial community of research is falling apart over money squabbles. Not the researchers, of course. The managers are responsible. Or better, irresponsible! What happened to quality and productivity in research and education? [snip] Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . . . . .
Re: Librarians and the Ginsparg model
on Fri, 8 Sep 2000 Paul M. Gherman gher...@library.vanderbilt.edu wrote: I think with increased electronic information whether free or commercial, the eventual costly infrastructure of libraries as we know them today will decrease as will the current number of staff working in libraries. My quote above has stirred several comments to the contrary, and I am not suprised. I probably should have stated the other side of my position. [snip] The Productivity Paradox mentioned by Henderson and alluded to by Tennant has been true for computers and productivity software up to now. But I think the publishing revolution is different - this change is not in productivity software, but in the nature of the product we purchase, store, preserve etc and deliver to our users. The very nature of our project and therefore our mission will change. If you look at the entire chain of costs in information delivery, the library is a signficant cost segment. I think electronic content will allow us to change our infrastructure and convert infrastructure dollars to information. We now subscribe to over 5,000 electronic journals - many sit on our shelves in paper, there are check in costs to the paper, reshelving costs, binding costs, claiming costs, let alone the cost of the shelf itself. These costs will eventuall go away, when we have the courage to cancel the paper version. But the storage and preservation cost will shift to another agency, maybe a publisher, maybe another organization like OCLC or CatchWord. Our information costs will rise as these storage costs are bundeled into the over all subscription costs. Fewer individuals are entering the library to gain access to our collections, as they can access them electronically. Fewer individuals are approaching the reference desk to ask questions. Well it is time to think about how we staff those public service points and reduce our costs of running them. E-books are just about to hit. We just subscribed to over 14,000 of them from netLibrary. With this collection, there were no individual title by title aquisitions costs, there will be very low cataloging costs, no shelving costs, no circulations cost or reshelving costs. We did not have to upack them and we will never rebind them. Now tell me why in this new environment why the productivity paradox holds true. Studies have showed the library cost of maintaining electronic information to be much higher than paper on shelves. For example, Lowry and Troll estimated that digital storage will cost 16 times as much as print, not including costs of training and management. Other unresolved economic challenges includes systems obsolescence, copyright, global standardization, networking capacity, and meeting user needs for access that is seamless and easy. [Serials Librarian. 1996 28 1/2:143-169] These studies did not take into account the added cost of preservation -- recopying and migrating to upgraded application software formats. In short, your person or persons unknown defense is unacceptable. Moreover, considering the infamous shallowness of information accessed digitally, I would be more concerned about informing patrons of richer resources available only on paper. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . .
Re: Etymology of Eprint
on 22 Aug 2000 Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk wrote: John Smith wrote: This clashes with my definition of a 'pre-print'. As far as I am aware this term arises from the provision by many journal publishers of printed copies of papers in their final form to authors in advance of the formal publication so they could distribute them to colleagues. So they were not unrefereed or unaccepted just not formally published. The act of distibuting papers in advance of submission for publication I would describe as the circulation of 'working papers' or 'work in progress'. This provision of paper 'pre-prints' may still happen. I have some provided by an Indian journal which published a paper of mine in 1996. Regards, John Smith, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. John, I'm afraid I don't agree with your definition. Having worked in scholarly publication in hot-metal days, I can say that it was not possible to produce offprints of the accepted papers very long before publication. The way they were produced was to print extra copies of the journal but not bind them. The unbound sheets were then stapled up into offprints of the individual articles and supplied to the authors. But they went out at more or less the same time as the actual journal copies went off to libraries. Authors called them reprints, but actually nothing had been reprinted, so properly they were offprints. They weren't preprints. But in the USA thirty or so years ago an effort was made to organise a preprint exchange, which really did distribute paper (photo)copies of as-yet unaccepted typescripts. It eventually collapsed for two reasons: many scientists objected to the distribution of non-refereed material as debasing the currency; and the costs involved, especially postage costs for pritned materials in large quantity, became too high. I think there was also a feeling that it created a privileged class of people who were on the mailing list, leaving others unable to get hold of the material so early. The preprint exchange of the 1960s was documented all too briefly. In his 1979 COMMUNICATION: THE ESSENCE OF SCIENCE William D Garvey says, distribution of preprints (copies of a journal-article manuscript) constitutes another form of journal authors' prepublication dissemination ... it can usually be relied upon as a relatively 'finished' report. (63) The American Institute of Physics produced a report titled THE ROLE AND DISTRIBUTION OF WRITTEN INFORMAL COMMUNICATION IN THEORETICAL HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS by Miles A Liffey and Gerald Zaltman (August 25, 1967). It says: Terminology problems start with the heart-word preprints. A preprint used to be an advance print of an article, book chapter, monograph, etc., which was intended for publicaation. It has come to be used very loosely to cover almost any written communication outside of the established literature. This has led to much semantic confusion and it has plagued this study project. One man's report is another's preprint and yet another's manuscript. As a result, we felt it would be better to avoid using the term preprint as far as possible. We will instead use the term written informal communication which we will abbreviate as WIC, to indicate the inclusion of the entire family of written communications outside of the established literature. This family will be considered to include reprints at one end of the spectrum and notes and multiple-address letters at the other. (p. 1-2) The NIH Information Exchange Groups experiment 1961-66 never released a final report, to the best of my knowledge. So you see little has changed in all this time. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Etymology of Eprint
on 8/22/00 Marvin, INTERNET:physnospamc...@telocity.com wrote - Original Message - From: Fytton Rowland j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 7:15 AM Subject: Re: Etymology of Eprint snip. But in the USA thirty or so years ago an effort was made to organise a preprint exchange, which really did distribute paper (photo)copies of as-yet unaccepted typescripts. It eventually collapsed for two reasons: many scientists objected to the distribution of non-refereed material as debasing the currency; and the costs involved, especially postage costs for pritned materials in large quantity, became too high. I think there was also a feeling that it created a privileged class of people who were on the mailing list, leaving others unable to get hold of the material so early. Yours, Fytton. Specifically, this was an activity of NIH to foster communication between grantees working in a common area. As I recall, it failed because it turned out to be politically impossible to keep the distribution to a chosen group. The official reasons given by Eugene A Confrey (1966) were: First, the original purpose of the experiment has been achieved. the IEG concept is workable, if the chosen research area is focused to an easily described and identifiable research phenomenon or problem ... Second, the rapid growth of IEG in the last two years has now reached the threshold limit for the NIH facilities ... Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Authors Victorious in UnCover Copyright Suit
on Sat, 12 Aug 2000 Stevan Harnad har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: (1) I've always argued that give-away refereed research reports are indeed more like self-advertising than anything else (but it accordingly follows that it makes no more sense that readers should be charged for access to them than it does to charge for access to any other ad!). That is an interesting idea, but advertising is very different in its essential details. The publishing cost of advertising is paid by the advertiser. Thus the advertising model is more like the subversive proposal, where the author bears the burden of dissemination, than it is the traditional journal publishing process. Three elements differentiate formal publication from advertising: (A) the investment of a third party, the publisher, (B) justified by peer review and (C) the purchase for dissemination purposes by libraries or by individuals. In addition, the publishers' ability to recover their investments is (D) secured by copyright. These factors do not appear in advertising and are rejected by the self-archiving model. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com . .
Re: Economist article + Faustian bargain
.. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . .
Re: ACS meeting comments on e-prints
on Tue, 4 Apr 2000 Stevan Harnad har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Dr. Stephen R. Heller wrote: At the ACS meeting last week theer were some interesting comments on the many activities discussed in this forum. A write up on this is available at: http://chemweb.com/alchem/2000/news/nw_000331_publish.html The opening paragraph says: The message from scientific publishers was clear. Government intervention in the field of journals and databases is not only unwelcome, but possibly unconstitutional too. This was one of many fascinating topics discussed as part of the popular CIN session at the ACS Spring Meeting in San Francisco this week. It will be interesting to see how government intervention in providing researchers with the means to publicly disseminate their research findings -- often funded by government research grants that mandate public dissemination, and always given away by their authors for free -- can be construed as unconstitutional. [snip] Floyd E Bloom quoted a Senate advisory panel's observation from 40 years ago: The case for a Government-operated, highly centralized type of center can be no better defended for scientific information services than it could be for automobile agencies, delicatessens, or barber shops. (Science 285:197 1999) The point is that scientists exchange their work for dissemination and recognition by their peers. It is best done in the private sector. Government management always looses any hint of excellence, particularly in the information area. Look, for instance, at Index Medicus. Coverage originally took in the entire field of biomedicine. Now it covers about 10 percent according to its own estimates. Or look at the stagnating database used by the National Science Board to create tables for SCIENCE ENGINEERING INDICATORS and ask what it in the world it is supposed to indicate. Or see how the government has run NTIS into the ground. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . .
Re: ACS meeting comments on e-prints
on 4/5/00 David Goodman dgood...@princeton.edu wrote: [snip] It is not the case that Medline or its precursors ever covered or attempted to cover the entire field of biomedicine. No one index does that or ever did; my idea of a really comprehensive approach I know of is: Medline + Excerpta Medica + Biosis Previews + Zoological Record + Agricola + CAB + Chemical Abstracts + Science Citation Index (and undoubtedly other indexes I don't regularly use). Some of these are government; some non-profit; some commercial. Argue with my source, Mary E Corning and Martin M Cummings MD (assistant director and director, respectively, National Library of Medicine) Biomedical Communications, in ADVANCES IN AMERICAN MEDICINE, edited by J. Z. Bowers and E. F. Purcell. New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. 1976 p. 722ff: The 20,169 articles in 1879 represented essentially the totality of the biomedical literature, whereas the 217,485 in 1973 were published in only 12 percent of the world's biomedical literature. The tenfold increase in citations in 100 years is pitifully far behind what Derek de Solla Price called the modern normal rate -- doubling every 15 years or around 100 times in 100 years. (Science Since Babylon. revised 1975. New Haven: Yale U. P. pp. 170-173) Let me cite similar analyses: The National Library of Medicine survey of periodicals received during a three month period estimated that the total number of substantive articles is roughly double the number actually covered by the Current List of Medical Literature, then the largest medical index in the world. (Brodman, E, and Taine, S I. Current medical literature: A quantitative survey of articles and journals. Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information. Washington, D.C., 1958. National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, 1959. 435-447) The biomedical literature that is accessible through electronic searching of bibliographies today represents a fraction of all studies in a field.(Scherer, R W., Dickersin, K and Kaplan, E. in Editing the Refereed Scientific Journal: Practical, Political, and Ethical Issues, edited by R A. Weeks and D L. Kinser. New York: IEEE Press. 1994.p 120-125) Incidentally this deficiency presents a particular problem for authors inasmuch as standards followed by many publishers ask researchers to, state general interpretation of the data in light of the totality of the available evidence. (Begg, C., M. Cho, Eastwood, S. Et al. J A M A 276:637-639. 1996) It also implies referees must fly by the seat of their pants. Heaping praise on a mediocre excuse for an information service does no service to the biomedical community, consumers of health care, and sponsors of research. [snip] Albert Henderson wrote: [snip] Floyd E Bloom quoted a Senate advisory panel's observation from 40 years ago: The case for a Government-operated, highly centralized type of center can be no better defended for scientific information services than it could be for automobile agencies, delicatessens, or barber shops. (Science 285:197 1999) The point is that scientists exchange their work for dissemination and recognition by their peers. It is best done in the private sector. Government management always looses any hint of excellence, particularly in the information area. Look, for instance, at Index Medicus. Coverage originally took in the entire field of biomedicine. Now it covers about 10 percent according to its own estimates. Or look at the stagnating database used by the National Science Board to create tables for SCIENCE ENGINEERING INDICATORS and ask what it in the world it is supposed to indicate. Or see how the government has run NTIS into the ground. [snip] Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com .
Re: ACS meeting comments on e-prints
on 5 Apr 2000 Stevan Harnad har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote: [snip] And Floyd Bloom (and Albert Henderson, who apparently like to quote one another) have been answered, both in this Forum, and in print: Henderson/Bloom/Henderson: It may be instructive to recall an earlier congressional reaction, as Albert Henderson, editor of Publishing Research Quarterly did in his response to E-biomed on 6 May. In the Sputnik aftermath, an E-biomed-like proposal was made that Congress accelerate U.S. scientific research by establishing a unified information system similar to what had been created in the Soviet Union. The Senate's advisory panel responded: The case for a Government-operated, highly centralized type of center can be no better defended for scientific information services than it could be for automobile agencies, delicatessens, or barber shops. Surely other creative solutions can be found to what NIH considers problems. Are they prepared to listen, or is this a done deal? Reply: Both Dr. Henderson and Dr. Bloom might benefit from being reminded... that unlike the producers of cars, bagels and haircuts, the producers of refereed journal articles wish to give them away for free. And there is no earthly reason why any government should not wish to help them do so, to the eternal benefit of science and society worldwide. [snip] If this were true in the Western world, life would be much different. Dr Harnad confuses the absence of cash with giving away for free. Authors get value in return for their work. They compete for dissemination and recognition afforded by publication in journals. Their behavior, which includes paying subsidies for publication under desirable imprints, makes this very clear. What is more aggravating is that U.S. universities begging for free dissemination are very rich. The goverment pays them $5 billion this year in reimbursements for overhead connected with research, including libraries. Universities then record huge profits and hoard financial assets at the expense of excellence. Library patrons go begging ... Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Medical journals are dead. Long live medical journals
on 2/28/00 Andrew Odlyzko a...@research.att.com wrote: Jim Till t...@oci.utoronto.ca writes: It's still far from clear (at least, to me!) why members of the physics research community seem, in general, to be more comfortable with eprints than are (as yet?) many members of the biomedical research community. That is an excellent question that has been puzzling many people. There are no definitive answers, but much seems to depend on the culture of each field. It should be noted that not all of the physics research community is comfortable with eprints. There is tremendous variation even within physics. Ginsparg's preprint server took off initially just in his small community of theoretical high energy physicists. I wrote about this in my paper The slow evolution of electronic publishing, pp. 4-18 in Electronic Publishing '97: New Models and Opportunities, A. J. Meadows and F. Rowland, eds., ICCC Press, 1997, also available at http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html as follows: We can see the confluence of many of the factors mentioned above in recent technological changes. The rapid acceptance of Ginsparg's preprint server was a case of simple substitution. His research community in high energy theoretical physics had, during the 1980s, developed a culture of massive preprint distribution. Each department would send copies of all preprints (typeset in TeX) in this area to several hundred other institutions. Costs per department ran into tens of thousands of dollars per year. Under these circumstances, shifting to electronic distribution was easy. The main loser was the postal service. However, the Post Office has no voice in departmental decisions. One could also claim that secretaries lost, since there was less work for them to do. However, secretaries do not have much power in decisions of this type either, and in any case, who likes stuffing envelopes? While Ginsparg's preprint server has been growing by covering more and more areas, the progress has been less dramatic than its initial takeover of high energy theoretical physics. Other fields do not have the same culture of massive preprint distribution, and so the S-curve is less steep. Still, the usage of his preprint and a few other preprints is growing, and once most preprints in an area start getting posted on a preprint server, that server universally becomes the lifeblood of the community. Actually, the National Institutes of Health sponsored preprint distribution in the 1960s, much like one in high energy physics funded by the Atomic Energy Commission and run by the American Institute of Physics. As described above, it involved paper copies sent by mail and was not available to the general public. The Information Exchange Groups (IEG) experiment went down in flames amidst complaints about the deteriorating quality of its content. See P H Abelson (SCIENCE 1966;154:727) or E A Confrey (SCIENCE 1966;154:843) for some details. Circulation of informal reports started well before Henry Oldenburg founded the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. RD investment and publication continues in all fields worldwide in a growth pattern that shows no sign of the S-curve leveling off that was forecast by Derek de Solla Price and others. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . . .
Re: Library cancelations
on 24 Sep 1999 Katherine Porter por...@library.vanderbilt.edu wrote: From: Albert Henderson 70244.1...@compuserve.com Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY In the robust economy over the recent years, there was no urgency to containing library spending. Yet so many librarians have swollowed whole the administrative need to keep down or cut library spending. Let university cut its profits. I am really tired of this argument. Whether the olden days were golden or not, I think libraries today are doing a much better job of supporting our users' information needs than we did when I started in a chemistry library in 1980. Indeed we had more paper titles on the shelves then than we do now, but we are providing more of what people need today than we ever did then. I don't think the cancellation projects hurt us nearly as much as Mr. Henderson would like to have the world believe. What was the advantage of having runs of journals that were never used and never cited? That certainly didn't make me a better librarian or fill the information needs of the chemists any better than the wide range of print and electronic titles we can supply today. The chemists have told me this if I couldn't see it for myself. Sure I'd like to have more money to spend on chemistry material. Who wouldn't. But those dollars certainly wouldn't be used to buy more print titles to gather dust on the shelves. I think we are wiser consumers now and pay much more careful attention to acquiring materials and access that are going to meet our patrons real needs. Your situation may be appopriate to your perspective. In general the facts suggest otherwise: 1. Interlibrary borrowing increased 151% since 1986, according to ARL Statistics. 2. ARL also reported that the average fill time for ILB is over two weeks. 3. The deficit in U.S. collections spawned a commercial document delivery industry. Hundreds of thousands of photocopies are imported by U.S. libraries annually. This represents a loss of leadership and vulnerability that U.S. politicians may well come to regret. 4. Citation studies indicate U.S. researchers cite U.S. authors most of the time, ignoring the 2/3 of all research reported by foreign authors. 5. Containment of library spending has limited career opportunities for librarians. The shut-down of the Columbia MLS program was justified largely on this basis. 6. It is also clear from remarks made to the ARL by U KS provost Shulenberger that association profits are targeted for extinction along with commercial publishers, copyright, tenure, etc. We expect scientists to be in command of the facts, the methods, and the literature. Facts 1 and 2 suggest to me that universities deliberately undermined the effectiveness of faculty and researchers by debasing resources. Library performance failures contribute to insularity, duplication, and error in research. My more important point is this set of facts -- together with the library cancellations that were forced by manipulating budgets -- is clear evidence that U.S. university administrators do not care about the quality of research and education. They care only about financial goals and management power. They are the enemies of the library and library patronsin what a recent CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION article called the war on faculty. In this forum this evidence means that financial support for technology from this element is not dependable. Promises of support by this element cannot be trusted. This appears to be a wide- spread opinion among anyone who has dealt with administrators for a long time. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . . . . . . . . . . .
Re: Library cancelations
on 27 Sep 1999 Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: I would really like to support Kitty Porter's reaction to Mr.Henderson's comment. I do not exactly know on what planet Mr. Henderson lives, but it certainly is not on mine. University profits? A wonderful oxymoron in my opinion. Wake up and smell the coffee. The CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION recited the numbers last year. (Oct 23, 1998:A39-58) Duke reported $200 million revenue after expenses and cut its library spending (according to ARL statistics) by $168 thousand. Princeton's profit was $268 million, while cutting the library $376 thousand. Chicago had $130 million profit and cut its library by $1.2 million. Other universities also reported multimillion dollar profits and gave their libraries increases ranging from 1% to 13%. The total excess of revenue over spending for 39 research universities totaled $8.5 billion. Elsevier and other greedy publishers ensure 40% profit rates Which official financial report is the source of this 40% profit figure? and soothe university libraries' anxieties by telling them that they are going to make the price increases predictable (of the order of 10-15% per year while the inflation rate is a small fraction of this) rather than containing their own prices. The largest part of journal price inflation comes from (A) increased papers and (B) reduced circulation. If universities dealt with the former, and maintained some parity of library/RD financing, the latter effect would be no problem. Let these publishers first behave decently or let us do what is needed to drive them out of business (by supporting initiatives such as Ginsparg's and PubMed Central). They and not university administrators are to blame and we should not let the likes of Mr. Henderson work toward dividing our own house! Why should American taxpayers subsidize Canadians? Profit and market fetishism are really the plagues of this century! Yes, universities expanded their profits by cutting libraries and instruction over the objections of faculty and faculty senates. They run their financial goals like a business, with grudging production of knowledge. What happened to the lux et veritas mission of research, education, and public service? Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . . . .
Re: Library cancelations
on 9/22 Paul M. Gherman, INTERNET:gher...@library.vanderbilt.edu wrote As a library director, I second Steve Harnad's observation that libraries will not quickly cancel journal subscriptions because of lanl or other self-archiving ventures. The problem is not the library but the financial support of the library. Our history indicates that universities constricted their library budgets nearly 30 years ago, forcing many libraries to cancel subscriptions. Over recent times, with a robust economy, 20 to 30 members of the ARL each year report having less funds than the year before. Universities cut library spending even while reporting hundreds of millions of dollars excess revenue to the IRS! Universities have been known to ignore page charges also, so what reliable financial basis is there other than subscriptions? The fact that APS hasn't noticed many cancellations attributable to LANL suggests only that universities are willing to sacrifice small fry physics as bait for a big kill in the life and social sciences. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Library cancelations
on 23 Sep 1999 Katherine Porter por...@library.vanderbilt.edu wrote: The fact that APS hasn't noticed many cancellations attributable to LANL suggests only that universities are willing to sacrifice small fry physics as bait for a big kill in the life and social sciences. Albert Henderson Having been a part of several big kills, I think there is another interpretation possible. These activities seem to target the sciences like physics and chemistry, not social sciences or humanities, because dumping a small number of titles gets big bucks where cancelling 100 humanities titles might get you $1000 savings. In no way is Physics a small fry in cancellation days, at least not at any institution I am familiar with. It is entirely possible that APS has seen fewer cancellations because libraries (yes, WE got to choose the titles, not the administration) are willing to keep even multiple access points to important journals and axe those of less local value. As a chemistry librarian, I would have to say that the journals of the key societies in the field would endure in my collection even after many other titles were gone. The nasty job of triage and justifying cancellations is part of being a pawn. Your many kills would not have been needed if universities kept library spending growth on a par with academic RD. Between 1990 and 1997, academic RD rose 50% (from $16,285 million to $24,348 million) while median ARL university spending rose 28% (from $11 million to $14 million). The imbalance goes back to 1970. Department of Education statistics indicate higher education profits rose while library spending decreased. In FY 1997 Vanderbilt showed a $200 million profit to the IRS (CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION Oct 23, 1998 A:39-58). It spent $15 million on its library. (ARL) It could have spent more. In the robust economy over the recent years, there was no urgency to containing library spending. Yet so many librarians have swollowed whole the administrative need to keep down or cut library spending. Let university cut its profits. Albert Henderson Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com . . . .
Spend More on Libraries
== Following are my comments, in two parts, == == exactly as submitted to NIH == FROM: Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com We share a vision of effective science using the rapid communication features of information technology. We differ when it comes to the means of reaching this goal. My comments focus on (A) problems inherent in the present rather radical proposal and (B) solutions that I believe you have not considered The complaint of NIH director Harold E. Varmus that, researchers spend hundreds of dollars of their NIH awards on subscriptions to scientific journals, (1) reveals serious defects in policy choices made over the last 30 years or so. Using grant money for subscriptions has always been an option. My recollection is that universities, not research grants, once paid for most subscriptions found in offices and laboratories. Universities canceled most such duplicates in the 1970s. In recent decades, over the protests of faculty and faculty senates, universities continued to cut library spending. They have been canceling the last remaining copies of many journals. (2) Studies indicate nevertheless that researchers use libraries more than ever, with library borrowing rates sharply increased. (3) It also appears that better financed researchers now order their own copies of journals no longer found in the library. Although they purchase these publications with public money, they neither share them generally nor maintain formal collections. In other words, local colleagues may still have to order interlibrary photocopies of articles that they identify via information services and citations rather than browsing. Vannevar Bush charged universities with the responsibility to conserve knowledge as part of the government-academic research partnership. (4) It was a Faustian bargain. Instead of maintaining information produced and used by government research programs, universities cut library spending (and Federal agencies permitted it!). Universities seek further relief from library costs, even in the robust economy of the 1990s, while confessing that the imbalance between library and research growth is a source of serious problems. (5) The millions of dollars of subscriptions now paid by research grants, described by Dr. Varmus to Congress, represents the unloading of universities' traditional responsibility onto researchers who have grants. The cancelations also drove publishers' prices upward, providing a foundation for denunciation and calls for new solutions. Taking the prospect of no library another step, provosts at CalTech and elsewhere propose that researchers divert even more grant money to self-publishing their work. (6) The present proposal falls directly into this trap. It would make it easy for universities to justify the further elimination of their subscriptions to advanced research journals and information services by shifting the full responsibility for conserving knowledge to the government. The present proposal serves such financial goals without realistically solving problems in dissemination and the quality of research. I note generous use of the appeal of free information. What is the cost to the taxpayer? How much equipment, labor, time, and other resources will be needed? How many articles a year will be served electronically? What about standards and obsolescence? Who will pay for equipment required for access? What will be the impact on scientists and institutions who are not fully wired? What will be the impact on the use of publications produced only in paper, including the corpus of previously published literature? Will NIH take responsibility for digitizing that? What about copyrights? There are also major questions of permanance being asked about the use of fragile storage for journals often called archival. How will the E-Biomed proposal deal with the growth of science -- now generating millions of articles a year and growing exponentially? Is NIH prepared to face Congressional challenges to technology that is far from perfect? I am certain there are other good reasons that faculty who quickly embraced email, bibliographic databases, mainframe computing, and laptops are reluctant to join administrators' undaunted support of support electronic journals. I believe Federal agencies were in error when they ended studies of science communication in the mid-1970s. The present proposal has no recent science or scientists to provide a context for evaluation. It has only lobbies with financial, rather than scientific, priorities and enthusiasts who more often than not have no experience as publishers. Many recommendations of pre-1977 studies meant to improve dissemination. They were ignored, even after such goals were explicitly adopted by the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976. (Public Law 94-282; 42 USC 6601+) (7) The incorporation
Re: Elsevier Science Policy on Public Web Archiving Needs Re-Thinking
On 24 Sep 1998 Tony Barry to...@netinfo.com.au wrote: There is a more fundamental question which relates to the concept of a final version. We are so used to the static nature of print that we have ingrained into us the concept that a publication _should_ be finalised. Electronic publications increasingly are not. Those publications which had loose leaf updates or periodic new editions (Handbooks, encyclopedias etc) have moved to evolving databases. We have changed our approach of being able to accept errors in a such a print product with the expectation that it would be fixed in a new edition, to a much more critical view of errors in an online document as we expect them to be amenable to correction. There is a long tradition of errors, errata and unrecalled books. The most influential that I know of is Derek de Solla Price's SCIENCE SINCE BABYLON (Yale, 1961) which broadcast the Malthusian nightmare that if growth of electrical engineering continued to double every 15 years or so, the whole working population should be employed in this one field as early as 1990. (p. 177 in my 1975 enlarged edition) Price's population and manpower figures were completely out of whack -- totally unrelated to actual manpower statistics. The point was never retracted although his next book called for a new approach to the science of science. In the meantime, Price's diseases of science ideas have stuck to many readers -- scientists whose critical faculties were never trained to evaluate a sociological analysis -- and I have seen them time and again. One of the quoters, surprisingly, was Daniel Bell in THE COMING OF POST INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY. (Basic Books. 1971.) On page 181, Bell quotes Price's example almost verbatim, not realizing that the projection would encompass less than 8 million people by 1990 -- far less than the entire working population. Bell spends some time with Price's theory but not his touch with reality. Price proposed some new theories in BIG SCIENCE LITTLE SCIENCE (Columbia U. P. 1963) but never to my knowledge retracted or discussed his innumerate calculation in print. In the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Yearbook, David L Goodstein demonstrates his familiarity with Price's first idea but not his later writing. (1995) Yale is still printing and selling the error. Why not? It gives critics and scholars something to debate. Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Savings from Converting to On-Line-Only: 30%- or 70%+ ?
On Sep 1998 Arthur P. Smith apsm...@aps.org wrote: aps I only know the circulation trends from 1960 on (dropping 3%/year on aps average) - I believe circulation actually grew from 1950 to 1960... aps it's hard to aps go beyond this kind of rough comparison to actual numbers without aps getting into a lot of silly technicalities (which may however be aps important for other arguments). My notes from editors' reports published in the Bulletin of the American Physical Society indicate the following circulation figures for nonmember sales of Physical Review: 1966 4443 1967 4427 1968 4325 1969 4157 1970 3667 1989 1945 At one point, 1968, universities held up payment of page charges for no apparent reason and put APS (and probably some others) in the red. See the editorial by Bill Koch in the Dec. Physics Today. While rechecking your figures you might also want to take a close look at who is disbursing the page charge payments you'd like to hang your new hat on. What will they do once they have squeezed every nickle out of the libraries? Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Science 4 September on Copyright
On 15 Sep 1998 Arthur Smith apsm...@aps.org wrote: Finally some real numbers... Harnad asks also about growth. With doubling every decade, the number of published articles probably grew a factor of 10 or more (probably significantly more because of the rise of the biological sciences) between 1960 and 1995. Some areas surely grow at this rate. My best estimate of growth of the numbers of articles, based largely on database production records collected by NFAIS and the observations of Derek de Solla Price, would be a growth just over 5X during 1960-95. US academic RD grew at a faster rate 1960-1970 and slowed for a year when Congress cut defense research. Then it picked up again, putting it substantially ahead of world research for the full period. Many databases have been forced to cap their coverage during the last years of this period, excluding many published articles. This unfortunately interferes with the accuracy of future statistics as a measure (as well as the usefulness of resource sharing). In the 1960s, as a result of the embarrassment of Sputnik, support for US academic RD AND libraries surged. Libraries also had the benefit of the Higher Education Act of 1965 Title II-A (college library materials) which focused on collection development for a few years. The period 1970 to 1995 indicates growth of US academic RD by a factor of 2.5, world research 3.2 and the 41 ARL libraries 1.6. Library photocopying, particularly interlibrary borrowing increased substantially -- 132% 1986-1997. Commercial document delivery is not so well tracked as interlibrary borrowing, but we know that foreign sources now supply hundreds of thousands of photocopies to US libraries. This suggests that US sources have dried up. It's well known that the serials crisis has been brought on by the huge growth in the number of scientific articles published - now we have a second reason (a drop in library funding) - the problem is laid squarely back at the door of the researchers and their institutions! In contrast to the spin put out by universities, attempting to shift the blame to publishers, I would say the serials crisis was instigated by cutting library growth. Price noted that libraries and technical publications grew at the same exponential rate, doubling roughly every 15 years. (SCIENCE SINCE BABYLON 1961 enl ed 1975 p. 173) That growth has slowed very about half the rate while research proceeds as before. Here is an extension of the statistics on the average growth of ten 100+ years old library collections (collected by F Rider and cited by Price) with new data published by Association of Research Libraries. 1938 1.2 million vols. 1954 not available 1968 2.7 1983 4.1 1997 5.7 Compare the latter figure with 19.2 million vols. projected if pre-1938 growth, keeping up with the work product of world research activity, had continued. By way of reference, Library of Congress presently reports 24, Harvard 13.6, Yale 10, CISTI 8, NAL 2.3, NLM 2.2, and Smithsonian 1.2 million vols. Now in the next 10 years, if we see another 60-70 percent drop in per-article publication costs, what will libraries do with the savings (if any this time)? The savings goes to administration, not the library; it feeds administrative bloat. I am told that the indirect cost payments for libraries, made in connection with Federal research grants, never get into the hands of the librarian. And what will researchers do? If there are no libraries, no databases and no journals, we return to pre-1665 chaos of all formal communications being nailed to the post, now on the WWW rather than the green. As it is, the libraries are half-empty, collecting half (or less according to studies of monographs) of research published in the last 30 years or so. US libraries have been more likely to retain journals that their faculty are associated with. Citation studies in SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING INDICATORS and AAAS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY YEARBOOK indicate US scientists and engineers cite US authors at an extraordinarily high rate compared with foreign authors. This suggests to me insularity that may well be traced to the decimation of library collections and the absence of foreign authors. Is there a policy of dissemination? I don't think so. The patterns of behavior suggest to me that the plan is to ditch libraries and shift the burden of communications to authors. Unless associations like APS and federal science agencies exercise their influence on policy and their power of accreditation, it will be the death of knowledge. Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com
Re: Nature 10 September on Public Archiving
on 16 Sep 1998 Mark Doyle do...@aps.org wrote: On Wed, 16 Sep 1998, Albert Henderson noblestat...@compuserve.com wrote: [snip] The cost of technology for accessing xxx is extremely minimal, less than subscribing to a single year many journals. Increasing coverage at xxx makes the return on such a minimal investment even higher. Establishing and maintaining a print library that contains (not to mention grows with) the same information as xxx has little, if any, return on investment in this way. You must have Physical Review D in mind when you say technology for accessing xxx is minimal Tenopir and King (J. Schol Publ 24,3 1997:153) indicate the average 1995 price of a learned journal is $284. [snip] Unlike the electronic-only journal, most publications must run two distributions. Many readers lack the infrastructure required to participate in epublishing. A decreasing number and probably not a majority... [snip] I would be interested in evidence regarding such majorities. [snip] Associations like AAAS, with members who prefer their paper copy, are particularly hard pressed to cut out print. 'Prefer' is not 'require'. Anyway, no one is saying print has to be cut out. The issue is whether print or electronic is the primary deliverable. Current publishing is heavily slanted towards print production so electronic production is fit in as an ad hoc added cost. But this isn't the optimal solution. Having two distribution methods does not require two production processes. Rather, you can quite effectively use a single production process geared towards electronic distribution with printing as a single extra step for which publishers can charge users who want it. Or the reverse, since IMHO print readers are still the majority. I think the electronic option is fine and useful. It has not proved its viability in spite of the exiting opportunities that it offers. So epublishing while appearing to provide economies actually becomes an extra burden that demands extra investments in technology, human resources, etc. Only because of the way it has evolved as an ad hoc add-on to the current print-oriented processes. But, yes, of course there are investments required, but these investments, if done correctly, can have extremely high returns. We are in agreement. There are more pressing problems flowing from the poor productivity of research. Even Newt Gingrich complains about the poor dissemination and synthesis of scientific results. The taxpayer is not getting his/her money's worth. The researcher is insulated from important information. Going electronic offers no solution to this. How does increasing library subscriptions to paper journals increase productivity? Having more paper in your library doesn't make it any easier to find the articles that are relevant to your research. Going electronic means more effective searching, faster browsing, automated filtering with notifications, more open communications, better access, more time for doing research. First, I don't care whether subscriptions are paper or electronic. Second, you have to understand that to prepare a comprehensive review article, the writer needs comprehensive primary sources. That also means comprehensive coverage by databases (which really pioneered in electronic publishing 30 years ago, financed largely by the marketplace). Third, what research needs is more evaluation and synthesis of research. The first recommendation of a Presidential panel indicated, scientists must create new science, not just shuffle documents: their activities of reviewing, writing books, criticizing, and synthesizing are as much a part of science as is traditional research (President's Science Advisory Committee. 1963). Because dissemination was ditched by science policy and university administrators, I see little real hope for the researcher until policy that supports dissemination -- regardless of medium -- is reaffirmed. British Library consultant David J Brown indicates the new media will not survive if the economic market is not large enough. (ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING AND LIBRARIES. London: Bowker-Saur 1996) So? That doesn't mean that the market isn't large enough. I think it is far more likely that publishers who don't evolve to take advantage of the new media won't survive. If the market changes, it is up to the publishers to respond to the change in the market, even if that includes streamlining production so that expenses are more in line with what the market will support. Publishers have responded by cutting editorial coverage, demanding author subsidies, and abandoning research entirely. Why did AIP get out of publishing physics monographs last year? Should university presses also fold up their monograph lines? He also points out that library growth has not been sufficient to absorb the growth of research. I would add, nor
Re: Nature 10 September on Public Archiving
On Fri, 11 Sep 1998, Arthur Smith wrote: What I have said previously is we could easily cut our costs by a factor of three or more OVER THE NEXT DECADE through automation improvements and forcing/educating authors into better practices. Some of the required technology does not even exist yet although I believe it is close (current TeX from xxx is not good or consistent enough for much automation on the editorial side here). Savings at the production level are one thing. Real savings are another. I think one should take into account the cost of this transition to research and its underwriters. There has been a tremendous investment in new technology and systems over recent decades. (No one has any idea how much money has been invested in technology that obsolesces every 3 years or so.) It still, as Arthur Smith writes above, is no more than close. Outside the U. S. -- where 2/3 science articles originate -- they are not so automated and enthusiastic. Forcing/educating authors into better practices is more than a decade away. In spite of the buzz we hear constantly, the effect of ejournals to date in terms of citation studies has been minimal. (S.P. Harter. 1998. Scholarly Communication and Electronic Journals. JASIS: Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 49(6):507-516). Unlike the electronic-only journal, most publications must run two distributions. Many readers lack the infrastructure required to participate in epublishing. Associations like AAAS, with members who prefer their paper copy, are particularly hard pressed to cut out print. So epublishing while appearing to provide economies actually becomes an extra burden that demands extra investments in technology, human resources, etc. There are more pressing problems flowing from the poor productivity of research. Even Newt Gingrich complains about the poor dissemination and synthesis of scientific results. The taxpayer is not getting his/her money's worth. The researcher is insulated from important information. Going electronic offers no solution to this. British Library consultant David J Brown indicates the new media will not survive if the economic market is not large enough. (ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING AND LIBRARIES. London: Bowker-Saur 1996) He also points out that library growth has not been sufficient to absorb the growth of research. I would add, nor is library growth able to disseminate what it cannot absorb. In my eyes this is due to universities diverting library finances to support administrative growth. A solution to the problems of dissemination would be easily derived by financial support of library growth that would keep up with research. University provosts and presidents would have to give up some of the advantages they gained in the last 30 years. But then I wonder what administrators contribute to the effectiveness of instruction and research -- compared to good library collections. Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 70244.1...@compuserve.com
