Re: [GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Perhaps a Kazhakstani graduate student can provide simple distribution
of files at a very low cost.  But once you get into providing anything
resembling serious curation, and even more when you get into peer review,
costs do mount up.  For example, arXiv costs about $10 per preprint
submitted (if we divide the annual cost of the arXiv by the number of
new submissions, and so don't worry about the accounting niceties of
splitting the costs between handling new and old papers).  For a few
million papers per year for all of scholarly publishing, this gets
beyond the capability of a Kazhakstani graduate student.


This rough estimate of $10 per preprint for arXiv, and others to be quoted, 
are all from the paper "Open Access, library and publisher competition, and 
the evolution of general commerce," Evaluation Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 
Feb. 2015, pp. 130-163,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0193841X13514751

and (for those who can't get inside the paywall), a preprint is at
 
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

Going beyond preprint distribution (and the very light level of screening
by volunteer editors, which does exist at arXiv, at no monetary cost),
Elsevier collects about $5,000 in total on average for each article they
publish.  About $2,000 is their profit, and the remaining $3,000 covers 
what they claim are necessary costs.  As many (including your truly) have 
been arguing for a couple of decades, the necessity of those costs (leaving
the profit question aside) is extremely questionable, and we now have lots 
of examples of lower cost journals.  It seems clear (some estimates and 
references in the paper cited above) that we could operate an adequate
scholarly publishing business, with the current level of peer review, 
at $300 per article, or 10% what it costs Elsevier.  The main obstacle 
is inertia.

Andrew





Heather Morrison  wrote:

> Indeed, great article. Building on this, a reflection: whatever one thinks of 
> the ethics and legality of Elsevier's lawsuit against SciHub founder 
> Alexandra Elbakyan, it appears to me that she has demonstrated that a 
> Kazhakstani graduate student can provide the bulk of the important services 
> contributed by Elsevier (hosting and serving up articles) at no cost to 
> users, and apparently off the side of her desk. If this is correct, this says 
> something about the real necessary marginal cost for providing this service, 
> i.e. almost nothing.
>
> Considering that academics do the real work of academic publishing - writing 
> and peer review - if the traditional value add of publishers in storing and 
> disseminating articles, necessary in the print and early electronic ages, can 
> now be done for next to nothing, surely we can devise a new system that 
> retains or strengthens quality at a fraction of the cost?
>
> best,
>
> --
> Dr. Heather Morrison
> Associate Professor
> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
> University of Ottawa
> Desmarais 111-02
> 613-562-5800 ext. 7634
> Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship
> http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
> heather.morri...@uottawa.ca
>
> On 2017-06-27, at 11:38 AM, "Reckling, Falk" 
> >
>  wrote:
>
> Indeed Eric, astonishingbackground story, almost all what you have to know 
> about the publishing industry and very well written,
>
>
>
> Best Falk
>
>
>
> Von: Éric Archambault
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 27. Juni 2017 09:26
> An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> Betreff: [GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific 
> publishing bad for science?
>
>
>
> Interesting article in the Guardian that spells out the role played by Robert 
> Maxwell in the development of the scholarly journal industry.
>
> Éric
>
>
> Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for 
> science?
> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
>
>
> Eric Archambault
> 1science.com
> Science-Metrix.com
> +1-514-495-6505 x111
>
> ___
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL@eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
> ___
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL@eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
>
>

___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

Re: [GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

[Andrew Odlyzko]

It is a very nice article.  But it conflates several issues, and has
some serious distortions.  

High profits at Elsevier (as well as at other publishers, including
quite a few non-profit professional societies) are one issue.  But
it has only tenuous relation to another one raised in the article,
namely how the scholarly publishing enterprise distorts science.
The latter is due primarily to the increasing competitiveness and
general sociology of science.  Even if Elsevier gave away its
journals, that would not change.  There is a slew of publications
on the problems with with current system, and just one example
is the paper of Vinkers et al. in Br. Med. J. in 2015, "Use of 
positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 
1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis,"

 www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6467

with a popular writeup by Philip Ball in Nature,

 
http://www.nature.com/news/novel-amazing-innovative-positive-words-on-the-rise-in-science-papers-1.19024

If one reads the Buranyi article carefully, one gets some glimpses
of the positive effects that Maxwell had on scholarly publishing.
He did recognize the rapid expansion of the research establishment,
and in particular the rise of new fields, fields that traditional
professional societies were neglecting.  I have not heard of any
cases where he tried to influence the scientific content of his
journals (say, by suppressing articles about dangers of tobacco,
or of pollution).  So yes, the high prices and high profits that
he extracted were regrettable.  But he just exploited the opportunities
that traditional scholarly publishers had left open.

Andrew





Peter Murray-Rust  wrote:

> I'd like to publicly commend Stephen Buranyi for this article. He spent a
> *lot*of time on it, and spent a whole day with me getting a historical and
> current perspective. Originally I think he hoped to give pointers for the
> future, but the story (rightly) mutated itself into Maxwell , which is
> exactly where it should be. Not enough people realise that it was
> effectively Maxwell who has corrupted the scholarly publishing system and
> this is an excellent and timely reminder of the initial causes.
>
> P.
>
> On Tue, Jun 27, 2017 at 7:12 PM, Donald Samulack - Editage <
> donald.samul...@editage.com> wrote:
>
> > I ask that the industry consider whether or not SciHub activities could
> > possibly be the work of one individual residing in Russia, or whether there
> > is something more malicious taking place instead.
> >
> >
> >
> > I am not a conspiracy theorist, but it makes sense to me (and I have not
> > heard any serious argument otherwise) in light of recent Russian attempts
> > to alter the course of the US election (and others), that if Russia
> > *really* wanted to get into the computers of every research lab and
> > academic institution around the world, there would be no better way to do
> > it than to give away free research articles. Please think about this… a
> > cover for a phishing exercise targeting every atomic energy facility,
> > WHO-sponsored lab, CDC facilities, government and state labs around the
> > world, leading academic institutions housing the world’s cutting edge
> > intellectual property, etc.
> >
> >
> >
> > The computing and article collating power that this single person would
> > need to have at her disposal to be able to have the IP change every 10
> > minutes (as I understand it), archive and mirror the collections, etc. may
> > not be the resources and activities of a single person. We need to consider
> > this possibility in this new world we live in, and also consider the
> > consequences of not taking steps to shut down such potentially corrupt
> > intent, if in fact such intent is ongoing.
> >
> >
> >
> > Donald Samulack
> >
> > (Speaking as a concerned citizen)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > *From:* goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *On
> > Behalf Of *Heather Morrison
> > *Sent:* Tuesday, June 27, 2017 1:08 PM
> > *To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
> > *Subject:* Re: [GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of
> > scientific publishing bad for science?
> >
> >
> >
> > Indeed, great article. Building on this, a reflection: whatever one thinks
> > of the ethics and legality of Elsevier's lawsuit against SciHub
> > founder Alexandra Elbakyan, it appears to me that she has demonstrated that
> > a Kazhakstani graduate student can provide the bulk of the important
> > services contributed by Elsevier (hosting and serving up articles) at no
> > cost to users, and apparently off the side of her desk. If this is correct,
> > this says something about the real necessary marginal cost for providing
> > this service, i.e. almost nothing.
> >
> >
> >
> > Considering that academics do the real work of academic publishing -
> > writing and peer review - if the traditional value add of publishers in
> > storing and disseminating articles, necessary in the print 

[GOAL] Re: The open access movement slips into closed mode

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Jan is surely right.  Large commercial publishers are pretty sophisticated
about avoiding taxes, and so I doubt they pay much.  (Even the numbers that
are listed in their shareholder reports have to be treated with extreme
caution, as often they represent money that might possibly be due at some
very distant time, but is not actually being paid right now.)

But even aside from corporate taxes (which, I am pretty sure, are outweighed
in politicians' minds by the effect of substantial employment of educated
people at decent salaries, and the taxes those folks pay), there is the
very basic factor that publisher revenues are small relatively to the cost
of running libraries.  What is going on is that publishers are squeezing out
librarians.  What may be under consideration in those secret UK discussions 
is a deal in which Elsevier will provide free access to everybody in the UK in 
return for slightly more than they are collecting right now from all the UK 
universities and university consortia.  And in the next round of budget
allocations to academic institutions, those institutions will be told they 
should shave their library expenditures to pay for the deal.

I am not claiming this is the optimal solution.  But given how slow librarians
and especially scholars have been to embrace Open Access and to set up 
alternative
journal systems, politicians may see this as attractive, as it will deliver 
improved service to their constituents.  It does entrench the large commercial 
publishers and perpetuates their high profit margins, but it does provide
much better access to scholarly information for the whole nation, and reduces
the costs of the entire system by eliminating the high internal costs of 
university libraries.  

A recent paper of mine on these developments is "Open Access, library and 
publisher 
competition, and the evolution of general commerce," Evaluation Review, vol. 
39, 
no. 1, Feb. 2015, pp. 130-163,

 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0193841X13514751

with preprint (for those without subscriptions) at

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

An earlier paper that predicted such developments is "Competition and 
cooperation: 
Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals,"
Journal of Electronic Publishing 4(4) (June 1999)

http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0004.411

Andrew Odlyzko

P.S.  Secret national-level negotiations with commercial entities about pricing
are not uncommon.  That is what pharmaceutical industry economics are based on.








Velterop <velte...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What a rubbish argument! This can only be true of a small country with a 
> disproportionally massive commercial scholarly publishing sector (that 
> isn't avoiding taxes via some small island tax haven).
>
> The Netherlands? Perhaps Britain? That's it.
>
> Jan Velterop
>
> On 30/12/2015 12:25, Richard Poynder wrote:
> > As Keith Jeffery puts it, “We all know why the BOAI principles have 
> > been progressively de-railed. One explanation given to me at an 
> > appropriate political level was that the tax-take from commercial 
> > publishers was greater than the cost of research libraries.” 
> > http://bit.ly/1OslVFW.

___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Arthur,

There is far more difficulty in counting researchers than in counting
articles.  The problem is the inherent ambiguity in the term researcher.
Who qualifies?  How do you tell the difference between research and
development?  What do you do about all the support staff (such as the
technicians who run the often ultra-sophisticated equipment)?  How do
you count students (graduate and undergraduate) who get involved in
researchy projects?

One can certainly do something, but one needs to define the terms
one uses with some precision.

Andrew




Arthur Sale a...@ozemail.com.au wrote:

 Thank you Arif.  I have read the article this afternoon (3 January) and will
 download and look through your thesis asap.

  

 However I feel compelled to re-emphasize to the list that I am not looking
 for an estimate of how many articles are published annually, or ever. The
 first of those pieces of data is useful for estimating what I really want to
 know: how many active researchers are employed in year y? Particularly 2011.
 Of course, it will be useful to have article counts by discipline, however
 rough, because publication practices differ widely between disciplines. A
 publication in some disciplines is worth far less than in others, the number
 of authors/article differs widely, and journal prestige varies at least as
 much.

  

 There are many other confusing factors in estimates based on article
 production rates which I touched on in my reply to Stevan Harnad, not least
 of which is the frequency of publication of equally highly respected
 researchers. Some publish rarely (say once every three years), others
 produce multiple articles per year. There are distributions in all these
 things which we should understand. If I mention just one, the huge disparity
 between articles/title in ISI and non-ISI journals listed in your article
 (111 vs 26, from Bjork et al) must give anyone cause to reflect! That's over
 4:1, too big to gloss over.

  

 I know of course that I cannot determine exactly the number of researchers
 in the world, any more than anyone else can determine exactly how many
 articles were written or published.  As an engineer in a previous career,
 absolute precision in these matters is not required, rather sufficient
 confidence that we are in the right ballpark. Anyway, thank you very much
 for your help and links, which I greatly appreciate.

  

 Arthur Sale

 University of Tasmania

  

  

 From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf
 Of Arif Jinha
 Sent: Tuesday, 3 January 2012 5:26 AM
 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
 Subject: [GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?

  

 Arthur,

  

 You're not going to be able to determine the exact number of researchers in
 the world and you will have to make good estimates. But there are direct
 relationships between the number of researchers, the number of articles
 published annually and the number of active peer-reviewed journals. Good
 sources for methodology are my thesis
 http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf -
 http://arif.jinhabrothers.com/sites/arif.jinhabrothers.com/files/aj.pdf
 (defended and submitted this fall)

 - Article 50 million -
 http://www.mendeley.com/research/article-50-million-estimate-number-scholar
 ly-articles-existence-6/
 http://www.mendeley.com/research/article-50-million-estimate-number-scholarl
 y-articles-existence-6/

 Methods and data are based chiefly on:

 Bjork et al's studies on OA share growth 2006 to current

 Mabe and Amin, Tenopir and King - works 1990s to early 2000s

 Derek De Sallo Price - 1960s - the 'father of scientometrics.

 - you can get the number of article from Bjork's methods and data and mine.

 - you can get the number of researchers from UN data but there is ratio of
 researchers to publishing researchers, and publishing researchers publish an
 average of 1 article per year, so if you can determine good estimate for
 that ratio you are on your way. You have good data on growth rates of
 researchers, articles and journals, but growth rates have increased
 dramatically since 2000 as demonstrated in my thesis.  It got a bit complex
 and I tried to sort it best I could in my thesis.

  

 all the best,

  

 Arif

  

  

  

 - Original Message - 

 From: Arthur Sale mailto:a...@ozemail.com.au  

 To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' mailto:goal@eprints.org


 Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 6:25 PM

 Subject: [GOAL] How many researchers are there?

  

 I am trying to get a rough estimate of the number of active researchers in
 the world. Unfortunately all the estimates seem to be as rough as the famous
 Drake equation for calculating the number of technological civilizations in
 the universe: in other words all the factors are extremely fuzzy.  I seek
 your help. My interest is that this is the number of people who need to
 adopt OA for us to have 100% OA. (Actually, we will 

Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)

[Andrew Odlyzko]

The recent postings to this list about rejection rates and
costs of peer review point out yet another way that costs
can be lowered:  Elimination of the wasteful duplication in
the peer review system.

It is widely acknowledged that almost all articles are
published eventually, possibly after some revisions, and
often after getting rejected by first and second choice
journals.  Thus several sets of referees have to go over
essentially the same material.  If we moved to a system
of explicit quality feedback, with referees and editors
providing their evaluations of the correctness, novelty,
and significance to the readers (beyond the current
system, where readers never see any negative evaluations,
and see positive ones only to the extent of knowing that
a published paper met some quality hurdle that is not
well formulated, much less known), we could get away from
all this duplication.

Unfortunately a change of this type is likely to take
far longer to achieve than open archiving, since it
involves changing the basic patterns of scholarly
communication.

Andrew Odlyzko

Re: Online Self-Archiving: Distinguishing the Optimal from the Optional

[Andrew Odlyzko]

On Wed Dec 11, Arthur P. Smith wrote:

 (snip)

   Going back to my original question - does anybody have any numbers that
   might corroborate or refute the assertion that the cause of the serials
   crisis is the increase in world-wide research funding, and particularly
   (at least for physics) the increase outside the US? Is there some clear
   measure of total publication expense relative to research dollars that
   could be looked at? I'd be interested in seeing numbers, both for
   physics and other fields.

   Arthur


At a certain level, the serials crisis is definitely caused by
an increase in the volume of publications (which in turn is closely
correlated to the increase in the number of researchers).  Since
1950, these numbers have gone up approximately 10-fold.  (There
is a lot of data on this subject.  I am traveling right now and
have limited access to email and to my data collections, but I do
present some statistics in my 1994 paper Tragic loss or good
riddance?  The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals,
available at http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/eworld.html.)
However, the decline in the US share of worldwide research (and
publications) has not been dramatic.  US alone had close to a
10-fold growth in its RD establishment and publications.

There is also data showing that publication expenses have gone
down as a fraction of total RD expenditures.  (One can look
at the ARL statistics, for example, and compare them to the
figures compiled by NSF for total federal research funding, say,
both easily available online.)  The issue is how to interpret
that.  Here is a quote from Tragic loss or good riddance ...:

  University libraries have already lost some of their importance.
  Spending on libraries has been increasing rapidly, much faster than
  inflation.  Still, Albert Henderson has pointed out that over the last
  25 years, the fraction of budgets of research universities in the US
  that are devoted to libraries has declined from 6% to 3%.  One could
  therefore argue that everything would be fine with scholarly
  publishing if only libraries regained their rightful share of
  university budgets.  My opinion is that this is unrealistic, and that
  the decline in the relative share of resources devoted to libraries
  resulted from their decreasing importance.  The increasing
  availability of phone, fax, email, interlibrary loan, and other
  methods of obtaining information, and the inability of any single
  library to satisfy scholars' needs, may mean that scholars do not need
  the library as much, and as a result do not fight for it.  In the best
  of all possible worlds, there would be resources to acquire
  everything, but in practice, choices have to be made, and at some
  level in the university power structure, libraries compete for money
  with faculty salaries, student scholarships, and so on.  That
  libraries have been losing this competition probably means that they
  have already lost some of their constituency, and will have to change.

Andrew

Re: Higher rate of citation

[Andrew Odlyzko]

On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Jim Till wrote:

On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Jan Velterop wrote [in part, on the
Subject: Re: UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) review]:

jv Little wonder that scientists are often not aware of the issues of
jv serials crises and open access solutions. If they were, many would
jv be likely to take an attitude to publishing their research that is
jv similar to their attitude towards scientific problems: experiment
jv and 'push the envelope'. The theory and the hypotheses are clear.
jv And experimental results are now, slowly but steadily, becoming
jv available, such as a generally higher rate of citation for articles
jv that are freely accessible to anyone.

Is there an (openly-accessible) summary of the evidence that supports 
the
hypothesis that openly-accessible research reports generally (i.e. in
several quite different disciplines) attract higher citation rates?

If such a summary exists, I'd like to know about it. It would be helpful
to me in my local OA (and FOS) advocacy efforts.

Jim Till
University of Toronto


The standard reference now (hopefully to be joined by many others in
the future) is the work of Steve Lawrence at NEC Research in Princeton,

Online or invisible?  Nature, vol. 411 (no. 6837), p. 521.  Self-archived
preprint available at 
http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/.

and

Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact, in
Nature Web forum, Future e-access to the primary literature, 2001,
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html.

Andrew

Re: Self-Selected Vetting vs. Peer Review: Supplement or Substitute?

[Andrew Odlyzko]

 community relies on.

 If self-archiving had (mirabile dictu) begun instead with refereed
 postprints, we might have spared ourselves these misconstruals, and we
 might have been further along the road to open access by now

The incentives were not there to do this.  The authors, who after all control
the information flow, could see the benefits to themselves of quick circulation
of preprints.  Open access to published journal articles was of much less
value to them, since they typically had access to those journals in their
libraries.

Andrew Odlyzko

Re: Self-Selected Vetting vs. Peer Review: Supplement or Substitute?

[Andrew Odlyzko]

 the lines I have repeated in
 commentary here. I have to say that I rather wish that you weren't
 publishing this -- or at least that you would clearly dissociate it from
 self-archiving, and simply portray it as the conjectures they are, from
 someone who is not actually doing research on the peer review system,
 but mere contemplating hypothetical possibilities.

What I am saying here is pretty much what I have been saying ever
since Tragic loss or good riddance ... back in 1994.  My position
has not changed.  This is an opinion piece, as solicited by the
editors of this volume, so it certainly is largely personal
evaluation and speculation.  However, everything I have seen in
the last 8 years confirms my initial impression.

 Or failing that, I wish I could at least write a commentary by way of
 rebuttal!

Why don't you propose it to the editors?  (BTW, mine is just one of
several short contributions they have solicited.  I have not seen
any of the others.)

Andrew Odlyzko

Re: Self-Selected Vetting vs. Peer Review: Supplement or Substitute?

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Stevan, Enclosed below is a draft of a short note about peer review that
was solicited for the 2nd edition of Peer Review in Health Sciences.
Any comments you might have would be greatly appreciated.  
Best regards, Andrew

  Peer and non-peer review

   Andrew Odlyzko
 Digital Technology Center
  University of Minnesota
  http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko

Fears about possible damage to the peer review system are slowing down the
evolution of scholarly communication, and in particular the development
of freely accessible article archives.  I am convinced that these fears
is unjustified.  Although the peer review system will change substantially
with the spread of such archives, it will change for the better.

A good overview of the history and current state of the peer review
system is provided by the book [1].  This system is really a collection
of many different systems, of varying effectiveness.  They guarantee
neither correctness nor novelty of the results, even among the most
selective and prestigious journals.  However, traditional peer review
(with anonymous referees evaluating submissions to a journal) does
perform a valuable screening function.  Still, it is just a part of
the entire communication system, and evaluation of the value of an
article is never truly complete, as sometimes historians will revisit
this question centuries after publication.  It is the presence of such
self-correcting features in the entire scholarly communication system
that makes the deficiencies of the current peer review system tolerable.
However, it is natural to expect evolution to occur.

In the Gutenberg era of print journals, placing heavy reliance on
traditional peer review was sensible.  Printing and distributing journals
was very expensive.  Furthermore, providing additional feedback after
publication was hard and slow.  Therefore it was appropriate to devote
considerable attention to minimizing the volume of published material,
and making sure it was of high quality.  With the development of more
flexible communication systems, especially the Internet, we are moving
towards a continuum of publication.  I have argued, starting with [2],
that this requires a continuum of peer review, which will provide feedback
to scholars about articles and other materials as they move along the
continuum, and not just in the single journal decision process stage.
We can already see elements of the evolving system of peer review in
operation.

Many scholars, including Stevan Harnad [3], one of the most prominent
proponents of open access archives, argue for a continuing strong role
for the traditional peer review system at the journal level.  I have no
doubt that this system will persist for quite a while, since sociological
changes in the scholarly arena are very slow [4].  However, I do expect
its relative importance to decline.  The reason is that there is a
continuing growth of other types of feedback that scholars can rely on.
This is part of the general trend (described in [5]) in which traditional
journals are continuing as before, but the main action is in novel and
often informal modes of communication that are growing much more rapidly.

The growing flood of information does require screening.  Some of this
reviewing can be done by non-peers.  Indeed, some of it has traditionally
been done by non-peers, for example in legal scholarship, where U.S. law
reviews are staffed by students.  The growing role of interdisciplinary
research might lead to a generally greater role for non-peers in reviewing
publications.  However, in most cases only peers are truly qualified to
review technical results.  However, peer evaluations can be obtained,
and increasingly are being obtained, much more flexibly than through the
traditional anonymous journal refereeing process.  Some can come from
use of automated tools to harvest references to papers, in a much more
flexible and comprehensive way than the Science Citation Index provided
in the old days.  Other, more up-to-date evaluations, can be obtained
from a variety of techniques, such as those described in [5].

An example of how evolving forms of peer review function is provided by
the recent proof that testing whether a natural number is prime (that
is, divisible only by 1 and itself) can be done fast.  (The technical
term is in polynomial time.)  This had been an old and famous open
problem of mathematics and computer science.  On Sunday, August 4, 2002,
Maninda Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena of the Indian Institute
of Technology in Kanpur sent out a paper with their astounding proof of
this result to several of the recognized experts on primality testing.
(Their proof was astounding because of its unexpected simplicity.)
Some of these experts responded almost right away, confirming the validity
of the proof.  On Tuesday, August 6, the authors then posted the paper
on their Web site and sent

Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)

[Andrew Odlyzko]

 just out of concern for
preservation of the scholarly literature.  Rather, Harvard uses the
quality of its library collection to attract faculty, students, and
donations.  In the future, Harvard (and other institutions, I am
not picking on them) will have an incentive to provide their faculty
with help in making their papers more accessible.  Yes, that will
make the field less level, but such is the world.  I feel that
the field will still be more level than it was a decade ago, say.



   In general, as we move towards a continuum of publication, it makes less
   and less sense to concentrate the copyediting and other costs at the
   formal publication stage.  What I expect scholars will want is provision
   of clearly readable research (in Arthur's words) from the very beginning.
   It really is a war for the eyeballs, in scholarly publishing as well as
   in more commercially-oriented areas, as my papers and those of Steve
   Lawrence demonstrage/

  My argument is simply that going in that direction is a bad idea for
  scholarly research, because it misdirects the resources and attention
  of scholars into issues of presentation, when their real focus should
  be the content of their scholarly research, and it penalizes researchers
  who focus on the latter at the expense of the former, or who may
  have no resources or skills to devote to it. Let a third party take
  care of the presentation aspects; perhaps not a publisher doing peer review,
  though peer review seems to me like an ideal way to judge whether
  an article warrants equal billing with other good research, or not.

  Now it can be argued how well we are actually doing in this area. Actual
  changes to the text of a manuscript are often very minimal. However,
  even steps such as getting the figures right-side up and positioning
  them logically among the text, making sure acronyms and uncommon terms
  are clearly spelled out somewhere, and of course our tagging efforts at
  linking citations etc., can make a huge difference to the reader, so
  time devoted to understanding the article is well-spent.

  Is this really something we want to lose, in favor of all-out
  war for the eyeballs? My imagination conjures up images of
  physicists plastering their results on billboards in an escalating
  war of presentation over content - but maybe there's an equilbrium
  detente point that doesn't actually take that much effort on the
  part of the author? The prospect does make me uncomfortable, but
  as Andrew points out, in some areas it seems to be already happening.
  What does experience teach us there? How is science actually
  faring under these conditions? Has anybody analyzed this sort of thing?

  More food for thought I hope. I've got a lot to read :-)

Well, scholars already devote much attention to presentation.  I would
love to be able to toss out a few inarticulate remarks to a waiting
assistant, and to have them written up instantly in a smooth and
attractive style.  Unfortunately, I haven't found a patron willing to
provide such an assistant!  :-)

More seriously, a very large part of a scholar's life is devoted to
presentation (even aside from formal teaching), whether in written or
spoken form.  Some type of balance between research and presentation
has always had to be struck.

Andrew




  -Please note new address-

  Andrew Odlyzko
  University of Minnesota
  Digital Technology Center
  1200 Washington Avenue South
  Minneapolis, MN 55415

  odly...@umn.edu   email
  612-624-9510  voice phone
  612-625-2002  fax

  http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko

Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Arthur Smith wrote:

 In response to Stevan and Andrew, a question for all to consider...:

 Stevan Harnad wrote:
 
  On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Andrew Odlyzko wrote:
   [...] However, that does not preclude less expensive
   modes of operation, either with lower quality, or with shifting some
   of the explicit financial costs that APS incurs into hidden subsidies
   from editors and the like.
 
  And there may be even more natural ways for covering the remaining
  costs if they are partitioned in a more appropriate way for the new
  media (as a SERVICE fee for an outgoing submitted draft instead of an
  access fee for an incoming PRODUCT):

 Obviously a service fee to authors or their institutions would help with
 our gentle persuasion process, but the service fee may not be small...
 and is it actually advantageous to science to put in economic incentives
 that effectively discourage publication of clearly readable research? Do
 we really want lower quality? Is this an unfulfilled need?

We definitely do want to encourage publication of clearly readable research.
The question is how to provide this.

Although there is little evidence of it as yet, I still feel that the
dominant mode of operation may well end up with most of the costs shifted
to authors' institutions.  Now the trend has so far been in the opposite
direction:  Page charges are on the decline, and universities have been
cutting back on secretarial support for faculty.  However, that may
change.

Bringing back secretaries to do basic typesetting does not make sense, as
almost all scholars find it easier to do this themselves.  On the other hand,
I feel there will be increasing pressure to provide expert Web design as well
as editorial assistance to make articles easy to access and read.  As papers are
increasingly accessed in their electronic preprint formats (as is documented
in various places, including my paper The rapid evolution of scholarly
communication, which is available, along with other papers, at
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/eworld.html), the incentive for
scholars will be make those forms attractive for readers.  This incentive
will increase dramatically when results such as those compiled by Steve
Lawrence (in his note in the Nature online forum at
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/) become widely known,
since they show that free access to one's papers not only leads to more
reading of them, but also to more citations in the literature, and thereby
a higher reputation, better chances at grants, promotion, etc..  Already
in my Tragic loss or good riddance ... paper I noted that scholars in
some areas where getting a paper into a prestigioug conference was more
important than publishing it (theoretical computer science being the
prime example of that) were putting a lot of efforts into making their
submissions look nice.

In general, as we move towards a continuum of publication, it makes less
and less sense to concentrate the copyediting and other costs at the
formal publication stage.  What I expect scholars will want is provision
of clearly readable research (in Arthur's words) from the very beginning.
It really is a war for the eyeballs, in scholarly publishing as well as
in more commercially-oriented areas, as my papers and those of Steve
Lawrence demonstrage/

Andrew



  -Please note new address-

  Andrew Odlyzko
  University of Minnesota
  Digital Technology Center
  1200 Washington Avenue South
  Minneapolis, MN 55415

  odly...@umn.edu   email
  612-624-9510  voice phone
  612-625-2002  fax

  http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko

Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Arthur Smith wrote:

First note $1000 in 1977 is about $2850 in 2001, according to standard
CPI tables. ...

So not counting anything directly associated with print distribution,
subscription management, marketing, or profit, a publisher can probably
expect to be spending $800-$1500 in 2001, of which perhaps $300-$1000+
is directly associated with the copy-editing piece, for every article
they publish. Compared with the $2850 the 1977 number would suggest, we
seem to be getting more efficient over the years. ...


The conclusion about greater efficiency does not follow.  The $800-$1500
is what publishers such as APS spend.  However, APS is uncommonly efficient
(and non-profit).  The average revenue per article in the STM area is
today someplace in the vicinity of $5000, which suggests that STM publishing
has become less rather than more efficient.  (I expect that APS had revenues
considerably lower than $1000 per article back in 1977 as well.)

In general, I agree that to operate the way APS does, it costs around
$800-$1500 per article.  However, that does not preclude less expensive
modes of operation, either with lower quality, or with shifting some
of the explicit financial costs that APS incurs into hidden subsidies
from editors and the like.

Andrew Odlyzko

Re: Recent Comments by Albert Henderson

[Andrew Odlyzko]

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.


2.  Library budgets:  Albert Henderson is correct in pointing out
that library budgets have been shrinking as fractions of university
budgets.  However, there are several ways of thinking about it.
If every part of the university got to keep its rightful share
of the overall budget in the past, then a third or so of the faculty
would still be teaching theology.

Here is what I wrote on this subject in the 1994 paper Tragic loss
or good riddance?  The impending demise of traditional scholarly
journals:


  University libraries have already lost some of their importance.
  Spending on libraries has been increasing rapidly, much faster than
  inflation.  Still, Albert Henderson has pointed out that over the last
  25 years, the fraction of budgets of research universities in the US
  that are devoted to libraries has declined from 6% to 3%.  One could
  therefore argue that everything would be fine with scholarly
  publishing if only libraries regained their rightful share of
  university budgets.  My opinion is that this is unrealistic, and that
  the decline in the relative share of resources devoted to libraries
  resulted from their decreasing importance.  The increasing
  availability of phone, fax, email, interlibrary loan, and other
  methods of obtaining information, and the inability of any single
  library to satisfy scholars' needs, may mean that scholars do not need
  the library as much, and as a result do not fight for it.  In the best
  of all possible worlds, there would be resources to acquire
  everything, but in practice, choices have to be made, and at some
  level in the university power structure, libraries compete for money
  with faculty salaries, student scholarships, and so on.  That
  libraries have been losing this competition probably means that they
  have already lost some of their constituency, and will have to change.


Andrew


Andrew Odlyzko  a...@research.att.com
ATT Labs - Researchvoice:  973-360-8410
http://www.research.att.com/~amofax:973-360-8178

Re: Electronic archiving and IIS talk

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Chris Armstrong's message raises once again the important issue
of interaction of technology and culture.  Electronic publishing
does threaten the idea of a single definitive version of a
scholarly article.  Is that a bug or a feature?  There are simple
technical solutions (metadata, cryptographic authentication and
digital timestamping) that would let us preserve the features
of our current system.  However, will we want to, since those
features are also limitations?  We should not forget that those
limitations are artificial, imposed by the technology of print.
Here is a passage from The slow evolution of electronic publishing
(available at http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html):

  Gutenberg's invention of movable type did prove to be revolutionary.
  Initially, though, it was an extremely conservative development [Cook,
  Eisenstein, Steinberg].  It did enable considerably less expensive
  production of large runs of books (as well as of indulgences).  Still,
  it took considerable further development, technical, social, and
  economic, before the full impact of movable type became apparent.  The
  first books had initial letters in paragraphs hand-colored, and were
  produced in ungainly folio volumes.  There was also extensive
  resistance to print by scholars [Hibbitts1, O'Donnell], which included
  calls for banning the new technology.  Many of the objections have a
  familiar ring to them (only trash was getting into print, books were
  not as durable as parchments, etc.).  For a long time print was
  treated with suspicion.  What is interesting is that many of the
  criticisms were serious one.  Although this view is generally
  discredited, even some modern scholars (cf. [Eisenstein]) have felt
  that initially print reduced the variety of scholarly information that
  was widely available.  (Setting the type for a book was much more
  expensive than copying the manuscript by hand, and it was only the
  large number of copies that could be printed at once that reduced the
  per-copy cost.)  There were also more subtle effects.  Scholars of the
  15th century were trained in the art of comparing a variety of copies
  of a treatise to figure out the mistakes of the scribes and thus
  discern the original words of the author.  With print, that was
  impossible!  A mistake made in typesetting would be propagated in all
  copies in that print run.  Indeed, some of the mistakes that slipped
  through were egregious, as in the wicked Bible in 17th century
  England, in which the Seventh Commandment was rendered as Thou shalt
  commit adultery (p. 204 of [Steinberg]).  Of course, methods (such
  as proofreading and printed errata) to compensate for such
  deficiencies were invented, and we have developed a culture of print.
  Scholars work with the mental image of an edition, a definitive work
  that stays immutable.  Many of the objections to electronic
  publications (such as that of Quinn [Quinn]) are based on perceived
  threats to this model.  Yet before movable type was invented, there
  were no definitive editions, and scholars lived in a much more fluid
  world.  Electronic publishing removes the choke point that the step of
  going to print represented, and is likely to lead to a much more
  diffuse (and also much more effective) communication system.  However,
  the habits developed over 500 years are not easy to break, which is
  why I am not astonished by the slow evolution of electronic
  publishing.

For those readers of this list who have a few spare hours, and access to
a good library, I highly recommend the book Johannes Trithemius: In Praise
of Scribes, 'De Laude Scriptorum,' edited with an introduction by Klaus
Arnold, translated by Roland Behrendt, Coronado Press, Lawrence , Kansas,
1974.  Trithemius' tract, with the first version written in the early 1490s,
and the Klaus Arnold introduction, illustrate nicely the problems
scholars had in the transition to print.

Andrew Odlyzko



Andrew Odlyzko  a...@research.att.com
ATT Labs - Researchvoice:  973-360-8410
http://www.research.att.com/~amofax:973-360-8178

Re: problem of the Ginsparg Archive as self-archiving model

[Andrew Odlyzko]

 is reluctantly told by the
 doctor she might have lupus, and leaves the clinic terrified of what
 this might be.  She then proceeds to obtain information about this
 disease from the Internet.  When she returns to her physician, she is
 well-informed and prepared to question the diagnosis and possible
 treatment.  What is remarkable about this story is that the basic
 approach of this patient was feasible before the arrival of the Web.
 She could have gone to her local library, where the reference
 librarians would have been delighted to point her to many excellent
 print sources of medical information.  However, few people availed
 themselves of such opportunities before.  Now, with the easy
 availability of the Web, we see a different story.

 [Kolata] = G. Kolata, Web research transforms visit to the doctor,
  New York Times, March 6, 2000, pp. A1  A6.







  And Andrew and I can retire to our tents and get back to our research,
  reaping the benefits of the give-away corpus, free at last!

Amen!


Andrew Odlyzko  a...@research.att.com
ATT Labs - Researchvoice:  973-360-8410
http://www.research.att.com/~amofax:973-360-8178

Re: Medical journals are dead. Long live medical journals

[Andrew Odlyzko]

   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.

Andrew Odlyzko




Andrew Odlyzko  a...@research.att.com
ATT Labs - Researchvoice:  973-360-8410
http://www.research.att.com/~amofax:973-360-8178

Re: Journal Article Royalties: Reanimating the Faustian Bargain

[Andrew Odlyzko]

A quick response to the messages from Jim Muckerheide and Fytton Rowland:

All servers that I am aware of do maintain a record of download addresses.
This does present serious privacy issues, and as a result there are very
few servers that make their logs widely available.

To answer another part of the question, server logs would be of very limited
use in producing discussion lists and the like.  The reason is that these
logs are not as informative as one would like for such purposes (which is
a relief to many privacy advocates and a hindrance to direct marketers and
the like).  What server logs do is record the IP address of the machine
that requested a page, and this address looks like 135.207.225.12.  One
can then use reverse DNS lookup to try to find out what machine that is.
Here is where the serious problems start.  Quite a few such lookups fail,
and no information is generated about the IP address.  (One can then try
to do other things, such as examine registries of autonomous systems, etc.,
but even that is of limited use, and let's skip it.)  When the lookup
succeeds, you get information that varies in its utility.  Some of the
addresses will be of the form

   john-smith...@physics.harvard.edu

which suggests the request came from John Smith's PC in the Harvard Physics
Dept.  (But even that is not certain, since this PC may have been passed on
to a student of John Smith.)  Others, such as

   156.cambridge-06-07rs.ma.dial-access.att.net

will tell you the request came from a dial-in customer of the ATT WorldNet
ISP business, and that the modem bank is located in Cambridge, Mass.
It won't tell you who was using that PC, though.  (For that you would need
to access the WorldNet logs, which are carefully guarded for privacy reasons.)
The next time you see that address, a different person might be using it.
Next, many requests come from addresses that look like

   proxy1.questnet.net.au

which are proxies that hide any number of users behind them.  None of these
entries produce valid email addresses.

One of the complications in studying server logs is that you can never be
certain you have seen all accesses to a page.  For example, if many people
are going through proxy1.questnet.net.au to access your pages, this proxy
will almost certainly cache (store a local copy) at least some of those
pages, and then deliver them to requesters without leaving any trace
on your server.

All these technical difficulties make it hard to evaluate usage in a
meaningful way.

Andrew Odlyzko



Andrew Odlyzko  a...@research.att.com
ATT Labs - Researchvoice:  973-360-8410
http://www.research.att.com/~amofax:973-360-8178