Re: Harvesting open-access data as commercial add-ons
At 12:33 18/04/02 +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote: My own sense is that there is nothing whatsoever to worry about if commercial publishers and providers are re-using Open Access content and services to enhance their own products and services. ... [remainder below] Stevan, There is a saying in business, for those who want to try and divine the future, follow the money. We want open archives, but we want them to be economically sustainable. The ability to make the self-archived peer-reviewed literature freely available to users is predicated on absorbing the costs of running these services. In arXiv's case it attracts funding because it is incredibly efficient, whether viewed in terms of presentation (cost per paper) or usage (cost per user). But it still costs something. Institutional funding support may offer more options in future, or commercial companies may fund services. But if I were to paint a scenario in 10 years in which the majority of open archives were managed or owned by a monolithic commercial entity, you would be concerned. In such a case you can be pretty sure that if the open access model was not serving the business plan its future would be reconsidered. The wider issue here - and I must admit, I didn't set out to address it on this occasion, nor via all of these lists, but have been drawn in - is not about commercial-publisher-baiting but debating the principle of who funds open access, and about the implications of possibly surreptitious, possibly not, incursions into open access archives by commercial interests. As to the rest of the speculation, it wasn't mine. Steve Hitchcock Open Citation (OpCit) Project http://opcit.eprints.org/ IAM Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865 On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Steve Hitchcock wrote: Re: From FOS Newsletter, 4/15/02: http://www.mathematicsweb.org/mathematicsweb/show/ The Mathematics Web portal is clearly Elsevier (if not overtly so, e.g. no logo). The preprint link takes you to the Mathematics Preprint Server. I've visited this site before and had no idea it was an Elsevier service This appears to be an example of Guedon's assertion with regard to 'open article archives' such as the Chemistry Preprint Server that: I believe Elsevier is testing ways to reconstruct a firm grip on the evaluation process of science in the digital context. How significant is the low-key approach to this, I wonder? ... Yes, they are trying to reposition themselves in the market, add value, hold on to what they have, extend it, become more essential to the evaluation process, etc. etc. That is all fine. They may or may not be successful. It does not matter in the least. Nor does it matter that it is they (i.e., the commercial publishers, the ones with the high-priced journals) that are doing it. What matters is getting the peer-reviewed content up there, with free full-text access, OAI-compliant and in the (research) public eye. That may well add value to toll-based products and services as a side-effect, but that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that (1) it is available for free for all, at last, and that (2) it will in turn draw more of the peer-reviewed content up there. Please let us not forget that freeing all of this content online is our first (and last!) goal. We are not dedicated to competing with, let alone ruining, publishers, primary or secondary, commercial or otherwise. What kind of a goal is that? We are dedicated to providing open access to the peer reviewed literature. As to what might be the eventual secondary effects of our efforts, over and above reaching the goal of open access for the whole of this special literature (at least 20,000 journals, 2 million articles annually), we can speculate about what those effects might be, but it simply does not matter. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm Moreover, it would be a mistake to focus on these speculations, because they distract us from our real goal -- and, in an odd way, focussing on such irrelevant speculations (e.g., in the form of commercial-publisher-baiting) instead of our goal is and has been one of the many things that have actually been holding us back from open itself, as well as provoking needless opposition to open access from publishers. My own guess is that whereas now, while we are still in the era of toll-access to most of this literature, the open-access archives and services will (among other things) provide an added value to commercial goods and services, they will also be providing (and irreversibly converting use and users to) open access (our explicit goal). That means that all users whose institutions cannot afford the toll-access, and perhaps also those who can, will access this literature for free rather than for fee, forever. Then what about
Re: Harvesting open-access data as commercial add-ons
On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Steve Hitchcock wrote: There is a saying in business, for those who want to try and divine the future, follow the money. We want open archives, but we want them to be economically sustainable. The ability to make the self-archived peer-reviewed literature freely available to users is predicated on absorbing the costs of running these services. In arXiv's case it attracts funding because it is incredibly efficient, whether viewed in terms of presentation (cost per paper) or usage (cost per user). But it still costs something. That is one of the many reasons why I favour distributed instititutional archiving rather than central: Central vs. Distributed Archives http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html Count the reasons: (1) Distributed institutional self-archiving distributes the archiving load and cost. At the individual university level, the cost per paper of permanently archiving (reliably and interoperably) all its annual research output in OAI-compliant Eprint Archives will be a negligible part of the university's existing annual network infrastructural costs: so small as to be not worth talking about. (2) Distributed institutional self-archiving focusses the costs/benefits of the self-archiving of institutional research output on the relevant natural entity that is involved: That entity is not the discipline as a whole, which is no entity at all, nor the publisher, who is a service-provider rather than a research stake-holder, but the researcher's own institution, the one that shares with the researcher the benefits of research impact, and the costs of its loss, because of toll-based access barriers. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html (3) Distributed institutional self-archiving is structured exactly along the reciprocal golden-rule lines that are the most natural ones for inducing researchers to self-archive: Give in order to receive. In exchange for providing open access to their own research output, institutions all gain access to one another's research output. (4) Central archiving got the ball rolling in physics, but it is growing too slowly even in physics, and has not generalized across disciplines. Research institutions (i.e., universities) cover all disciplines. (5) Central archiving encourages old, proprietary ways of thinking about this anomalous, giveaway research literature, including misleading analogies to publishing, which also happens to be a centralized concept. Institutional funding support may offer more options in future, or commercial companies may fund services. This is far too vague. The scenario for institutional self-archiving and its support is clear. How (and why) commercial companies will or would cover archiving costs is another matter. But even apart from that, there is the question of how to get the peer-reviewed research archived in open access archives in the first place. Distributed institutional self-archiving has both a natural motivation and an existing means for doing this. How do the current re-uses that are being made of what little open-access content has been self-archived to date (the subject, after all, of Steve Hitchcock's posting) connect with the matter of archiving costs at all (negligible as they are, on the distributed model)? Note that two forms of parasitism are latent in all this discussion: (i) the parasitism of self-archived peer-reviewed papers on the peer review provided (and funded) by the journals publisher Clarification of parasitism and copyright http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1827.html These costs are currently covered by the toll-access system (subscription/license/pay-per-view) that still exists in parallel with the nascent open-access system. The scenarios for the transition to covering the essential costs in other ways, if/when it becomes necessary, have already been discussed many times: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1437.html The True Cost of the Essentials http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1973.html (ii) the parasitism of commercial re-use of self-archived papers by commercial services Here the parasitism is in the opposite direction, but irrelevant. But if I were to paint a scenario in 10 years in which the majority of open archives were managed or owned by a monolithic commercial entity, you would be concerned. And that is one of the (many) reasons I am advocating distributed institutional self-archiving rather than central. So stop worrying. (And why paint needless scenarios?) In such a case you can be pretty sure that if the open access model
