Re: The True Cost of the Essentials
hi, if you look at the ARL statistics and expenditures for serials of law faculties in particular, 76 law libraries spend $63,607,619 US http://www.arl.org/stats/pubpdf/law02.pdf) on (individual) access to 272 journals (http://www.ala.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Products_and_Publications/Periodicals/American_Libraries/Selected_articles/7law.htm) which is about $235 000 US available per annum per journal. of course, this is an oversimplification (e.g. some contribute more than others; cost structures depend on the individual discipline...), but the figures show that there is a lot of money out there which could be invested in a much more productive way (i.e. resulting in a much higher research impact). if onlythe investment is co-ordinated (channeled) in a better way - i.e. by funding higher level digital property (i.e. publishers who add non-digital value) rather than individual access to this digital property - research impact could be much higher at perhaps even lower costs. No groundbreaking news. but apart from the organization of this funding scheme, plain economics need to be taken into account and could be a problem. so, how much does it actually cost to run an e journal? with shared facilities (and therefore no costs to the publishers), a 1998 PWC study estimates costs for a law journal to be around 100 000 (http: //www.dlib.org/dlib/november98/11roes.html), Odlyzko generally mentions a $300-$1000 figure per paper (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_8/odlyzko/), fytton simlarly mentions $400 US for a 10 page paper at a rejection rate of 50% http://iris.ingentaselect.com/vl=8918111/cl=103/fm=docpdf/nw=1/rpsv/cw/alpsp/09531513/v15n4/s2and JHEP flatly states that their actual costs are around $200,000 US (http://jhep.sissa.it/IoPP_SISSA2.html). Since the latter is an actual cost figure and comes from insiders who definitely should know about this issue, I think the 200 000 is a useful indicator. (in this respect, $235,000 is more than $200,000). it doesnt take a lawyer ;-) to come up with the idea to compose a questionnaire about the cost structure and use the doaj.org listing as a basis to make a quick overview of actual costs of journals throughout various disciplines. I guess everyone in here will agree that duplification of work is rather annoying and often a waste of time; so, is someone else already working on such a questionnaire/study? (ive been going through the 2003 postings quite thoroughly, but didnt find a posting in that respect). If so, when can we expect results? are there any preliminary results that can be shared at this stage (i'm writing a paper on a similar topic and would like to include cost figures)? if no one else is currently working on the implementation of such a study i could write a draft and post it for improvements. in the (very?!) long run, perhaps such a benchmark study could be a useful basis for making a monetary offer to publishers to change their business models. abracos, Markus --- Prior Threads on This Topic: Savings from Converting to On-Line-Only: 30%- or 70%+ ? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0002.html 2.0K vs. 0.2K http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0228.html Online Self-Archiving: Distinguishing the Optimal from the Optional http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0248.html Separating Quality-Control Service-Providing from Document-Providing http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0466.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 (Implementing Peer Review) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html The True Cost of the Essentials http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1973.html Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review - NOT!) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1966.html Journal expenses and publication costs http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2589 Re: Scientific publishing is not just about administering peer-review http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3069.html
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
It may not have been clear that I do in fact agree with Steve. I certainly meant my remark about perceived fairness to apply only to the current publishing environment. Even a partial success for open access should change things for the better--in spite of any transitional complications. On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Steve Hitchcock wrote: I'm not sure what 'fair' means, but David seems to be somewhat defeatist here. There has been a switch in thinking away from the role of the serials crisis in motivating open access and instead focussing on author-centric motivations like impact and assessment. But for those who are concerned about the serials crisis an interesting study would be a McCabe-like analysis of the following: IF the entire peer reviewed literature was openly accessible from institutional archives, what would be the effect on journal prices and (arguable) publisher monopolies? It would not be the same answer as McCabe gives now. Nor would it be the same if 'open access journals' were to be substituted for 'institutional archives' in the scenario, for although the journal prices would reduce to zero, fears have begun to surface elsewhere about new publisher monopolies that would result. I don't want to speculate on journal prices, but my guess is that some of the market drivers that McCabe reveals would be affected and price pressure could be reversed, most obviously by increased competition. The result might have an interesting effect on decision-makers in institutions, if not on authors. Steve Hitchcock IAM 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 At 16:42 28/07/03 -0400, David Goodman wrote: Several years of discussion on this list and elsewhere have convinced me that there is no fair pricing scheme for an expensive database or group of journals. I admire the ingenuity of all those who have tried, but, as Fred says, efforts at increasing the perceived fairness tend to get complicated. And I think we all agree that the transition to a free access system will have complications, and will not be instantaneous. On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Fred Spilhaus wrote: That is one way but it requires a completely different economic model. It is not clear to me how to get from here to there in one swoop even if one wanted to. The complexities of serving authors in many different circumstances and under a variety of different national and institututional constraints is daunting. While minimizing cost to the reader may increase use, which is in the authors interest and the best interests of science it has to be done with all of the other constraints in mind such as having somewhere of quality to publish in future. I expect you will see some hybids that free the material that is fully paid up front. But in our case that could further complicate what may be the most complex pricing scheme that is openly available so that you know what you are paying and can decide if you are being treated fairly in pricing. Its a trde off: skip the price negotiation and go staight to the license or spend your timne hassling over price so the license seems small. On the one side you pay marketing people and on the other lawyers. I would like to minimize both. FRED Dr. David Goodman Princeton University and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU dgood...@princeton.edu Dr. David Goodman Princeton University Library and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
I'm not sure what 'fair' means, but David seems to be somewhat defeatist here. There has been a switch in thinking away from the role of the serials crisis in motivating open access and instead focussing on author-centric motivations like impact and assessment. But for those who are concerned about the serials crisis an interesting study would be a McCabe-like analysis of the following: IF the entire peer reviewed literature was openly accessible from institutional archives, what would be the effect on journal prices and (arguable) publisher monopolies? It would not be the same answer as McCabe gives now. Nor would it be the same if 'open access journals' were to be substituted for 'institutional archives' in the scenario, for although the journal prices would reduce to zero, fears have begun to surface elsewhere about new publisher monopolies that would result. I don't want to speculate on journal prices, but my guess is that some of the market drivers that McCabe reveals would be affected and price pressure could be reversed, most obviously by increased competition. The result might have an interesting effect on decision-makers in institutions, if not on authors. Steve Hitchcock IAM 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 At 16:42 28/07/03 -0400, David Goodman wrote: Several years of discussion on this list and elsewhere have convinced me that there is no fair pricing scheme for an expensive database or group of journals. I admire the ingenuity of all those who have tried, but, as Fred says, efforts at increasing the perceived fairness tend to get complicated. And I think we all agree that the transition to a free access system will have complications, and will not be instantaneous. On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Fred Spilhaus wrote: That is one way but it requires a completely different economic model. It is not clear to me how to get from here to there in one swoop even if one wanted to. The complexities of serving authors in many different circumstances and under a variety of different national and institututional constraints is daunting. While minimizing cost to the reader may increase use, which is in the authors interest and the best interests of science it has to be done with all of the other constraints in mind such as having somewhere of quality to publish in future. I expect you will see some hybids that free the material that is fully paid up front. But in our case that could further complicate what may be the most complex pricing scheme that is openly available so that you know what you are paying and can decide if you are being treated fairly in pricing. Its a trde off: skip the price negotiation and go staight to the license or spend your timne hassling over price so the license seems small. On the one side you pay marketing people and on the other lawyers. I would like to minimize both. FRED Dr. David Goodman Princeton University and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Over the short run the general cost of providing service from electronic resources is about the same as paper. What is saved on check-in, binding, and so so on, is spent on contract administration, computer services, and so on. In the long run, it is correct that there is a savings to be expected in the net size of science library buildings. Already I have observed several academic departments reclaim library space for other needs, This is one of the reasons I am aware of the possibility academic administrators might do likewise with acquisition funds. (my personal view, as always) On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Andrew Odlyzko wrote: On Tue Jul 22, David Goodman wrote: For administrators in gleeful expectation of the library windfall, I note that the percent of the total US research university library budget devoted to serials costs in 2002 was only 26%. http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/graphs/2002/2002t4.html This covers print journals, electronic journals, databases, newspapers, etc. ; it includes all fields of study. If 3/4 of it were science journals, that comes to less than 20% of the total library expenditure. But the 26% figure for serials costs is just for external purchases. To that has to be added the cost of checking the journals in, shelving them, binding, etc., as well as the space, cleaning, and related costs. If you get away from paper, you eliminate that as well. (Although some of it will be a displacement, since printing on scholars' desktop printers will increase.) Andrew Odlyzko Dr. David Goodman Princeton University and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials
Dear Steven, I have been reading the discussion of the True Cost of the Essentials; it seems to me the discussion is quibbling over pennies when there are dollars lying around. Basicly the entire cost of the journals is tiny compared with the efficiencies gained by having full electronic access to the literature in a discipline. In astronomy, where essentially every professional astronomer has had total electronic access to the entire journal literature for five or six years, the value of that access, in terms of increased efficiencies of research, is about twenty times the total production cost of the core journals(*). Given this huge difference issues concerning methods to reduce the production cost of the journals, or to redistribute these costs, seem of secondary importance. It is likely true that improving the publication process will be of far greater benefit to the progress of research than any restructuring of the financial arrangements so that those who currently can't or won't afford access to the literature can get it. A good example of the type of improvement possible is the de facto collaboration between the physics journals and the ArXiv. While this has the pleasant side benefit that papers can be read without charge, the principal benefit of this collaboration is that the rate of information diffusion between active researchers is substantially increased(**). The rate of discovery must go up as a result. The value to society of a 1% increase in the rate of discovery (which would mean that we would know twice as much new stuff after 70 years as otherwise) is so great as to be uncalculable. Best wishes, Michael (*) The value of increased efficiency for the electronic astronomy library is calculated in section 9 of my recent paper for JASIST (http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasis-abstract.html). The cost of the core journals comes from assuming the cost of the 6,000 journal articles is twice the cost of the 3,000 published by the Astrophysical Journal and the Astronomical Journal (figures from the AAS annual budget report). (**) See Tim Brody's plot at http://citebase.eprints.org/analysis/citation_latency.png
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials
Michael Kurtz is an astrophysicist and author of: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/jasis-abstract.html Astrophysics is unusual in 3 respects: (1) It has a small, closed, self-contained journal literature, with cross-citing restricted to those core journals. (2) Virtually all astrophysicists are at institutions that can afford the toll-access to all of those core journals. (3) Hence astrophysicists have already enjoyed the full benefits of free online access for many years now. Michael Kurtz wrote: I have been reading the discussion of the True Cost of the Essentials; it seems to me the discussion is quibbling over pennies when there are dollars lying around. Unfortunately, unlike astrophysics, most other disciplines do *not* have a closed, self-contained journal literature to all of which their institutions can afford the toll-access. There are 20,000 peer-reviewed journals across all disciplines worldwide, and no institution can afford toll-access to more than a shrinking fraction of them. That is why there is a library serials crisis, and it also why no discipline other than astrophysics is yet enjoying the full benefits of free online access. http://www.arl.org/stats/index.html Basicly the entire cost of the journals is tiny compared with the efficiencies gained by having full electronic access to the literature in a discipline. In astronomy, where essentially every professional astronomer has had total electronic access to the entire journal literature for five or six years, the value of that access, in terms of increased efficiencies of research, is about twenty times the total production cost of the core journals(*). That is no doubt true. But the fact is that in other disciplines most articles are not accessible to most of their would-be users because toll-access is nowhere near being universally affordable. Given this huge difference issues concerning methods to reduce the production cost of the journals, or to redistribute these costs, seem of secondary importance. It's hard to see why you would think this was so, since the fact is that currently most of it is simply unaffordable -- to *any* institution, let alone most or all institutions. But note that I am not talking about cost-cutting either: Let us call those researchers who are at institutions that can access some or all of their relevant journal literature the Haves and let's call those researchers who cannot the Have-Nots. (Note that, apart from astrophysics, every other discipline not only has a majority of Have-Nots, but that even the Haves are Have-Nots for those of the journals in their field for which their institutions cannot afford the access-tolls. Well, self-archiving is a solution for the Have-Nots: Let the Haves continue to access what they can access via their institutional toll-access but let every author (except astrophysicists!) self-archive their own journal papers too, in order to supplement toll-access with open-access for all their would-be users among the Have-Nots. This does not entail any cost-cutting or restructuring by journals (though it might eventual lead to it). It merely gives every researcher, in every field, the benefits that astrophysicists already enjoy today. It is likely true that improving the publication process will be of far greater benefit to the progress of research than any restructuring of the financial arrangements so that those who currently can't or won't afford access to the literature can get it. I don't know what you mean by improving the publication process (if you don't mean restructuring and cost-cutting). At the moment, universal access, as in astrophysics, is simply not affordable to other disciplines. Their literature is too big and diverse, and their researchers are not all at rich universities. Hence it is not the publication process that needs improvement (what improvement?) but the *access to its product*: the refereed journal articles that currently sit unaffordably behind access-denying toll-barriers for the Have-Nots. The remedy is for the *authors* of all those inaccessible articles (i.e., all articles other than those in astrophysics) to maximize their uptake, usage and impact, by making them openly accessible to the Have-Nots -- by self-archiving them. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ A good example of the type of improvement possible is the de facto collaboration between the physics journals and the ArXiv. While this has the pleasant side benefit that papers can be read without charge, the principal benefit of this collaboration is that the rate of information diffusion between active researchers is substantially increased(**). The rate of discovery must go up as a result. The value to society of a 1% increase in the rate of discovery (which would mean that we would know twice as much new stuff after 70 years as otherwise) is so great as to be uncalculable. All true, but you are speaking here about
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Tom, I think we all should be grateful for your own understanding, and I most sincerely hope personally that you are right about your colleagues. Dr. David Goodman Princeton University Library and Palmer School of Library Information Science, Long Island University dgood...@princeton.edu - Original Message - From: Tom Cochrane t.cochr...@qut.edu.au List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 6:02 pm Subject: Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) At 02:53 PM 22/07/2003 -0400, David Goodman wrote: The reason why librarians must be concerned about this, is the unfortunate probability that the money saved from library acquisitions will not be used to finance the publication system, but for general university administration. This is not an improvement over the present, where a considerable part of the expense is used for general administrative purposes by the publishers. This explains why many libraries are willing to pay subscriptions to alternative publishers: the basic rule of library budgeting is that if you do not spend all the money, you will lose it forever. I don't think you should underestimate the capacity of university Presidents and senior administrators to understand this problem. They would be quite capable of understanding any argument about a redirection or repurposing of some of it, especially if it is a widely developing trend. Equally, if the dollars in our library budget committed to the give away literature could be released for greater acquisition of the non give away, most would be very pleased at this redeployment. So would the publishers of the non give away material. So would authors who have dependence in some measure on royalty income. Tom TOM COCHRANE Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Technology, Information and Learning Support) Queensland University of Technology GPO Box 2434 BrisbaneQld4001 Australia
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
[This is an exchange with someone at University-X who has *not* agreed to having his words posted, so I have abridged, paraphrased and completely camouflaged his points and his institution.] PARAPHRASE: Open Access business models should be tried, and may one day prevail. I agree, but I believe open access through self-archiving can and will precede open access publishing and its accompanying change in business model. PARAPHRASE: PLoS seems to have thought it through. I'm not sure PLoS thinking (which is in terms of governmental subsidies and/or institutional licenses) will scale up to all or even most of refereed research (20,000 journals, 2,000,000 articles annually). I believe open access through self-archiving must come first, and only then, and only *if and when* journal toll-revenues should ever shrink (and corresponding institutional toll-savings grow) to the point where peer review needs to be paid for in another way, only *then* will there be a transition from toll-access to open-access publishing. But by then the important part (universal open access) will already have come to pass. PARAPHRASE: BMC may be underpricing to gain more sponsors. I actually think BMC's $500 is closer to the (asymptotic) mark than PLoS's $1500. Because PLoS is explicitly targetting the very highest quality papers http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2530.html there's still a lot of excess fat on the PLoS bone. Hence here too, I believe it will be self-archiving -- offloading all access-provision and archiving onto the distributed institutional archives -- that will eventually cut down to the only essential cost that still needs to be covered in online-era peer-reviewed publishing (namely, the cost of providing the peer review service itself). PARAPHRASE: Perhaps in a few decades... Not if I can help it -- no more decades of needless delay, I mean)! I am sure that open access is already universally reachable immediately, and is in fact well overdue! It may be decades before the transition to open access publishing, but I hope it will only be a few more years at most before we have universal open access to the entire refereed corpus (through institutional self-archiving). PARAPHRASE: Your view that self-archiving needs to come first sounds plausible, but $1500 seems closer to the pricing target than $500. And the revenue per article is much lower than $500 when access is unlimited. The relevant figure is of course not the *revenue* per article (which is the old, reader-end way of thinking, based on the toll-access model) but the (model-neutral) *cost* per article. And to determine the size of that, we need to specify the price *for-what* per article? Every product and service being provided now (peer review and copy-editing, markup, paper version and its distribution and marketing, online version and its storage, distribution and marketing, online enhancements, etc.)? or just an essential subset of it?. I am betting that of all of these paper-era products and services, the only *essential* online-era service will turn out to be peer review itself (and possibly some editing) -- the rest being either jettisoned or offloaded onto the distributed network of institutional archives, self-archiving their own research output, both pre- and post-peer review. And the price of peer review alone is far closer to $500 per article. But you have touched on some very important points. Let me try to put them together into what I believe is a coherent picture of what is actually going on today: There is a straightforward *incoherence* in reckoning per-outgoing-article peer-review service charges on a fixed annual institutional-rate basis, on the same model as institutional access-tolls (licenses). Fixed annual institutional rates are appropriate for access-tolls on annual *incoming* articles, as they are now, but not for a stable open-access model, which must be based strictly on each individual *outgoing* article submitted to a particular journal for peer review. The reasons for this are simple, and several: (a) Journals are independent, individual entities, selected by (and competing for) submitting authors and quality. Institutions cannot make a priori collective contracts with individual journals, committing themselves (on behalf of their authors?) to any annual quota of submissions (let alone acceptances), the way they can with journals that they subscribe to or license (reader-end). (b) The BMC-like institutional membership deals are hence an artifact of the fact that there exist virtually no open-access publishers apart from BMC right now, so BMC's cost-recovery model can be put forward in what looks like a universal way -- but it would immediately stop making sense if many other publishers (including competing biomedical publishers) were to approach universities with the same kinds of membership offer! The BMC solution does not scale
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
I think this interesting exchange between Stevan and a member of an unnamed university illustrates the enormous misunderstanding of the BMC model that exists among both academics and academic librarians, which, if BMC (and come to that PLoS) are not careful will lead to their early and unjustified demise. The same could be said of the other exchange a day or two ago between Stevan and an unnamed learned society editor. Stevan's exposition of the situation is accurate and clear, but unfortunately most of the confused won't read it. i am an admirer of Jan Velterop and his teacm at BMC, but with hindsight, I think it was a mistake for them to introduce their institutional membership scheme. It has caused confusion. Many universities seem to have charged this fee to the library budget rather than to the budgets of academic departments, and this has muddied the water and led to some librarians believing that they are being charged twice over for the same material (which of course they are not). Some say that BMC is no different from other commercial publishers - they think of the BMC institutional membership fee as just another journal subscription (which it is not). The clear, simple, $500 per article fee payable by each author (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is obviously *not* a library expense. It is also about the right sum, in my view based on my 2002 research into the costs of peer review. There is a head of steam building up against the author pays model now, partly due to these confusions, and partly due to the long-term dislike of authors for page charges. Many authors do not distinguish between charges levied by journals that also charge subscriptions, and charges levied by open- access journals. This may lead to the early death of the new model and the continuation of toll-access and the journals crisis for libraries. Stevan may not mind about that, but his preferred model of institutional open-access repositories depends on someone else doing the refereeing. Fytton Rowland. Stevan Harnad wrote: (snip) In short, the BMC open-access publication model has not been thought through by the research and library community *at all*, whereas BMC itself has only thought it through (understandably) from its own bottom-line standpoint (and improvising as they went along, helped along by the rising tide of pro-open-access sentiment in the research community). (snip) PARAPHRASE: BMC charges my University -- University X -- about $500 x 10 = $5000 [actual figures altered so as not to identify any institution, but ballpark is the same] for its yearly membership. (Our faculty were not in favor of the deal.) About 20 University-X researchers are already publishing in BMC journals annually so far [actual figures altered, but ballpark is the same]. The faculty disinclination toward the BMC deal is quite understandable (though in itself it is certainly no evidence that it's not a good idea)! From your own figures, this amounts to a publication subsidy to about 20 University-X (biomedical) researchers per year right now, while everything else stays the same: All of University-X's other incoming journal-tolls still have to be paid. Universal open-access by this route is nowhere in sight. (snip) .at a time when these membership-fees must all be paid *in addition to* toll-access costs (with no sense of when and whether those toll-costs will diminish). (snip) PARAPHRASE: With 20 articles instead of 10, that already makes it $250 per article instead of $500. Any more and BMC will have to raise its rates, causing financial hardships for member universities. Don't worry for BMC! If they manage, they manage. If they later raise rates and institutions balk, cross that bridge when you come to it. Worry now about the *rest* of University-X's research output, over and above the 20 articles in question! (snip) PARAPHRASE: I hear that each article in the 95 BMC journals averages one per month. I think that's a considerable underestimate. I'm sure that BMC open-access articles do not get, on average, more or less downloads and citations than other comparable-quality open-access articles (whether self-archived or published in open-access journals) -- which is, on average, a lot more downloads and citations than comparable-quality toll-access articles get (4.5 times as many, according to Laurence 2001 http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html ) In other words, the impact-enhancing benefits of open access are not in dispute (whereas the instrinsic quality-level of BMC articles is a separate matter, on which I have no views, or information).
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
As much of this exchange is about BioMed Central, here's some input from BMC (interleaved): -Original Message- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk] Sent: 22 July 2003 02:50 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) [This is an exchange with someone at University-X who has *not* agreed to having his words posted, so I have abridged, paraphrased and completely camouflaged his points and his institution.] PARAPHRASE: Open Access business models should be tried, and may one day prevail. I agree, but I believe open access through self-archiving can and will precede open access publishing and its accompanying change in business model. BioMed Central has no preference in this regard. Open access through self-archiving is bound to stimulate open access publishing at source. The very business model of BioMed Central supports self-archiving, or any other kind of archiving or re-use of the articles published. All research articles published in BioMed Central journals are truly Open Access. PARAPHRASE: PLoS seems to have thought it through. [snip] PARAPHRASE: BMC may be underpricing to gain more sponsors. A reasonably large proportion of BioMed Central's cost structure is fixed. This means that the true cost per article to BioMed Central is dependent on the scale it is able to reach. Our calculations show that on the basis of what we believe is an achievable scale (ambitious, but not overly so), something in the order of $500 per article is feasible. Trends so far support the assumptions in regard to achievable scale. We are not there yet, however, but new journals (all of BMC's journals are new) have rarely in history achieved a break-even point in 18 months (this is how long -- or rather, short -- we have been operating with article processing charges). [snip] PARAPHRASE: Perhaps in a few decades... Definitely in a few decades, but most probably already within a few years will the open access model be the prevailing one, at least in the biomedical disciplines. Only a few years ago, the mood was generally dismissive of even the desirability of open access. Now, open access, in whatever form, is widely seen as necessary and the future of scholarly communication, although there are still some practical difficulties to overcome. Major publishers are already making reference to going over to open access models when necessary and even contingency plans are being drawn up, according to usually well-informed sources. The likelihood is that initially the authors will be given the choice: pay and your article will be open access, or don't pay and it will stay behind access barriers. The American Physiological Society has recently announced the implementation of just such a choice for their journal Physiological Genomics (www.physiolgenomics.org) and others are seriously discussing offering the same in the very near future. [snip] PARAPHRASE: Your view that self-archiving needs to come first sounds plausible, but $1500 seems closer to the pricing target than $500. And the revenue per article is much lower than $500 when access is unlimited. I agree with Stevan's response below. Revenue per article for open access journals is whatever the processing charges per article are. They relate to cost. Whether or not the article is accessed more or less is of no relevance other than that more is good for the reputation of the open access journal in question and therefore its ability to attract submissions. Increased use, citation, of an article increases its value (and the same is true, grosso modo, of journals), but not its cost. The relevant figure is of course not the *revenue* per article (which is the old, reader-end view, based on the toll-access model) but the (model-neutral) *cost* per article. And to determine the size of that, we need to specify the price *for-what* per article? Every product and service being provided now (peer review and copy-editing, markup, paper version and its distribution and marketing, online version and its storage, distribution and marketing, online enhancements, etc.)? or just an essential subset of it?. [snip] PARAPHRASE: BMC charges my University -- University X -- about $500 x 10 = $5000 [actual figures altered so as not to identify any institution, but ballpark is the same] for its yearly membership. (Our faculty were not in favor of the deal.) About 20 University-X researchers are already publishing in BMC journals annually so far [actual figures altered, but ballpark is the same]. The basis of BioMed Central's business model is the Article Processing Charge. This is sometimes interpreted as an 'Autor's Charge', but shouldn't be. Authors should no more pay for article processing charges as readers do for subscriptions (they rarely do, and certainly not for specialist research journals). The ideal
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Fytton Rowland wrote: There is a head of steam building up against the author pays model now, partly due to these confusions, and partly due to the long-term dislike of authors for page charges. Many authors do not distinguish between charges levied by journals that also charge subscriptions, and charges levied by open-access journals. This may lead to the early death of the new model and the continuation of toll-access and the journals crisis for libraries. Stevan may not mind about that, but his preferred model of institutional open-access repositories depends on someone else doing the refereeing. For authors who don't personally subscribe to a given journal, but read it in the library, there *is* no difference between charges levied by journals that also charge subscriptions, and charges levied by open-access journals (expect that the page charge is often *higher* than the subscription would have been). Page charges like those levied by PLoS and BMC will never be accepted in psychoolgy, which is now among the largest of all academic disciplines (Amer. Psych. Assoc. -- whch is only the largets of several major psych. societies -- has some 150,000 members/affiliates and publishes nearly 50 journals). Stevan disagrees with me about this -- never say never, he says. I forwarded an intersting piece about PLoS to an APA divisonal listserv the other day and the *only* response was (approximately): $1500, are they crazy?! I told them about institutional membership and their ire abated... somewhat. I agree with you that the institutional membership should not be charged to the library budget (or that the library budget should be increased to account for the new service they are providing), but institutional membership is, IMHO, the way to go. Otherwise, the vast majority of authors (who don't really care about this issue one way or another) will simply continue to send their work to traditional journals that charge them nothing to publish and whose issues they can pick off the library shelves (apparently) for free. Regards, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 e-mail: chri...@yorku.ca phone: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164 fax:416-736-5814 http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Jan Velterop wrote: sh open access through self-archiving can and will sh precede open access publishing and its accompanying sh change in business model. BioMed Central has no preference in this regard. Open access through self-archiving is bound to stimulate open access publishing at source. The very business model of BioMed Central supports self-archiving, or any other kind of archiving or re-use of the articles published. All research articles published in BioMed Central journals are truly Open Access. So are all toll-access journal-articles that are self-archived! And that's the point: Open-access publishing is currently the 5% solution and self-archiving can provide immediate open access to the other 95%, rather than just waiting! Definitely in a few decades, but most probably already within a few years the open access model will be the prevailing one But, through self-archiving, universal open access can already prevail tomorrow: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ The likelihood is that initially the authors will be given the choice: pay and your article will be open access, or don't pay and it will stay behind access barriers. But that is *not* the only choice, nor the best or fastest one! Immediate, universal self-archiving is: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/.html http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/ Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01 02 03): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Christopher D. Green wrote: Page charges like those levied by PLoS and BMC will never be accepted in psychology, which is now among the largest of all academic disciplines (Amer. Psych. Assoc. -- ...the largest of several major psych. societies -- has some 150,000 members/affiliates and publishes nearly 50 journals). Stevan disagrees with me about this -- never say never, he says. Never say never. In the meanwhile, if you can't find a suitable open-access journal to publish in (or don't want to have to pay any publishing charges), continue to publish in the journal of your choice -- and self-archive! http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt institutional membership is, IMHO, the way to go. Otherwise, the vast majority of authors (who don't really care about this issue one way or another) will simply continue to send their work to traditional journals that charge them nothing to publish and whose issues they can pick off the library shelves (apparently) for free. Fine. But don't keep losing daily research impact while waiting for the day when all journals become open-access journals, funded by institutional charges: Make your articles openly accessible by self-archiving them right now. And if you want to know why you need to care about whether or not your work is open-access, see these: Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Ariadne-RAE.htm Harnad, S. (2003) Maximising Research Impact Through Self-Archiving. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/che.htm Harnad, S. (2003) Self-Archive Unto Others as Ye Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You. The Australian Higher Education Supplement. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html Harnad, S. (2003) Measuring and Maximising UK Research Impact. Times Higher Education Supplement. Friday, June 6 2003. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/thes.html Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01 02 03): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Stevan Harnad wrote: Never say never. In the meanwhile, if you can't find a suitable open-access journal to publish in (or don't want to have to pay any publishing charges), continue to publish in the journal of your choice -- and self-archive! Of course. Take a look at my article in your own CogPrints archive! Best, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 e-mail: chri...@yorku.ca phone: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164 fax:416-736-5814 http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Certainly $500 covers the cost of peer review -- and if that is the only essential, which we'd all agree is the minimum necessary for quality control, then of course the article can be processed for that. Once we add in the costs for copyediting, XML tagging for compliance with (often painfully) specific DTDs, composition (whether desktop or typesetting), graphics quality control, dynamic cross-linking to references, etc., the price understandably goes up. When questioned about which of these researchers would be willing to give up, they consistently suggest that are all important. And so the cost for producing high-quality articles must cover these. The differences in cost-per-article from journal to journal will of course very much depend on how many of these elements are included in the production process and how much functionality you include in the final online product. As you can tell from the PLoS pricing structure, we've decided that for us to produce the highest quality articles possible, all of these (and other elements not listed above) are, in fact, essential. Others may, of course, come to a different decision and their costs will undoubtedly reflect that. Best regards, Rebecca Kennison Public Library of Science -Original Message- From: Fytton Rowland [mailto:j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk] Sent: Monday, July 21, 2003 7:45 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) I think this interesting exchange between Stevan and a member of an unnamed university illustrates the enormous misunderstanding of the BMC model that exists among both academics and academic librarians, which, if BMC (and come to that PLoS) are not careful will lead to their early and unjustified demise. The same could be said of the other exchange a day or two ago between Stevan and an unnamed learned society editor. Stevan's exposition of the situation is accurate and clear, but unfortunately most of the confused won't read it. i am an admirer of Jan Velterop and his teacm at BMC, but with hindsight, I think it was a mistake for them to introduce their institutional membership scheme. It has caused confusion. Many universities seem to have charged this fee to the library budget rather than to the budgets of academic departments, and this has muddied the water and led to some librarians believing that they are being charged twice over for the same material (which of course they are not). Some say that BMC is no different from other commercial publishers - they think of the BMC institutional membership fee as just another journal subscription (which it is not). The clear, simple, $500 per article fee payable by each author (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is obviously *not* a library expense. It is also about the right sum, in my view based on my 2002 research into the costs of peer review. There is a head of steam building up against the author pays model now, partly due to these confusions, and partly due to the long-term dislike of authors for page charges. Many authors do not distinguish between charges levied by journals that also charge subscriptions, and charges levied by open- access journals. This may lead to the early death of the new model and the continuation of toll-access and the journals crisis for libraries. Stevan may not mind about that, but his preferred model of institutional open-access repositories depends on someone else doing the refereeing. Fytton Rowland. Stevan Harnad wrote: (snip) In short, the BMC open-access publication model has not been thought through by the research and library community *at all*, whereas BMC itself has only thought it through (understandably) from its own bottom-line standpoint (and improvising as they went along, helped along by the rising tide of pro-open-access sentiment in the research community). (snip) PARAPHRASE: BMC charges my University -- University X -- about $500 x 10 = $5000 [actual figures altered so as not to identify any institution, but ballpark is the same] for its yearly membership. (Our faculty were not in favor of the deal.) About 20 University-X researchers are already publishing in BMC journals annually so far [actual figures altered, but ballpark is the same]. The faculty disinclination toward the BMC deal is quite understandable (though in itself it is certainly no evidence that it's not a good idea)! From your own figures, this amounts to a publication subsidy to about 20 University-X (biomedical) researchers per year right now, while everything else stays the same: All of University-X's other incoming journal-tolls still have to be paid. Universal open-access by this route is nowhere in sight. (snip) .at a time when these membership-fees must all be paid *in addition to* toll-access costs (with no sense of when and whether those toll-costs will diminish). (snip) PARAPHRASE: With 20 articles instead
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
For administrators in gleeful expectation of the library windfall, I note that the percent of the total US research university library budget devoted to serials costs in 2002 was only 26%. http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/graphs/2002/2002t4.html This covers print journals, electronic journals, databases, newspapers, etc. ; it includes all fields of study. If 3/4 of it were science journals, that comes to less than 20% of the total library expenditure. And yet the library serials budget *is* relevant, for, if open-access should prevail, it is the library that will enjoy the annual windfall savings on its erstwhile serials toll expenditures For by then the institutional library windfall savings will be more than enough to pay the peer-review costs for all institutional research output several times over. If half the science research journals were converted immediately, which is extremely optimistic, it would provide a potential source of $1.8 million for the typical university. If half the 2000 or so annual papers from a university were so published, that's $1,800 per paper for all costs. The total costs will inevitably equal the money spent--the only way to make the system more affordable is to reduce the costs, not merely redistribute them. The reason why librarians must be concerned about this, is the unfortunate probability that the money saved from library acquisitions will not be used to finance the publication system, but for general university administration. This is not an improvement over the present, where a considerable part of the expense is used for general administrative purposes by the publishers. This explains why many libraries are willing to pay subscriptions to alternative publishers: the basic rule of library budgeting is that if you do not spend all the money, you will lose it forever. -- Dr. David Goodman Princeton University Library and Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University e-mail: dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Fytton Rowland wrote [in part, on the Subject: Re: Nature's vs. Science's Embargo Policy]: [fr] A review study that I undertook last year suggests that [fr] the true figure is closer to the $500 than the $1500, [fr] assuming a rejection rate of 50%. If rejection rates [fr] are very high, as in Manfredi la Manna's example, then [fr] the cost per *published* paper is higher. However, one [fr] has to ask whether, in a paperless system, rejection [fr] rates need to be so high! Fytton, are the results of your review study openly accessible? If so, where? About rejection rates: Zukerman and Merton (1971) reported substantial variation, with rejection rates of 20-40% in the physical sciences, and 70-90 percent in the social sciences and humanities: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1107.html. A much more recent study by ALPSP yielded results that appear to be consistent with the earlier data: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1127.html. I'd predict that, in a paperless system, rejection rates will continue to vary across disciplies. If this prediction is correct, then costs per published paper will also vary across disciplines. Jim Till University of Toronto
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
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: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, Andrew Odlyzko wrote [in part]: [ao] The recent postings to this list about rejection [ao] rates and costs of peer review point out yet [ao] another way that costs can be lowered: Elimination [ao] of the wasteful duplication in the peer review system. Publishers of several journals can achieve economies of scale by using the same staff to oversee multiple journals. Economies of scale for the peer reviewers would require centralized peer review for a particular field or discipline. This approach has been tested in Canada by the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Initiative (CBCRI): http://www.breast.cancer.ca/. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the National Cancer Institute of Canada (NCIC), the Canadian Cancer Society, Health Canada, and the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Foundation (CBCF), all use the same peer review system (that of the NCIC) for the evaluation of research proposals submitted directly to the CBCRI. However, this hasn't really achieved much economy of scale, because some of these agencies (NCIC, CIHR, CBCF) also, for what I think are good reasons, also peer-review those breast-cancer applications that are sent directly to them, rather than to the CBCRI. The individual research teams make the decision (and some choose, again for what I think are good reasons) to submit essentially the same application to more than one of these various agencies. Different peer-review committees judge quality according to somewhat different criteria, and involve committee members who may be true peers in relation to one aspect of as research field or discipline, but not in relation to another. The mix of expertise matters. So, many research teams prefer to have an opportunity to take more than one kick at the can. If peer-review is regarded as a process of weighted randomization, then, from the point of view of an individual research team, the probability of successfully obtaining support is increased if multiple applications are submitted. The situation isn't very different for peer-review of research reports, except that the number of peers involved in the review process is usually much smaller (e.g. 2 or 3 people, instead of about 10). The smaller the number of reviewers, the greater the variance in the score or rating of perceived quality. Jim Till University of Toronto
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
A comparison should include all disciplines, as there are journals even more expensive than those in economics. Here are a few preliminary numbers, using publically available data from WebofScience and the ARL statistics. (Note that because of a variety of factors these are very rough approximations). In particular, Only journals covered by Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index are included, as the coverage of Humanities Citation Index is too spotty-- and those journals much less expensive. For 2001, the latest year available. [University; number of peer-reviewed articles published; what it would cost at $1500 per article; the current serials budget (subscription/license)]: University articles publ. cost at $1500 serials budget Cornell 4848$7.3 million $5.6 million Dartmouth 1492$2.2 million $3.2 million Princeton 3132$4.7 million $4.7 million Yale4463$6.7 million $6.4 million Thus, it would seem that the costs of the new scheme for ARL institutions are about the same as the present (I am aware of the many factors to be considered in a more exact comparison). It is presumably the hope of those of us engaged in the various aspects of the movement for alternatives to conventional journals to reduce costs, not merely redistribute them. Thus it would seem that the proposal under discussion has either grossly overestimated the expense of its scheme, or is too expensive to be worth considering. The BioMedCentral price is $500 an article. If it proves to be possible to operate the scheme at such a price level, then it might well offer significant cost savings. Dr. David Goodman Princeton University Library and Palmer School of Library and Information Science dgood...@princeton.edu
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Hal Varian wrote: [Re: paying referees] Of course, it is not obvious that this sort of incentive would work well with non-economists. I vaguely recall seeing a study of the impact of referee payments on turnaround, but I couldn't find it in a casual search. This is what I have managed to locate: Does anyone know other references? It appears that the practise is peculiar mostly to economics, though other disciplines have considered it (though not adopted it) off and on across the years: Chang, JJ; Lai, CC. Is it worthwhile to pay referees? SOUTHERN ECONOMIC JOURNAL, 2001 OCT, V68 N2:457-463. ABSTRACT: There are puzzles in refereeing scholarly articles: Why are referees willing to review a paper without payment, and is it worthwhile to pay referees in order to raise the review rate? Two interesting results are found in this article. First, when reviewing services are driven by reciprocity, the equilibrium participation of referees may exhibit the so-called self-fulfilling feature. Second, the optimal payment may not be zero if the referee receives the benefit of reputation gained by refereeing an article. In particular, this article will show that those journals whose status quo review rate is lower tend to pay reviewers more while journals whose status quo review rate is higher do not find it worthwhile to pay referees enough. This result implies that, in order to raise its quality, a journal with a low review rate is more likely to adopt a strategy to increase pay and attract a critical mass of referees. Fialkoff, F. Paying to get a book reviewed ultimately compromises the review itself - Tainted reviews. LIBRARY JOURNAL, 2001 JUN 15, V126 N11:61. Engers, M; Gans, JS. Why referees are not paid (Enough) AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, 1998 DEC, V88 N5:1341-1349. Campanario JM. Peer review for journals as it stands today - Part 1 SCI COMMUN 19 (3): 181-211 MAR 1998 HAMERMESH DS FACTS AND MYTHS ABOUT REFEREEING JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES 8 (1): 153-163 WIN 1994 SPICER LJ PAY FOR REFEREES NOT A BRIBE SCIENTIST 1 (20): 10-10 SEP 7 1987 BRIERLY A PAID REFEREES ARE NOT THE ANSWER TO POOR REVIEWS SCIENTIST 1 (14): 10-10 JUN 1 1987 SPICER LJ SHOULD JOURNALS PAY REFEREES? SCIENTIST 1 (8): 13-13 MAR 9 1987 JOHNS B. PAY REVIEWERS. NEW SCIENTIST, 1995 MAY 20, V146 N1978:48-48. LOEHLE C. PAYING PEER REVIEWERS. ISI PRESS DIGEST, 1989 NOV 27, N48:4808+. SMITH TJ PAID REFEREES NATURE 308 (5958): 397-397 1984
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials
On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Mark Doyle wrote: Stevan keeps misrepresenting what I have said. I have not advocated waiting on self-archiving at all. Only that in parallel and as part of initiatives that create self-archiving or alternative journal solutions, attention should be paid to true electronic archiving. I don't think I said you advocated waiting; I drew attention to the fact that your words (like ALPSP's Sally Morris's words) were (perhaps understandably, ex officio) ambivalent. In particular, WHO should pay attention to true electronic archiving, and how? I mean it is fairly clear what the advocates of immediate open access are advocating: That researchers should self-archive, now. And it is fairly clear what they are up against: A huge panoply of prima facie worries that have already been holding back self-archiving for far too long: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation So I have to repeat: Who should be paying attention to true electronic archiving, and how? The authors of the annual 2 million articles in the annual 20,000 peer-reviewed journals? I rather think that what those authors should instead be doing is self-archiving. It is fine for publishers to be paying attention to true-archiving; it is fine for archivists to be paying attention to true-archiving. But what it is already long overdue for researchers to do is neither of these things, but to self-archive. It doesn't matter if this is relatively new - it is a cost today and anyone serious about taking advantage of electronic publishing to revolutionize scholarly communication knows that is important. Indeed. And I think that without the slightest doubt the most important thing for scholarly communication is open access, now. That is the revolution that is already well past its due date. Other revolutions, true revolutions, are welcome, and let those who want to usher them in pay attention to them, but the prime focus of the attention of the open-access movement should be on open access, now. Let's call a spade a spade. (Mark, please correct me if I'm wrong. I don't wish to misrepresent your position.) At the root of their (understandable) ambivalence about open access is Mark's (and APS's) worry that open access could compromise journals' cost-recovery before an alternative means of cost-recovery is in place. Whereas my (and BOAI's) worry is that open access is already long overdue. BOAI's every effort is dedicated to hastening open access. Do you think that encouraging researchers already long held back by needless worries to worry about true archiving is a way to hasten self-archiving (even if you are, as I do not doubt, an advocate of self-archiving)? Yes, true archiving is new, and it is not yet clear what its true costs will be, and what will eventually constitute essentials and what will constitutes deluxe options. But should any of this deter or redirect self-archiving efforts today? My only interest is in getting this cost recognized and true archiving implemented widely so that such costs can be externalized by publishers like the APS so that we can make a transition to open access. And my only interest is in getting self-archiving implemented widely right now, such as it is, for that would CONSTITUTE open access, rather than merely being a prelude to it. We have already been preluding for far too long. Note the relative emphasis, in the two interests, regarding cost-recovery and open-access. I don't say APS's (and other publishers') concerns are not understandable, but I hope you will also understand BOAI's and the research community's determination not to let such concerns continue to serve as any kind of a brake on immediate progress towards open access. The soapbox (and resources) of something like BOAI should be used to do something concrete beyond just creating free PDF or HTML archives which we all know how to do and we all know are cheap. Why? It would be immediate open access to the cheap PDF and HTML of all 2 million articles in all 20,000 peer-reviewed journals that would revolutionize scientific communication irreversibly; true archiving could meanwhile proceed on its own timetable. Having said that, I am sure that BOAI would be responsive to any substantive suggestions as to what might be usefully done IN PARALLEL with its central mission (which continues to be immediate cheap archiving), as long as it did not draw appreciable resources away from its central mission, or otherwise retard it in any way. The current economic model for peer review and archiving is very much still tied tightly to publisher restricted access to the article content. Undermining this without developing a true alternative to what the current system provides is naive and may lead to a true loss for the scholarly community. Unfortunately this is a reiteration of the difference in the main concerns between publishers and the BOAI that we have already noted: ensuring future cost-recovery versus
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials
Stevan, On Monday, April 1, 2002, at 08:50 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote: I don't think I said you advocated waiting; I drew attention to the fact that your words (like ALPSP's Sally Morris's words) were (perhaps understandably, ex officio) ambivalent. I am not speaking ex officio. And I am not being ambivalent. It is fine to pursue self-archiving. It isn't fine to wait to develop broader solutions that address archiving since they take a long time to develop and they will be needed at the end point of self-archiving. In particular, WHO should pay attention to true electronic archiving, and how? Everyone interested of course. Libraries, institutions, authors, publishers, government agencies, BOAI signatories, etc. They should be working together to create standards for marked up content, to build tools, and to build repositories that are markup aware. They should be working on new economic models for paying for this and peer review. This shouldn't wait on every author self-archiving. I mean it is fairly clear what the advocates of immediate open access are advocating: That researchers should self-archive, now. And it is fairly clear what they are up against: A huge panoply of prima facie worries that have already been holding back self-archiving for far too long: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation Fine, and neither should the false worry of slowing self-archiving hold up discussion of these other worries. They are worries because they are important for scholarly communication. Some like archiving and preservation are clearly essential and should be addressed as early as possible if you really want to transform the whole system. So I have to repeat: Who should be paying attention to true electronic archiving, and how? The authors of the annual 2 million articles in the annual 20,000 peer-reviewed journals? Authors are only one player. Right now publishers and libraries act as proxies for them in building digital libraries. New proxies (or new tools) will be needed. I rather think that what those authors should instead be doing is self-archiving. This is a false opposition (you seem to the master of this). It is not one or the other. Both are important and both can develop in parallel. Other revolutions, true revolutions, are welcome, and let those who want to usher them in pay attention to them, but the prime focus of the attention of the open-access movement should be on open access, now. Well, that is a tautology. My point is that open access is going to transform the system (is transforming the system). But those interested in open access should also pay attention to the eventual end point now. Let's call a spade a spade. (Mark, please correct me if I'm wrong. I don't wish to misrepresent your position.) At the root of their (understandable) ambivalence about open access is Mark's (and APS's) worry that open access could compromise journals' cost-recovery before an alternative means of cost-recovery is in place. Yes. Whereas my (and BOAI's) worry is that open access is already long overdue. BOAI's every effort is dedicated to hastening open access. Do you think that encouraging researchers already long held back by needless worries to worry about true archiving is a way to hasten self-archiving (even if you are, as I do not doubt, an advocate of self-archiving)? Again, false opposition. A long term archiving solution is needed. It isn't needed while open access is growing, but it will be needed as we approach the end point. Hence each should develop in parallel. Note the relative emphasis, in the two interests, regarding cost-recovery and open-access. I don't say APS's (and other publishers') concerns are not understandable, but I hope you will also understand BOAI's and the research community's determination not to let such concerns continue to serve as any kind of a brake on immediate progress towards open access. The APS is the research community (at least for our field). You seem to keep forgetting that. I cannot speak for BOAI, but I am fairly confident that if APS makes concrete recommendations as to ways in which BOAI's efforts towards hastening open access can be augmented in such a way as to converge with APS's own efforts towards open access (without slowing BOAI's momentum), BOAI will prove very accommodating. We shall see Anyway, I don't really have time for these long back and forths and we have become broken records. So I'll stop here. If anyone else in the open access world is interested in pursuing these issues with the APS, please let me know. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society do...@aps.org
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials
I have invited Mark Doyle of APS to specify concretely what parallel measures he is recommending that BOAI pursue in order to ensure true archiving in the long-term. BOAI's mandate is to hasten and facilitate open access for the entire peer-reviewed corpus, now, but if there are concrete parallel measures that do not retard the primary objective, I am sure that BOAI will be happy to take them on board. Unfortunately, Mark's (somewhat piqued) reply is far too vague to consititute a concrete recommendation: On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Mark Doyle wrote: It is fine to pursue self-archiving. It isn't fine to wait to develop broader solutions that address archiving since they take a long time to develop and they will be needed at the end point of self-archiving. So what should one do, in parallel, and without retarding the primary BOAI objective of immediate open access? Who should do what, and how? In particular, WHO should pay attention to true electronic archiving, and how? Everyone interested of course. Libraries, institutions, authors, publishers, government agencies, BOAI signatories, etc. They should be working together to create standards for marked up content, to build tools, and to build repositories that are markup aware. They should be working on new economic models for paying for this and peer review. I am afraid this does not help: Who should do what? What, exactly, should BOAI be advocating here, to whom? This shouldn't wait on every author self-archiving. And should every author self-archiving wait on this? And what is this? I mean it is fairly clear what the advocates of immediate open access are advocating: That researchers should self-archive, now. And it is fairly clear what they are up against: A huge panoply of prima facie worries that have already been holding back self-archiving for far too long: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#1.Preservation Fine, and neither should the false worry of slowing self-archiving hold up discussion of these other worries. They are worries because they are important for scholarly communication. Some like archiving and preservation are clearly essential and should be addressed as early as possible if you really want to transform the whole system. Mark has lost me. The many worthwhile desiderata he mentions are worth pursuing in their own right, by those who are immediately concerned with such things. They are only false worries (and have only been dismissed, vigorously, and with supporting reasons) by me as reasons for not self-archiving! As parallel projects they are more than welcome. I have to remind Mark that whereas in his field of physics, self-archiving has advanced relatively well (although its linear growth is still far too slow), this is not yet true in other fields. It is a real challenge to get other disciplines to self-archive, and the kinds of prima facie worries that I (among others) have been working hard to get out of researcher's heads are a real problem. These false worries not only slow self-archiving, they in many cases prevent it from getting off the ground at all. That is why -- across 10+ long years -- I have built up the file of FAQs for combatting Zeno's Paralysis (I worry about self-archiving because...). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#8 BOAI's explicit and direct goal is to hasten and facilitate open access. Long-term archiving, preservation, markup, reference-linking, etc. are all worthy and desirable goals too, and inasmuch as promoting them in parallel with BOAI's primary goal of open access is feasible without diverting resources from or slowing progress toward that primary goal, I am sure BOAI will be happy to oblige. You need only specify concretely exactly what it is that you would like to see BOAI do. (But don't just say that BOAI should stop telling people to stop worrying about things like markup, etc. as reasons for not self-archiving or submitting their work to an open-access journal now!) sh So I have to repeat: Who should be paying attention to true electronic sh archiving, and how? The authors of the annual 2 million articles sh in the annual 20,000 peer-reviewed journals? Authors are only one player. Right now publishers and libraries act as proxies for them in building digital libraries. New proxies (or new tools) will be needed. For BOAI Strategy 1 (self-archiving), authors are the main player. Publishers have no role in it (apart from not trying to discourage self-archiving) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/selfaq.htm#publishers-do and libraries have a role only inasmuch as they can facilitate self-archiving: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/selfaq.htm#libraries-do I don't know what you mean by proxies. I am guessing you mean that they do the markup for the authors, and I agree with you that the most likely, natural and optimal outcome will be that XML authoring tools are developed and markup is offloaded onto authors instead of proxies. But
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials
On Tuesday, April 2, 2002, at 01:08 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote: I have invited Mark Doyle of APS to specify concretely what parallel measures he is recommending that BOAI pursue in order to ensure true archiving in the long-term. BOAI's mandate is to hasten and facilitate open access for the entire peer-reviewed corpus, now, but if there are concrete parallel measures that do not retard the primary objective, I am sure that BOAI will be happy to take them on board. Unfortunately, Mark's (somewhat piqued) reply is far too vague to consititute a concrete recommendation: Suffice it to say that a concrete recommendation will be forthcoming (not in days, but months most likely). My main goal is to raise awareness at institutions and libraries that want to promote non-publisher archiving of research articles. They should consider carefully what kind of infrastructure should be built and understand what costs are involved so that can be covered in any new economic model that is to supplant the subscription model. Such understanding may be helpful for extant journals trying to undo the subscription model and for establishing alternative journals on a sound financial footing without losing some important benefits provided by the status quo. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society do...@aps.org
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review - NOT!)
P.S. I hadn't noticed that Stevan had once again changed the subject line of a thread biased to his own point of view. My thread has nothing to do with implementing peer review, but with implementing archiving in a non-publisher based manner. This kind of thing is what makes me a reluctant participant in the debates here. Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society do...@aps.org
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review - NOT!)
On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Mark Doyle wrote: P.S. I hadn't noticed that Stevan had once again changed the subject line of a thread biased to his own point of view. My thread has nothing to do with implementing peer review, but with implementing archiving in a non-publisher based manner. This kind of thing is what makes me a reluctant participant in the debates here. Mark's original posting had been on the thread Re: Excerpts from FOS Newsletter, which does not describe the discussion topic but is merely a thread for Excerpts from the FOS Newsletter. The Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) to which I redirected it has been covering this topic in this Forum now continuously for 2 years. Many postings have appeared on this thread that have different views about costs and essentials. The purpose of a thread-name is to allow later users of the archive to follow a continuous line of discussion. I'm quite happy to let Mark's NOT! stand henceforth, if it makes him feel less reluctant about participating. [I actually think this is a much-neglected but important function of a moderator. Not to bias the tenor of the thread-names, but to keep related items under a continuous header rather than letting them go off willy-nilly in directions that are not transparent from or even unrelated to the thread-name. I have silently changed many idiosyncratic or unrepresentative subject headings in this Forum from its inception in 1998 with an eye to making it more integrated and navigable to later users.] I'll reply to Mark's substantive points a little later. Stevan
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Fri, 29 Mar 2002, Mark Doyle wrote: sh I agree that it is becoming more and more apparent that off-loading sh the XML mark-up to authors is the optimal solution, and will no doubt sh happen, as user-friendly, windows-based XML markup tools are designed sh and adopted. But who is working on them? It is a serious question. I don't know. But I am sure of this: The number of people working on developing XML authoring tools and the intensity of their work will increase directly with the increase in self-archived content that is openly accessible, and especially if/when that starts to affect journal revenues. That is the direction of the causal arrow, not the reverse (i.e., sit and wait for XML tools before archiving!). sh But let us not get the causal sequence or timing mixed up because of sh this. There is no immediate problem for which that solution must sh first be found! The problem is that many smaller alternative journals or pure self-archiving solutions don't even address or acknowledge that a true electronic archive is technically sophisticated and currently labor-intensive to produce. Self-archiving need not address it at all. Alternative journals (and established ones) will have to address it eventually, but they are not likely to do it until necessity pressures them to be inventive. The pressure of that necessity will come from self-archiving and the open access alternative it makes available. PDF files are not a true electronic archive. If literature is diverted from publishers who are building true archives, this is a loss to the community. Self-archiving does not DIVERT literature from publishers, it DUPLICATES it -- and makes the duplicate version open-access. If comparisons are made between what publishers charge and what low-cost archives do without explicitly examining all things that publishers do, then the comparisons are unfair and dangerous. I agree completely, and I never make such comparisons (I am too busy, like you, pointing out how misleading and irrelevant they are!). But not because of the cost of true archives versus those of home brew, but because of the omitted cost of peer review. Of course not all publishers are cost effective and not all publishers create the same level of electronic archives. However, a real analysis of the costs is needed. By all means, let us analyze; but meanwhile, even more important, let us self-archive, and open up the access. My point is that $30/articles is extremely low and it doesn't represent a fair comparison. It gives the perception that even well-intentioned, not-for-profit publishers are abusing the system. I am not sure what the true cost of true archiving is, but I am sure that $30/article is an irrelevant figure if it is put forward by way of contrast with what publishers are paid per article ($2000). There is the $500 peer review cost to reckon too. This I think is the root of why the ALPSP response and the response from many society publishers hasn't been enthusiastic about the BOAI. We understand that there are deeper things involved than just making the content available for the here and now. I would respond negatively to BOAI too if my current modus operandi and cost-recovery system were put at risk. But it is not BOAI that has put those at risk. It is the reality of the online age. Journal publishers' current modera operandi, products, costs, and means of cost-recovery are dependent completely on access-tolls, exactly as in the paper era. Yet, unlike most of the literature, this special literature (peer-reviewed research) is and always has been an author give-away. The online era has at last made it possible for authors to bypass the access-tolls and truly give away what they have always wanted to give away. This is clearly not journal publishers' objective (why should it be?). So authors have to take matters into their own hands. And this will not make publishers happy, but it has to be. It is open access, hence what is optimal for research itself, that is at stake. Society publishers will adapt to the new reality, as they feel its direct pressures. But they cannot be allowed to hold it at arm's length in order to preserve the impossible status quo any longer. I have answered ideologically. But your point was that ALPSP and others have not been enthusiastic about BOAI: Why would they be? BOAI is hastening a hard transitional time for them, a transition that is both inevitable and optimal, but undeniably a hardship for publishers. It cannot be held at bay, however, by dramatizing the complexities of true archiving -- an online function, by the way, that journal publishers themselves are still relatively new to too. Archiving is evolving, and will continue to do so, especially under pressure from the new demands of open access. sh Priority #1, by far, is opening access to this (peer-reviewed) sh literature right now (yesterday!). There is absolutely no excuse for sh blocking its access or
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Mark, In what respect are PDF and especially TeX archives flawed? I'm asking not as a challenge but to find out what you think is deficient. The only thing I could find from your posting that they were deficient in is the provision of links. But this can be incorporated into the preparation of text, especially if all the documents are on OAI repositories. The other part that might be missing is an organization that will permanently stand behind the repository. I do not think anyone regards commercial publishers as sufficient, and in response they are beginning to make arrangements with more durable organizations. Societies might be sufficient, if they are strong societies like yours'. But surely you could just as well adopt the responsibility of maintaining ArXiv as you accept the responsibility of maintaining your current journals. I consider publishers' platforms universally a nuisance, and so do our users. Their use is increasing, because publishers do their best to direct users there as a form of self-advertising. If a user has a reference, the user wants to go to it, or at least the journal, not the publisher's home page. The various features for personalization are of limited value when they are linked to a single publisher. They might be of great value if they offered universal coverage, and the APS could well provide this service for its member completely independently of publishing journals. David Goodman Research Librarian and Biological Sciences Bibliographer Princeton University Library dgood...@princeton.edu609-258-7785
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Hi Stevan, On Thursday, March 28, 2002, at 01:55 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Mark Doyle wrote: I don't see this $30/article [mark-up] price working for a highly technical journal ...a wholesale replacement of the current system [by] one based on self- or institutional- or subject-based archiving without tackling the underlying technical issues related to long term archiving would be a major mistake The most viable and cost-effective solution for solving this problem is to develop authoring tools that allow authors to directly create a truly archival XML file. The later in the process you add markup, the more costly it is... I agree that it is becoming more and more apparent that off-loading the XML mark-up to authors is the optimal solution, and will no doubt happen, as user-friendly, windows-based XML markup tools are designed and adopted. But who is working on them? It is a serious question. But let us not get the causal sequence or timing mixed up because of this. There is no immediate problem for which that solution must first be found! The problem is that many smaller alternative journals or pure self-archiving solutions don't even address or acknowledge that a true electronic archive is technically sophisticated and currently labor-intensive to produce. PDF files are not a true electronic archive. If literature is diverted from publishers who are building true archives, this is a loss to the community. If comparisons are made between what publishers charge and what low-cost archives do without explicitly examining all things that publishers do, then the comparisons are unfair and dangerous. Of course not all publishers are cost effective and not all publishers create the same level of electronic archives. However, a real analysis of the costs is needed. My point is that $30/articles is extremely low and it doesn't represent a fair comparison. It gives the perception that even well-intentioned, not-for-profit publishers are abusing the system. This I think is the root of why the ALPSP response and the response from many society publishers hasn't been enthusiastic about the BOAI. We understand that there are deeper things involved than just making the content available for the here and now. Priority #1, by far, is opening access to this (peer-reviewed) literature right now (yesterday!). There is absolutely no excuse for blocking its access or impact for a microsecond longer. Of course we are in agreement that authors should self-archive their work in a way that makes it available to as wide an audience as possible. But we aren't in agreement when you say things like (from Re: BBC News SCI-TECH Boost for research paper access): On Monday, March 25, 2002, at 02:42 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote: But which costs? The $500 for peer-review is uncontested. But it is the only remaining essential cost in the era of online institutional research archiving. These archives don't yet exist at the same level as that of most publishers (whether it is the APS or Elsevier). Name one free long term archive that has adequately addressed this issue and for which the costs of preparing the archive are not laundered by a publisher. (Hint: arXiv.org isn't one and neither is PubMedCentral). Anything that is a PDF/TeX/Word repository isn't one either. Name a university that takes on the responsibility for translating their author's output to a uniform, well designed marked up archive (this essentially means XML these days). Meanwhile, however, journals continue as before, selling their paper versions and their markup, and their online page-images, etc. It is most definitely not a PRECONDITION for freeing access to this entire literature, right now, that authors should first be able to provide XML-marked-up drafts! Yes, but it is a precondition for moving to pure self-archiving and alternative journals to replace current publisher archives as advocated in the BOAI and similar places. You can't throw the baby out with the bath water. If publishers are the only ones focused on creating a true long term archive but their way of paying for it is undermined before a new economic model is in place, then there will be a loss to the community. My main point is that alternative journals are easy to start, but that they need to do things beyond peer review and delivering PDFs. On the contrary: It will be the availability of this whole literature online and free that will DRIVE the downsizing of publication to the essentials, the development of authoring tools, and the upgrading of the author-version, as the need for that arises. The ONLY need right now is to free this literature; and an author-supplied peer-reviewed final draft is sufficient to do that. I don't agree simply for the reason that authoring tools and rich XML repositories aren't explicitly valued by current researchers because they only think in terms of delivering or receiving a PDF or HTML file. However, derived
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Mark Doyle wrote: I don't see this $30/article [mark-up] price working for a highly technical journal ...a wholesale replacement of the current system [by] one based on self- or institutional- or subject-based archiving without tackling the underlying technical issues related to long term archiving would be a major mistake The most viable and cost-effective solution for solving this problem is to develop authoring tools that allow authors to directly create a truly archival XML file. The later in the process you add markup, the more costly it is... I agree that it is becoming more and more apparent that off-loading the XML mark-up to authors is the optimal solution, and will no doubt happen, as user-friendly, windows-based XML markup tools are designed and adopted. But let us not get the causal sequence or timing mixed up because of this. There is no immediate problem for which that solution must first be found! Priority #1, by far, is opening access to this (peer-reviewed) literature right now (yesterday!). There is absolutely no excuse for blocking its access or impact for a microsecond longer. Meanwhile, however, journals continue as before, selling their paper versions and their markup, and their online page-images, etc. It is most definitely not a PRECONDITION for freeing access to this entire literature, right now, that authors should first be able to provide XML-marked-up drafts! On the contrary: It will be the availability of this whole literature online and free that will DRIVE the downsizing of publication to the essentials, the development of authoring tools, and the upgrading of the author-version, as the need for that arises. The ONLY need right now is to free this literature; and an author-supplied peer-reviewed final draft is sufficient to do that. Please let us not needlessly mix, complicate, or hamstring agendas, at the risk of delaying this overdue benefit for research and researchers any longer. Publisher practices, as well as author tools and author practices will evolve to adapt to the reality of open access. Open access need not wait for anything at all at this point. Those who have already self-archived have not waited, and there is no need for the rest of us to wait either. It would be nice if some of the money flowing into BOAI was directed towards this. Perhaps under BOAI Strategy 2 (creating and converting to open-access journals) promoting the development of XML authoring tools would be a money well spent. But let us not make that a brake on Strategy 1 (author/institution self-archiving, NOW), for it is not. Strategy 1 need not and should not wait for XML authoring tools. [S.H.: What about the cost of implementing peer review?] The archiving cost is just as, if not more, important than the peer review cost and the fact that is it usually missing from your discussions is a major weakness. I don't think the $30/article number is generalizable to all fields of scholarly communication. I am afraid I have to disagree rather strongly here. Not only is it not the case that markup (and its costs) is more important than peer review (and its costs) -- what an idea! -- but by the time markup becomes a salient factor at all (which will be when the literature has been freed by self-archiving and publishers are ready to downsize to the essentials), necessity will be the mother of invention, and the requisite XML authoring tools will be developed. There is no problem of principle there, just one of practice, and the current absence of demand for author XML, within the current status quo (why should there be a demand?): But that is exactly the status quo that the author/institution self-archiving is meant to alter, demonstrating the huge utility of the free peer-reviewed drafts, even without proper mark-up. If freeing access diminishes subscription revenue, it means that this vanilla peer reviewed version has considerable market value; if it doesn't diminish subscription revenue, we don't need to worry about any of this, and author XML markup can take its time coming as long as it wishes. So much for BOAI Strategy 1. Obviously BOAI Strategy 2 (open-access startups and conversions) will want to minimize costs, and one of the ways will be to offload XML markup on authors, and hence XML authoring tools would be very handy to have. So by all means let us develop them. But let us not mix up these two BOAI Strategies and their causal interaction, describing as a major mistake the wholesale replacement of the current system [by] one based on self- or institutional- or subject-based archiving without tackling the underlying technical issues related to long term archiving. No one is proposing wholesale replacement of the current system by self-archiving! (And not primarily because of markup, but because of peer review!) An agenda like that would be incoherent, like proposing to replace all driving by hitch-hiking! Self-archiving is a
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 True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Stevan Harnad wrote: [concerning my speculations on what we would do if our journals no longer had any control over presentation...] It's my opinion that in this case Arthur's opinion does not represent the APS (Marty?)... Probably there are many different opinions here - it's not so much what I or Marty say but what the society (governed by members and various committees and boards) would actually do that's my question. One piece of evidence I might be wrong is the virtual journals we've sponsored: http://www.virtualjournals.org/ but note that the peer review that goes into those is selection by one or a small number of editors, with no consulting of outside reviewers - of course the links are to articles in existing peer-reviewed journals where that review process has already been done. It think that if the Physics community should ever decide that all it wants/needs is peer review, APS will then faithfully provide that, rather than ceding the titles... peer review is a pretty thankless task, for editors and referees alike. If the product of that review becomes less meaningful I just don't see how it will be sustained. Which is why it's tempting to look at new ways of doing the peer review at the same time. But back to my speculation on what the society would do: if all the information were already available for free online in an acceptable, readable, long-term archival format, with full searching capabilities, etc. why would we want to simply be some sort of contractor to universities in assessment of their faculty? Better a commercial company takes on that task, and leave us to planning meetings and lobbying the government... Arthur
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Arthur Smith wrote: Probably there are many different opinions here - it's not so much what I or Marty say but what the society (governed by members and various committees and boards) would actually do that's my question. peer review is a pretty thankless task, for editors and referees alike... But back to my speculation on what the society would do: if all the information were already available for free online in an acceptable, readable, long-term archival format, with full searching capabilities, etc. why would we want to simply be some sort of contractor to universities in assessment of their faculty? Better a commercial company takes on that task, and leave us to planning meetings and lobbying the government... Here is a prediction: Once free online access to the peer-reviewed literature is at last gained, it is the commercial publishers, not the learned society publishers, who are more likely to want to give up their titles rather than downsize to performing the only remaining essential function: peer review. After all, when it comes down to it, they (the learneds, not the commercials) are us. And it was and is and always will be us who perform the thankless task of editing and refereeing (the latter, and sometimes even the former, for free), not only for the sake of faculty assessment, but for the sake of the quality, usability, reliability and navigability of our research. Stevan Harnad
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
At 17:51 20/12/01 -0500, Arthur Smith wrote: It think that if the Physics community should ever decide that all it wants/needs is peer review, APS will then faithfully provide that, rather than ceding the titles... peer review is a pretty thankless task, for editors and referees alike. If the product of that review becomes less meaningful I just don't see how it will be sustained. Which is why it's tempting to look at new ways of doing the peer review at the same time. But back to my speculation on what the society would do: if all the information were already available for free online in an acceptable, readable, long-term archival format, with full searching capabilities, etc. why would we want to simply be some sort of contractor to universities in assessment of their faculty? Better a commercial company takes on that task, and leave us to planning meetings and lobbying the government... Arthur, In this context, what are your comments on the journals Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics (ATMP) and JHEP? ATMP appears to be a genuine 'overlay' on arXiv, pointing to papers it has peer reviewed but which are stored on arXiv. JHEP allows submissions via arXiv but after peer review papers are stored on its site rather than arXiv. Thus it stops short of a full version overlay, instead relying on complete automation of the editorial work that is carried out by means of a software robot to minimize costs and ensure free and open access to refereed papers. In both cases the emphasis is on peer review with much scaled-down editorial processing. I know you commented on this in your 'overlay' paper two years ago. According to Fosmire and Yu (2000), ATMP is a bona fide high impact journal. Has anything changed? 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
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
David Goodman wrote: [on my question of why we should want to be simply a contractor to universities in assessment of their faculty?] because, Arthur, the intellectual reputation and respectability of the physicists who constitute your society is much greater than any commercial --or governmental--organization would ever be. As your members care about physics as a science, they presumably will want to continue certifying research and researchers, and assisting universities in selecting physics faculty. All I'm suggesting is that the society would find the risks of such a business model likely outweigh our motivation based on any higher purpose. As I said, managing and doing peer review is pretty thankless, and if there's not much to really show for it (i.e. the literature is already sufficiently available, searchable, archived, interlinked, etc. despite anything we do) I doubt that devoting 70+% of the society's budget to such a risky activity would be deemed worthwhile. [...] No matter how well you do publication, the purpose of the APS is not primarily or necessarily that of a publishing house. Yup. Arthur
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
A few very brief responses to Arthur Smith's comments on my posting: Arthur's comments my original posting [On shifting costs back to authors' institutions] 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. But the reality is that we have an enormous range of authors who send papers, many of whom may have time and resources and capability to make articles easy to access and read, but many of whom do not. A look at the statistics on articles we receive: http://ridge.aps.org/STATS/00geographic.html shows some of our journals have as little as 21% coming from US authors, less than 35% from authors in even nominally English-speaking countries (a good number of these come from India with rather variable quality of presentation). 15-20% or more come from Asia (mostly China and Japan). Even papers received from US institutions can vary quite widely in consistency. I don't know comparable statistics for arXiv.org, but you can see there quite a variety of presentation styles and skills (a sample paper I just brought up had all the figures upside down, for example) and the range of raw materials we receive seems to be even wider than is on display there. Now one of the things we try to do in copy-editing (along with bringing everything to a common tagged format) is to bring the articles we publish to some minimal quality level in the presentation, English/physics terminological usage, etc. I can't say this is done perfectly, but on the other hand I believe the consistency in format and presentation in the final published articles goes a long way to making sure that the relative merits of articles to the readers can be judged primarily on the content, not on enormous differences in presentation. As Andrew notes: [...] Already [...] 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. But is this a good thing for science? Should authors with the resources to do so be selling their research with flashy presentations, while other authors who invest their resources in actual research get ignored? We need to level the playing field somewhere; doing so at the point of publication through funds extracted from readers (or sponsors, no particular bias on my part there) ensures that authors from less privileged institutions are given equal billing, where the actual research performed warrants it. Two points: 1. The conventional publication process does not level the playing field all that much. It does, to some extent, after a paper passes through peer review, but even there, in general the publisher does only a small amount towards improving the presentation, basically just the provision of what Arthur calls 'some minimal quality level.' Well-written papers are easy to read after publication, while the terrible ones (often terrible only because of the author(s) lack of knowledge of English require much effort to understand. Further, there are many biases in the peer review process. Well-known figures, or even not so well-known ones that come from prestigious places, tend to do better than others. Quality of presentation also appears to matter at that stage. 2. My comments were of the descriptive (and predictive) nature, not prescriptive ones. I was referring to the incentives that influence scholars, and are likely to shape evolution of research publications. Free distribution of eprints has done much to level the playing field; instead of a couple of dozen top experts from the most prestigious schools getting a preprint, and everybody outside of that circle having to wait a year for the paper to be published, now everyone has access to the paper on arXiv (or similar server) at the same time. However, that creates incentives for making the playing field less level. (I wrote a paper back in 1996 entitled The bumpy road of electronic commerce, which argued that we would not have that mythical 'frictionless capitalism' as a result of the Internet, since there would be incentives to create artificial barriers.) Remember that Harvard does not spend something like $80 million per year on its libraries
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
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 [snip] 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: [...] 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. Arthur
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Bernard Lang wrote: [...] I have absolutely no experience with copy editing but ... How much of the process could actually be mechanized ? Part of it at least is checking specific presentation rules, I believe. A good question. The answer though is only a little, that I am aware of. One can attempt to use grammar checkers and spelling checkers but they're of dubious value with abstruse technical information (most grammar checkers don't like the standard scientific passive voice for example...). You can look for yourself at our style guide: http://publish.aps.org/STYLE/ and see how much of that looks mechanical. Some is, most is not; the part that is not mostly requires some sort of human judgment. For example, within the explanatory material of a caption include definitions of all symbols, abbreviations, and acronyms used in the figure that have not been previously defined in the text... - how much of that can be checked mechanically? So there is an irreducible human judgment component in this, I believe much more than 50% of the work needing to be done, that cannot be automated with any current technology. Another point is that copy editing can be paid for separately, by authors (or institutions who can afford it) or by people who think some pieces of works do deserve it. Note my discussion of this in response to Andrew Odlyzko. I don't think that's the right way to go, but if people are doing it anyway it's worth analyzing how well it is working for the furthering of scholarly research in these areas. We can publish first, and review or copy edit later, in whatever order is convenient, or never if no one wishes to do it. I do not care if, when, and how reviewing has been done ... all I need to know is whether it has been done, and by whom or what group, and maybe even have the comments. With that I am a big enough boy to make my own decisions. Choosing a journal is just choosing a set of reviewers. Is it? I think it means much more than that. Or at least it has historically meant also choosing a certain style and quality of presentation, and a certain assessment of worth in the articles - a yes/no up/down judgment made by two or more people with real scientific experience, making a decision with real meaning and consequences. Just getting reviews from a particular bunch of reviewers is quite a different thing. Of course reform of peer review is a very interesting subject in its own right. Does it need to be considered along with new business models for scientific publication? I would say yes, but it's an area one has to tread carefully... [...] And why should papers have only one type of reviewing, when they are so many different publics with different needs, even within the not for profit litterature. so you want to spend more money on peer review, not less? :-) Arthur
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
A lot to catch up on! I'm not sure when I'll get a chance! But one thing I thought I ought to respond on, to clarify the problem a bit: On Sun, 16 Dec 2001, Andrew Odlyzko wrote: [On shifting costs back to authors' institutions] 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. But the reality is that we have an enormous range of authors who send papers, many of whom may have time and resources and capability to make articles easy to access and read, but many of whom do not. A look at the statistics on articles we receive: http://ridge.aps.org/STATS/00geographic.html shows some of our journals have as little as 21% coming from US authors, less than 35% from authors in even nominally English-speaking countries (a good number of these come from India with rather variable quality of presentation). 15-20% or more come from Asia (mostly China and Japan). Even papers received from US institutions can vary quite widely in consistency. I don't know comparable statistics for arXiv.org, but you can see there quite a variety of presentation styles and skills (a sample paper I just brought up had all the figures upside down, for example) and the range of raw materials we receive seems to be even wider than is on display there. Now one of the things we try to do in copy-editing (along with bringing everything to a common tagged format) is to bring the articles we publish to some minimal quality level in the presentation, English/physics terminological usage, etc. I can't say this is done perfectly, but on the other hand I believe the consistency in format and presentation in the final published articles goes a long way to making sure that the relative merits of articles to the readers can be judged primarily on the content, not on enormous differences in presentation. As Andrew notes: [...] Already [...] 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. But is this a good thing for science? Should authors with the resources to do so be selling their research with flashy presentations, while other authors who invest their resources in actual research get ignored? We need to level the playing field somewhere; doing so at the point of publication through funds extracted from readers (or sponsors, no particular bias on my part there) ensures that authors from less privileged institutions are given equal billing, where the actual research performed warrants it. 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
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Stevan Harnad wrote: [... arguments I'm not sure I can say much more on ...] [I wrote: ] Note that I'm not worrying about freeing the literature here; if publishing free literature really involved no copy-editing, we would likely never do it, as a publisher with a historical interest in certain publication standards. Do you mean APS would then not do copy-editing, or that it would then not publish? I hope you mean the former, as peer review is still essential, and the real standard underlying the value of the refereed research literature. What I meant was the latter. Just my opinion, really. The publications have long had an ambiguous relationship with the society, being by far the most expensive thing the APS does. The society has stated goals to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics which is more about publishing quality content than doing peer review. We manage the peer review as part of publishing journals of course, that's how we determine what's worth putting in our journals. But if the journals ceased to really mean anything in terms of improved presentation of the content, I suspect we would just sell the business to whoever wanted it; Elsevier probably. Arthur
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001 Arthur P. Smith apsm...@aps.org wrote: if publishing free literature really involved no copy-editing, we would likely never do it, as a publisher with a historical interest in certain publication standards Just my opinion, really... The society has stated goals to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics which is more about publishing quality content than doing peer review. We [APS] manage the peer review as part of publishing journals of course, that's how we determine what's worth putting in our journals. But if the journals ceased to really mean anything in terms of improved presentation of the content, I suspect we would just sell the business to whoever wanted it; Elsevier probably. It's my opinion that in this case Arthur's opinion does not represent the APS (Marty?)... It think that if the Physics community should ever decide that all it wants/needs is peer review, APS will then faithfully provide that, rather than ceding the titles... In any case, the extent to which copy-editing is worth paying for, over and above peer review, is surely something the market could decide, once the online access to the peer-reviewed draft was free. (APS is generously freeing access even to its proprietary, copy-edited drafts, by allowing its authors to self-archive them, although this rather moots the market decision! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/APS/copy_trnsfr.pdf ) Stevan Harnad
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
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)
Just one remark ... the current system does waste a lot of reviewing work ... if only because: - the same paper gets submitted in several places, when not accepted - papers are read by many people who never get to voice their opinion, whether valuable or not. There are many ways that reviewing information can be produced, stored and used in the more flexible world of the Internet. and there are ways of rating reviewers and reviews (I think this is already a formally studied topic), or groups of reviewers. I have not given much thought as to how anonymity of reviewers could be maintained in such schemes, but I would guess it is atractable problem. apologies for saying published instead of publicly archived ... and I understand your aim is to have access to the peer-reviewed corpus ... sorry for being off topic Bernard On Sat, Dec 15, 2001 at 11:56:01PM +, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Bernard Lang wrote: We can publish first, and review or copy edit later, in whatever order is convenient, or never if no one wishes to do it. We can publicly archive first (let's reserve the term publish for something more than this mere vanity-press, lest it lose its meaning) and then we can submit that unrefereed preprint to an established journal for peer review. (Why established? Because otherwise you have no way to know what quality-standards have been met by their having accepted it for publication!) Or, we can leave the paper forever as merely a publicly archived, unrefereed preprint. The primary objective of this Forum, however, is to attain free online access to the entire full-text contents of the peer-reviewed corpus of 20,000 refereed journals. Vanity self-archiving of unrefereed preprints does not meet that objective. Online access to unrefereed preprints is merely a bonus, an extra, not an alternative way of meeting the objective of attaining free online access to the peer-reviewed corpus. Self-Archiving Refereed Research vs. Self-Publishing Unrefereed Research http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1468.html I do not care if, when, and how reviewing has been done... all I need to know is whether it has been done, and by whom or what group, and maybe even have the comments. (This is a bit confusing, as if is synonymous with whether, mais passons...) Whether the it has been done, and by whom, for our purposes, is the question of which known, established quality-controller and certifier (i.e., which journal) has peer-reviewed and accepted the paper. That tags its level in the quality hierarchy, and those tags are critical for navigating the enormous literature for busy researchers who would rather not spend their time reading or trying to build upon material of uncertain quality. This kind of reliable filtering cannot be done on an ad hoc basis (any more than eggs can be certified on an ad hoc basis: the egg-graders have to establish their reputations). And comments are always welcome, but they are a luxury. See: http://www.bbsonline.org/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/ With that I am a big enough boy to make my own decisions. Choosing a journal is just choosing a set of reviewers. Why should I do it before I know what papers I'll be looking for. Why not consider a bunch of papers and then decide which types of reviews I'll consider adequate (for example depending on how selective I need be). Because there are only so many hours in the day, and an awful lot of stuff is written. I would rather have trusted quality filters in advance, not after I have committed my time! and I'd rather have a literature already written with the foreknowledge (on the part of its authors) that it will have to answer to peer review. And for the peer reviewers to be able to certify that I can trust a paper, I first have to know I can trust the peer review. So its quality level must have been reliably demonstrated in advance. In other words, I need journals. And why should papers have only one type of reviewing, when they are so many different publics with different needs, even within the not for profit litterature. Because peer-review is a scarce, over-farmed resource; because peers review for free; because one review is more than enough for most papers; and because pre-certification peer review is not the same a post-certification peer commentary... A Note of Caution About 'Reforming the System' http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1169.html Harnad, S. (1997) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 11(4) 283-292. Short version appeared in 1997 in Antiquity 71: 1042-1048. Excerpts also appeared in the University of Toronto Bulletin: 51(6) P. 12. http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/EPub/talks/Harnad_Snider.html Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 02:19:23PM -0500, Arthur Smith wrote: [...] This means that the only remaining per-article real costs are (1) dissemination on-paper, (2) any on-line enhancements by the publisher (special mark-up, linking), and (3) peer review. By (2) I assume Stevan is referring to the copy-editing process, which I cited, with markup being one of the issues. Any publisher would like to do this cheaper if they could be sure of the same level of quality. The real question, which needs to be answered not just by this group, but by all those within the audience for science, whether other researchers, other scholars, media, public, etc., is, what level of copy-editing is actually justified, on grounds of the need for accessibility of that scientific research? Commercial companies may be more attuned to the economic justification for copy-editing than we are, as a non-profit. So it would certainly be of interest to see whether they are spending more, less, or about the same as us per paper on copy-editing. As for-profit entities, it's unlikely any company would spend much more than is absolutely necessary to create a journal that meets the expectations of their market. Andrew Odlyzko's argument suggests that they may be spending more than us - if so, why is that? Note that I'm not worrying about freeing the literature here; if publishing free literature really involved no copy-editing, we would likely never do it, as a publisher with a historical interest in certain publication standards. Stevan's arguments for that are fine, and it'll go however far it'll go pretty much whatever we do. It may have some effect on the market for quality, but we seem not to have experienced too much of that effect yet. But we still would like to reduce the high costs libraries (or institutions who may replace them in funding publication) have to bear, and if lowering quality at copy-editing is really acceptable, perhaps that will actually happen. So, the question again: what level of copy-editing is actually justified, on grounds of the need for accessibility of that scientific research? I have absolutely no experience with copy editing but ... How much of the process could actually be mechanized ? Part of it at least is checking specific presentation rules, I believe. Another point is that copy editing can be paid for separately, by authors (or institutions who can afford it) or by people who think some pieces of works do deserve it. To me, the major characteristic of the Internet era (as opposed to the Gutenberg era) is that we can ignore the process sequentiality that the cost of publication and the inflexibility of the medium was imposing on us. We can publish first, and review or copy edit later, in whatever order is convenient, or never if no one wishes to do it. I do not care if, when, and how reviewing has been done ... all I need to know is whether it has been done, and by whom or what group, and maybe even have the comments. With that I am a big enough boy to make my own decisions. Choosing a journal is just choosing a set of reviewers. Why should I do it before I know what papers I'll be looking for. Why not consider a bunch of papers and then decide which types of reviews I'll consider adequate (for example depending on how selective I need be). And why should papers have only one type of reviewing, when they are so many different publics with different needs, even within the not for profit litterature. for more ... 2 slides in French: http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/ecrits/Exposes/Bruxelles-Egov/papierg.htm http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/ecrits/Exposes/Bruxelles-Egov/papieri.htm Bernard -- Non aux Brevets Logiciels - No to Software Patents SIGNEZhttp://petition.eurolinux.org/SIGN bernard.l...@inria.fr ,_ /\o\o/Tel +33 1 3963 5644 http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/ ^ Fax +33 1 3963 5469 INRIA / B.P. 105 / 78153 Le Chesnay CEDEX / France Je n'exprime que mon opinion - I express only my opinion CAGED BEHIND WINDOWS or FREE WITH LINUX
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
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: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Andrew Odlyzko wrote: 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. 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): 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 This means that the only remaining per-article real costs are (1) dissemination on-paper, (2) any on-line enhancements by the publisher (special mark-up, linking), and (3) peer review. Given a freely accessible, on-line generic version, (1) and (2) accordingly become optional PRODUCTS, on-paper and on-line, that can be paid for by those who still want and can afford them instead of the free on-line generic versions. Hence peer review (3) becomes the only remaining essential SERVICE; but its true cost (because peers review for free) is so much lower than what is currently being spent in access tolls for the text as a user/institution-end product (an average of $2000 in worldwide collective institutional subscription, license, and pay-per-view [S/L/P] fees per article and as much as $5000 for the priciest journals) that it can easily be covered as an author/institution-end outgoing service charge if and when the market for the incoming S/L/P products, now optional, ever shrinks to where it no longer covers it. The true annual institutional costs of the essential peer review service (per submitted outgoing manuscript) can be paid for out of only a portion (10-30%) of the much higher annual institutional windfall savings on the optional product expenditures. There is hence every reason to be confident that these lower costs will be met by novel business models and that the goal of free access to the peer-reviewed full text is entirely attainable and neither merely preferable nor unreachably utopian. From a draft document in preparation. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html You may join the list at the amsci site. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Arthur Smith wrote: Obviously a service fee to authors or their institutions would help with our gentle persuasion process, but the service fee may not be small... Service fee for what? I am advocating an eventual service fee for peer review, but only if/when revenue from other optional products and services is no longer enough to pay for it, because of preference for the free (self-archived) online version. (Then the service can be paid for out of the savings.) 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? I can't follow this. Who is discouraging what? Publishers continue to produce and sell the enhanced, value-added product; authors self-archive and thereby free up access to the refereed final draft. As long as the paid version has a market and pays the bills, nothing changes. If/when the market decides (with its dollar-vote) that the refereed final draft is enough, some of the resulting savings from no longer paying for the optional add-ons can be used to pay for the one remaining essential service: peer review. But it will be paid as a service fee on outgoing papers, not an access fee for incoming ones. This means that the only remaining per-article real costs are (1) dissemination on-paper, (2) any on-line enhancements by the publisher (special mark-up, linking), and (3) peer review. By (2) I assume Stevan is referring to the copy-editing process, which I cited, with markup being one of the issues. Any publisher would like to do this cheaper if they could be sure of the same level of quality. The real question, which needs to be answered not just by this group, but by all those within the audience for science, whether other researchers, other scholars, media, public, etc., is, what level of copy-editing is actually justified, on grounds of the need for accessibility of that scientific research? Isn't this something the market can answer? The refereed final draft is freed by author/institution self-archiving. If there is something in the on-paper version, or the publisher's enhanced PDF, that is still deemed worth buying, it will keep paying its own way. If there isn't, then things will downsize to the essentials -- which may turn out to be just peer review. Commercial companies may be more attuned to the economic justification for copy-editing than we are, as a non-profit. So it would certainly be of interest to see whether they are spending more, less, or about the same as us per paper on copy-editing. As for-profit entities, it's unlikely any company would spend much more than is absolutely necessary to create a journal that meets the expectations of their market. Andrew Odlyzko's argument suggests that they may be spending more than us - if so, why is that? Good question. Note that I'm not worrying about freeing the literature here; if publishing free literature really involved no copy-editing, we would likely never do it, as a publisher with a historical interest in certain publication standards. Do you mean APS would then not do copy-editing, or that it would then not publish? I hope you mean the former, as peer review is still essential, and the real standard underlying the value of the refereed research literature. Stevan's arguments for that are fine, and it'll go however far it'll go pretty much whatever we do. It may have some effect on the market for quality, but we seem not to have experienced too much of that effect yet. But we still would like to reduce the high costs libraries (or institutions who may replace them in funding publication) have to bear, and if lowering quality at copy-editing is really acceptable, perhaps that will actually happen. I think APS has been terrific, most especially because they explicitly allow self-archiving even of the APS PDF... So, the question again: what level of copy-editing is actually justified, on grounds of the need for accessibility of that scientific research? I think the market will be able to decide that once self-archiving has freed the vanilla refereed version. Stevan Harnad
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
It may have cost $1000 to prepare an article for press in 1977. Given that the editors and the reviewers services are free, and the material is normally submitted in electronic form, how much should it cost now? What does the publisher need to do in pre-press besides copy-edit? This is not the same as asking what the publisher does actually do, it terms of advertising, public relations, appearance at conventions, and maintaining a main office, all of which are customary business functions but whose necessity is what we are questioning. David Goodman, Princeton University Biology Library dgood...@princeton.edu609-258-3235 On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Albert Henderson wrote: On Fri, 7 Dec 2001 Alan Story a.c.st...@ukc.ac.uk wrote: On your second strand, breaking publishers' monopoly and the question of assignment of copyright ( which as Stevan points out is complementary).and here speaking from the perspective of the UK. ... The assignment as a condition of publication contracts that publishers require academic authors to sign are unreasonable, defining unreasonable Such contracts are not at all unreasonable if you consider that the author asks the publisher to invest over $1000 (1977 dollars) in average pre-press costs per article. (Distribution costs averaged an additional 9 cents.) The publisher provides to the author a recognition that is invaluable in establishing competence, intelligence, and even vision in the sense of being the first to 'publish' insightful ideas and discoveries. The reader should view such agreements as reasonable because the reader benefits by bona fides accorded 'published' claims that are locatable by browsing in credible sources. In short, these copyright transfer agreements, used by the publishers to secure their investments, are hardly 'unreasonable' in any sense of the word. They benefit the author and the reader as well as the publisher. Moreover, publishers have exploited the new technology for the benefit of authors and readers so that any qualified researcher does have free access through membership in a library. What is unreasonable is the proposition that the reader who relies exclusively on self-published 'archives' gets equal value. The implication that libraries need not provide services to students, faculty, and others because copies of articles can be obtained through labor- intensive efforts is far more 'unreasonable' than publishers' contracts with authors. Not only is this a rather questionable business model for universities--- to understate the absurdity of this situation --- for the production and distribution of knowledge, but it also dramatically decreases access toand use of that knowledge. And it is the signing of an unreasonable contract that lies at the centre of this tangled and inequitable web of copyright power relations and limitations on access. By 'business model' you must mean profitability. Yes, universities would be much more profitable if library spending were eliminated and the burden of dissemination were shifted entirely to authors and readers. The increased gap between spending on research and on libraries, 1970 to date, demonstrates the business plan: universities' interests in profits. It is only equaled by their disdain for the work product of research and the quality of education. It is not, as you claim, the copyright agreement that 'dramatically decreases access to and use of that knowledge.' It is that universities have cut library spending, canceled journal subscriptions, stopped buying books, and laid off librarians. The evidence of this is in 40 years of skyrocketing 'just too late' interlibrary photocopy and document delivery statistics. The evidence to support Harnad's utopian promises and your argumentative claims is nowhere to be found. Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 70244.1...@compuserve.com .
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
David Goodman wrote: It may have cost $1000 to prepare an article for press in 1977. Given that the editors and the reviewers services are free, and the material is normally submitted in electronic form, how much should it cost now? First note $1000 in 1977 is about $2850 in 2001, according to standard CPI tables. Some publishers (at least us) pay the scientific editors, but that only amounts to perhaps $200/article (per published article - the actual cost is more proportional to total number of articles, so the number is subject to rejection-rate effects etc.). More publishers pay for secretarial help and office overhead for the editors, or have centralized communications offices throughout the review process, typically another $250-$300 (per published article). Most publishers who don't just print camera-ready copy have not yet seen ANY net savings from receiving electronic formats - these can speed up the process and may reduce error rates, but the multitude of electronic formats, language issues, font issues, figure/image problems, etc. generally results in processing expenses at the level of about $50/article JUST to get and maintain an accurate PDF file for review purposes; further processing and copyediting typically comes in at somewhere around $500/article (depending on length), with perhaps a $30-40 savings for electronic (but note the $50 expense getting the electronic copy properly prepared in the first place). At least for us copyediting now includes a significant amount of work in tagging the article to an SGML or XML format, particularly reference sections, allowing robust inter-article linking. On top of this all is the overhead for information services pieces (software, hardware, networking to support the publishing work), managing relations with other primary and secondary publishers (for interlinking for example now), managing the money (even if you're free you still have to write grant proposals, manage a budget, justify yourself to whoever is paying those little expenses you do have), which is probably highly variable depending on volume etc., but 10% on top of the rest is a minimal estimate, or perhaps $100/article given the above numbers. 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. Though the 1977 number undoubtedly included the things I've discounted (print distribution in particular, at the level we had in 1977, would come to around $500/article). What does the publisher need to do in pre-press besides copy-edit? Well, they don't really have to do anything, which could save the publisher perhaps $500 or so per article. But I doubt there are many publishers actually spending nothing on the pre-press side: I believe even Elsevier pays journal editors an amount per article that corresponds to this - the amount may be more like $150 or $200 and not cover their costs, but it's something at least. And we'd love for copy-editing to be cheaper. It may be starting to happen... but it's definitely NOT an easy transition for an established publisher, particularly with all the new tagging requirements. We could save a lot of money if we forced authors to meet much stricter requirements on what they send us (as far as formats etc. go) and not give them any of the hand-holding they seem to need on the matter. We would probably lose a lot of authors (to publish in journals that are much more expensive for libraries) if we did that, but it would significantly cut our expenses. We do have some hopes that authors can be persuaded to shape up in a gentler fashion, but it may take a long time, and may never be complete. Arthur Smith (apsm...@aps.org)
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
At 12:34 PM 7/26/01 -0400, David Goodman 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. This applies no matter what route the progress towards a free system takes. All it needs is for people to make use of it and stop using at least some of the conventional publications. We keep measuring use and many of us are eagerly anticipating the change, but we cannot act until the scientists do. There is another element to the library cancellations issue which has not yet been mentioned here. Many academic library purchases of electronic journals are now covered by consortium licensing deals. At present, typically these specify that an academic library that buys some print journals from a publisher pays a small premium (say 10%) on their subscription and then gets electronic access to all that publsihers' journals. This works to the benefit of small institutions; one UK one (Edge Hill University College) now has five times as many journal titles as before. Of course this charging mechanism can only be transitional -- in 2010 it won't make any sense to base charges on what an institution spent in 1997. So work is in progress on developing usage stas-based charging systems -- in any one year, what you pay will be based on how much use was made of that publisher's titles in that university in the previous year. [This has the paradoxical implication that librarians should make lots of e-js available but should simultaneously try to discourage their use, so that the price won't go up next year (8-) .] Of course, the institution may not actually want all these extra titles -- the London School of Economics probably doesn't want microbiology journals, say. But usage statistics seem to show that many previously unwanted titles actually get used, to librarians' surprise. But there is a big downside. The more of these package deals a library makes with big publishers, the less flexibility it has when it comes to the annual journal cancellations exercise. They can't cancel titles from the major publishers, which they buy en bloc (or rather, they would save no money by doing so). So all the cancellations have to come from the titles published by small publishers -- and disproportionally these will be the smaller not-for-profit learned-society publsihers, whose prices are usually much more reasonable! The virtuous lose. Some of us who are unreconstructed old-fashioned socialists might say this is monopoly capitalism at work in its typical way... Fytton Rowland. ** Fytton Rowland, M.A., Ph.D., F.I.Inf.Sc., Lecturer, Deputy Director of Undergraduate Programmes and Programme Tutor for Publishing with English, Department of Information Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU, UK. Phone +44 (0) 1509 223039 Fax +44 (0) 1509 223053 E-mail: j.f.rowl...@lboro.ac.uk http://info.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/staff/frowland.html **
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Stevan Harnad wrote: Do you think the APS estimate is a better average for the 20,000+ refereed journals and their 2,000,000+ annual articles? (I am not asking ironically: I really wonder how representative you think the APS bottom line is. We are talking about averages here, after all, and S/L/P revenues vary from $500 per article to $4000+ from journal to journal, and publisher to publisher. Submission and rejection rates as well as processing demands vary too.) Obviously a good question - policies on paying for editorial time vary from journal to journal also. And typical personnel costs can vary significantly from place to place. In some respects we may be on the high end, in some on the low. I'll mention one reference: http://arXiv.org/blurb/pg01unesco.html with some numbers demonstrating the scale (of revenue) is even wider than you suggest. But even given the range, $500/article seems to be pretty close to an absolute minimum cost given the current structure of peer review. As far as we can tell, our costs are close to the low end of what's feasible for a typical large-volume scientific journal publisher. JHEP, the example you gave, fits in the electronic start-up publisher space, and if you talk to the editor you'll see even they expect costs to rise a bit as that publisher settles into a more sustainable pattern. There are probably ways to do it more cheaply. A publisher that does peer review but publishes just about everything anyway (such as for conference proceedings) can probably get away with somewhat lower editorial costs. But for the type of established, significantly peer-reviewed journal we're talking about, I believe our costs are very typical, and even on the low end. [...] Are we talking about the eventual author self-archiving of the entire refereed literature (20K journals, 20M articles annually), and what the eventual impact of THAT might be on S/L/P revenue? Or are we merely talking about the pitifully small portion of the annual 20M articles self-archived so far, which is still only about 50K annually, most of it in physics, amounting to only about 30-40% of the total physics literature and not destined to reach 100% of that until the year 2011 at the current linear growth rate: http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions I see the problem as that of awakening researchers to the benefits (in terms of visibility, accessibility, and hence potential impact) of freeing access to their research online through self-archiving. In other words, the problem is getting the 20M up there, along with the 50K. Actually I thought you said it was 2 million, not 20 million (or is 2 million an annual figure and 20 million a total?) But at what point can author self-archiving declare victory? One would think it could several years ago in high energy physics, with virtually 100% coverage. You seem to be implying coverage has to be complete in ALL areas of science (or all areas of scholarly publishing, even?) before we can expect to see S/L/P cancellations. Maybe the answer is somewhere in between? But my suspicion is that author self-archiving is really only addressing part of the problem. Yes it is providing free access to people, that's great. But the problem seems to be the fact that it is under author control, and a medium controlled by the authors is not sufficiently trustworthy for science and scholarly institutions to abandon their established communications media - the scholarly journals. So the need really is for a new medium, NOT controlled by authors, but perhaps controlled by researchers and their disciplines in some larger sense. Perhaps it will be the journals themselves in some new guise - or perhaps it will be something new, based on the author self-archives. Stevan, feel free to continue promoting author self-archiving, and I wish you well in reaching the 2 million or 20 million figure. But I think we've reached a point where it's clear this isn't a full solution at least to the problem of serials costs to libraries, which is, if not the only goal, one major goal this forum has been trying to address. Somewhat along those lines, this forum may be interested in continuing fallout from the Public Library of Science effort: http://www.genomeweb.com/articles/view-article.asp?Article=200172219199 -- it sounds like they may actually try starting up their own new journals based around the public library distribution medium. And they have a very close impending deadline! Could be interesting... Arthur (apsm...@aps.org)
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
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. This applies no matter what route the progress towards a free system takes. All it needs is for people to make use of it and stop using at least some of the conventional publications. We keep measuring use and many of us are eagerly anticipating the change, but we cannot act until the scientists do.
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: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
ON Fri, 22 Sep 2000 David Henige dhen...@library.wisc.edu asked some good questions: Although a semi-outsider, I find the debate between Henderson and Rouse fascinating, less for its contextual implications than for the character of the argumentation itself. Let me first delcare two interests. First, I work in the same library system as Ken Rouse; second, my field is history and therefore well outside (whew!)some of the arguments being made. Still, one does not need to be in the STM stable to recognize the pointlessness of arguing respective quality here. Let's face it, even the scientists would be unable to determine an objective set of criteria to determine inherent quality and then to find an equally objective method to apply it and finally to disseminate it. So, why bother? Clearly, the norms of science require objective criteria such as a documented foundation, appropriate methodology, logical conclusions, understandable writing. Mathematics must be provable. Once accepted for publication, a paper continues to be read and the work evaluated. Insofar as dissemination, some say that channels targeted to special interests are more effective than those that deliver lots of unwanted material. Others emphasize economies of scale. Each argument has some merit and each type of channel may be more appropriate than alternatives in certain circumstances. We have no choice in this instance then but to call quality a wash. The question then becomes, if none of the antagonists can demonstrate that they publish better quality materials than the others, why does one party (guess who?) charge so much more for roughly the same merchandise. That's a fair question, asked and answered many times over. The first part of the answer is in the level of service and the size of circulation that diffuses first-copy costs. A journal published for 100 customers will cost them each more than a journal published for 1,000 costs each of its subscribers, although the total first copy cost may be the same. The second part is that it is never roughly the same merchandise, however, as a close inspection would reveal. It almost induces one to think of the word monopoly, doesn't it? When a corporation prepares a literature review for internal use, it is not only a monopoly but a trade secret. Copyright and patents are monopolies, just like other property. Such monopolies attract investment and are therefore sufficiently in the public interest to be supported by the Constitution. And it is just here of course the other Q word comes into play. While not one usually to sing the praises of quantification, here it can legitimately serve as a tie-breaker. This, I gather, is the burr that abrades certain parties in the dispute. Regardless of the bias of Prof. Barschall, several courts at least have shown that his quantitative methodology is sound. It is as sound as a mathematical proof. But is it relevant? What court has said it is a reliable basis for purchase, renewals, etc??? Judge Sand's opinion certainly raised a red flag. After all, we all recognize that the Chicago Cubs' announcers are Cub-friendly, and this might affect their read on various things. But it hardly affects onfield play. In other words, bias is not necessarily a fatal flaw. If it were, we all would know even less than skeptics imagine we know. The problem with Barschall is that, as a Director of AIP, he covertly represented the interests of a major physics publisher. By having him on your library committee, your boss put a fox in charge of the chicken coop. Barschall parlayed that opportunity into claims of scientific findings, awards from various library associations, etc. In the process, he abused the ITALIAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY mercilessly -- perhaps stemming from some old rivalry. Bias or not, his workmanship was incredibly sloppy. He claimed, for instance, to find the averages of non-existent numbers! Any twelve-year-old knows better. [read more in my article Lawful Misconduct in THE SCIENTIST 12,2 p. 7-8 Jan 19, 1998] Even an outsider can only be amused by Henderson's attempt to portray the terms of the debate as those of class struggle. Yes, thanks. I thought the idea was ironically amusing, given that neither public universities nor commercial publishers think of themselves in terms of class struggle. The term is certainly apt when you consider the hubris of elitism that goes with the undeserved
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
From: [anonymous] Peer review is very expensive. To do a good job of peer review takes substantial amounts of time and effort, from secretaries who handle the manuscripts, reviewers who go over them, and editors who must make the decisions. This is certainly true, and all of the essential costs of peer review (let us call the process Quality Control and Certification, QC/C) will have to continue being paid, according to the model I have proposed (although I have to point out that the item reviewers who go over them is not part of the budget, as peers referee for free). The question is: How much are those essential QC/C costs currently, when peer review is hybrid, paper/post and online, and how much will they be when peer review is entirely online (as it is for more and more journals, including my own)? Whatever those QC/C costs are, they MUST continue to be covered. The question is: Should they continue to be covered by reader-institution-end Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) fees (which are ACCESS-BARRIERS) as they are currently, or is there another, barrier-free way? For if QC/C costs continue to be paid via S/L/P access tolls, then the literature cannot be made free for all online, for freeing it online would make those S/L/P revenue sources vanish, causing the refereed journal system to collapse. So the question we are addressing is: How much are those QC/C costs, and is there any way to recover them, other than access-blocking S/L/P tolls? There has been extensive discussion of how much the QC/C costs are now (and how much they will be when QC/C is online-only), but let us not get into that here (see Odlyzko 1998 and the American Scientist Forum Archives on the 2.0K vs. 0.2K thread) and agree only that they can only be LESS (and those with experience agree they will be considerably less) per published article than the current TOTAL price of a published article (via S/L/P). The reason is that currently the published articles are being sold as a PRODUCT, whereas QC/C is only a SERVICE that goes into the creating of that product. So the arithmetic goes as follows. Let us say that $XXX is the total revenue received by journal publishers per article via S/L/P, by selling it as a product; most of this revenue comes from reader-institutional S/L/P tolls. The way to pay for the SERVICE of QC/C alone, then, is for all S/L/P expenditures by the reader institutions to cease, returning to the institutions all of their $XXX, and then paying for whatever portion of that the essential QC/C costs amount to -- let's call that $YYY -- out of the windfall savings, at the author-institution end. We need only note that $YYY $XXX (indeed, probably $YYY $XXX) to see that the author-institution-end model (which provides free access for all) is as preferable to the reader-institution-end model (which restricts access to those individuals/institutions who can/will pay the S/L/P tolls) as a research literature free for all is preferable to the current one, with the access barriers of financial firewalls in place. I need only add that, just as peers referee for free, authors give their papers away for free. Their motivation is to have their peer-reviewed findings as widely accessible as possible; that is what their research impact depends on. They have no stake in toll-booths; indeed, their stake in them is negative. So if the access-barriers that were necessary in the Gutenberg era so that papers could be published at all are no longer necessary in the PostGutenberg in which authors can self-archive their papers in public Open Archives, then if authors continue to be prevented from doing this, they will sooner or later want to know the reason why. Saying this can all be handled less expensively electronically is (A) not true, at least in some image-intensive biological journals, manuscripts are often accompanied by 100-300 Mb of digital image files; What is the problem with 100-300 Mb image files? The pornographic traffic on the Net is doing fine with much bigger files. and (B) not practical for authors who do not use digital files for images; All images can be digitized and compressed; fewer and fewer authors are pre-digital any more. And for those who are, hard copy is still an option. Surely these minoritarian image-related considerations are not a justification for continuing to hold the research literature hostage to S/L/P (and its embargos) any longer. and (C) still does not eliminate a substantial component of the cost. The cost of the peer review for the journal whose publication committee I sit on is about $500 per paper. So be it. Let $YYY = $500. Total revenue per article is $XXX from S/L/P. Let all S/L/P be cancelled and let the author-institution cover the $500 per article out of the savings. (I am not of course advocating instant termination of S/L/P. As long as there is still demand for paper, it can still be sold; as long as the journal can continue to sell its
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
From: [Anonymous] Subject: Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) I still have a few disagreements. First, I agree that $YYY costs less than $XXX and the difference is the publishers operating costs and profits. I do not defend the publishers' interests here, as they are in a business that is undergoing a disruptive technology change, and will eventually become less important or even extinct. But before we bury them, I would like to make sure that a few of the useful things they do are preserved. I agree completely. What is needed is a reliable, stable and fair transition strategy. Subversive self-archiving is all well and good, but we also have to think ahead. Even in Physics, where the evolution towards the optimal and inevitable is the most advanced, there is not yet a transition strategy -- nor, for that matter, have S/L/P cancellations begun (but I think they're around the corner). Without a rational transition strategy, getting there (QC/C service only, with costs recovered from S/L/P savings) from here (S/L/P toll-based product) looks like an impossible Escher drawing or a Moebius strip. (See the thread The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition in the American Scientist Forum (1998) Archive http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html) One of these is peer review. I gather that we agree on this. Although it is fine for a journal that publishes mainly reviews with occasional line drawings to do its business on-line, for journals that publish original images, this is a real problem with the current generation of technology. I am sure this will be taken care of in 5-10 years, but 300 Mb of images (15 pages at full photographic resolution) still takes about 50 minutes to download at 100Kb (which is the average rate that our internet connection works during the workday because of all the traffic). It then takes about 2-3 minutes to open each image and display it on a computer screen, and several minutes more to examine details of the image by scrolling around (because most computer screens are limited to about 1,000 pixels resolution, and photographic quality images are 2,000 x 3,000). I am not a pornographer, so I do not know the quality of images that they transmit, but I doubt that many of their clients would have the patience to wait for images at full photographic resolution that neuroanatomy requires. I can assure you that if it took 3-4 hours to receive and review the images for one paper, our referees and editors would not stand for it either. I am not an expert on image compression and transmission, and I do not deny that there may be some technical difficulties with very large images for the time being. But my reply is as before: For those cases, there is still the hybrid (paper/online) solution, both for refereeing and for online publication. The large image literature, however, is a small minority of the literature, not representative of it, and certainly no reason for holding back self-archiving: For if online images are too big to make online refereeing and online publication practical yet, then online self-archiving of those images at this time is certainly no threat to anything! (And recall that our exchange began with the question of the justification for copyright and embargo policies that forbid online self-archiving.) A second issue is where the costs of review are generated. While referees are not paid, it requires substantial expenses in faxing, postage (for paper review, which I argue above is still necessary, at least in some quarters), and office worker time to make this happen. This will not go away any time soon. Even without disputing how much really still needs to be mail/faxed in the big-image literature, my reply is: The $YYY refers to ALL essential QC/C costs. If it's still essential to fax some images for refereeing, so be it; let that cost be part of the $YYY. There is still nothing here to justify copyright or embargo policies that forbid self-archiving. A third issue is who maintains the archive. Ideally, to survive any forseeable disaster, the electronic archiving should be permanent, in one site and format, and be stored in widely distributed sites. Correct. And that is precisely what the Open Archives initiative was launched for: http://www.openarchives.org/, adopting the dienst protcol and the Santa Fe convention. The Santa Fe convention was designed to ensure that all Open Archives are interoperable. This means that they can all be searched by anyone, anywhere, all at once, as if they were all just one global, seamless archive. Each Santa Fe compliant Open Archive resides at a University or Research Institution; for reliability, reundancy and permanence they will be mirrored around the world (the Physics Archive has 15 mirrors worldwide). And with all their precious research eggs in this one global virtual archive, we can be sure that permanence
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Tue, 30 Nov 1999, Sally Morris ALPSP wrote: 1)I thought the issue of the cost of PR was originally raised on the grounds that, if it could be reduced to zero by some such means as 'open peer review', then no costs would have to be recovered from authors at all. Economically, perfectly logical Incorrect. The open peer review option was criticized, not advocated, in this Forum. 2)However, the strong message from academia seems to be that PR (whether as it is, or in some 'evolved' form) is extremely important and should not be thrown out with the bathwater. See, for example the recent paper from AAAS on 'defining publication' (www.alpsp.org.uk/dceps.htm). That has also been a position advocated repeatedly in this Forum. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html 3)The figures being bandied about for the full cost per paper seem to me to be on the low side. See, for example, the results of the survey carried out by Professor Bernard Donovan, a couple of years ago, of a sample of learned society publishers (www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/) Rather than looking at surveys conducted a couple of years ago, it might be better to look at actual costs of current on-line-only journals. I can only repeat that JHEP's Editor says it's $300 per paper (after start-up costs). And their extremely efficient peer-review software and tracking system could handle 10 journals as readily as 1. http://jhep.cern.ch/ 4)Until about 5 years ago I was running a list of some 50 medical journals - some for learned societies, some not. In every case the publisher was covering not only the editor's expenses (several thousand pounds per year) but also some kind of royalty or honorarium. The expenses consisted not only of direct costs such as postage and secretarial help, but also office accommodation (even when this was in the editor's own university); every university these days seems to find it necessary to recover such costs, and in many cases they add a hefty overhead percentage on top. In addition there will be in-house administrative costs. Sally Morris Overhead for an online-only quality-control/certification (QC/C) service provider (the new breed of refereed journal publisher) will not be zero, but it should be less than these old, paper-based figures. Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Sciencehar...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southamptonhttp://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of Freeing the Refereed Journal Literature Through Online Self-Archiving is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
MODERATOR'S NOTE: Although I have used the moderator's prerogative to invoke cloture on this topic already in this forum, I don't want to deny Joseph his say this once, as the topic has again been briefly touched upon again, in passing. Instead of responding to Joseph's message by quote/commenting it as in the past (and repeating the responses made in the past) I will simply try a brief, pre-emptive innoculation: (1) This Forum is about freeing the (give-away) literature PUBLISHED in refereed journals. (2) It is not about literature WITHHELD from refereed journals. (3) Literature published in refereed journals is PUBLIC: Anyone can read it (if they can afford access to the journal!), anyone can apply it (unless it's patented), and anyone can build on it, cite it, comment on it, etc. (4) If there is an impending Provosts' Plot to WITHHOLD papers from publication in refereed journals, papers that would until now have been published there, that is a very serious problem indeed, and someone should do something about it. (It means, among other things, that the publish or perish era is over, and promotion, tenure, impact, prizes, prestige, grant-income etc., no longer depend on refereed publication: on what, then, one wonders?) (5) But (4) is NOT the problem that we are concerned with here, which is (to repeat) the problem of freeing the literature PUBLISHED in refereed journals. (6) There have been attempts by journal publishers to use Copyright Transfer Agreements to prevent their authors from publicly self-archiving their published papers online, free for all. (7) Joint copyright with the author's institution (for these GIVE-AWAY papers) might help overcome this ostensible barrier to freeing the literature. (8) As this is give-away literature, and as we are only talking about papers that are indeed being PUBLIshed, authors have nothing to lose here. Universities are not looking for (nor will they find) a cut in the movie rights from the spin-offs of these articles that almost no one reads, let alone cites. (8) ADVICE TO AUTHORS: If there is a possibility of making significant money from the sale of your paper, don't share copyright with your university and don't give it away to a refereed journal either! Get an agent and make a good fee/royalty deal with a trade publisher. (10) The above does not apply to any of the papers under discussion here; let it not detain us further. Stevan Harnad List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Sun, 28 Nov 1999 08:34:34 -0600 From: ransd...@door.net (Ransdell, Joseph M.) Stevan: May I make a correction in your representation of my view as regards the issue of the universities and intellectual property rights, especially copyright? In response to Tom Wilson's comment that: tw . . .the institutions are likely to have something to say in the matter, tw given the emerging awareness of their stake in intellectual property - tw some Universities may decree that, in certain areas, work is of such tw commercial significance that their stake must be protected. you say: sh Tom, this too has come up repeatedly in this forum (mostly from Joseph sh Ransdell in connection with Steve Koonin and the Provosts' initiative). sh I recommend a little reflection on this. Just as it was highly sh instructive, indeed essential, to make the critical distinction between sh the give-away and the non-give-away literature (roughly, journals vs. sh books) in order to see the light about self-archiving, so it is sh essential not to confound the case of patents, software piracy, etc., in sh which universities indeed have a stake, with the case of refereed sh research publication. The correction is this: I am and have always been quite clear on the distinction between patents, etc., and copyright and on the differences between the sorts of research material they apply to, and I am concerned with the same material you are concerned with. I am also aware of something else which you do not seem to be taking duly into account, Stevan, namely, that there are many scientific fields -- especially those in biomed but not only those -- in which copyrightable but nonpatentable research material can be and in fact often is of great monetary value to those who understand that well-substantiated theoretical findings are ipso facto connected with experimental procedures and these procedures can frequently be used to generate productive procedures of great practical application and financial profit, if one is interested in that sort of thing. And, yes, there are many people who are interested in that sort of thing, among whom one even finds university administrators. In fact, finding administrators that are not interested in possible profit from research, institutional or personal, would be the real
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
- Original Message - From: Ransdell, Joseph M. ransd...@door.net To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Sunday, November 28, 1999 10:38 AM Subject: Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) snip (8) ADVICE TO AUTHORS: If there is a possibility of making significant money from the sale of your paper, don't share copyright with your university and don't give it away to a refereed journal either! Get an agent and make a good fee/royalty deal with a trade publisher. And check any agreement you have signed with your university. You may have given up the right to make such deals. A copyright is intellectual property, like a patent. I recall that the U. of Michigan took a faculty member to court a few years ago on this question.
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
tw I know that none of the refereeing that I put in place cost the tw publisher (Butterworths at the time) a penny. Clearly, different tw publishers have different practices. sh The figures come from the actual costs reported to me by The Journal of sh High Energy Physics (JHEP) http://jhep.cern.ch/ and from analyses like sh those by Andrew Odlyzko sh http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/economics.journals.txt and have sh been confirmed in this Forum by Mark Doyle of the American Physical sh Society (see the 2.0K vs. 0.2K thread, discussing the true cost of sh quality-control-only per article). sh Someone has to pay for the administration of the refereeing and the sh editorial dispositions. Some small journals can poach this from their sh editors' universities but this is not a solution for most journals, and sh certainly not for the big ones, like JHEP, with hundreds or even thousands sh of submissions to process annually. sh And I repeat, it is not the referees who cost money, but the sh implementation of the refereeing. I totally agree with the last point - but I wonder if high submission, high cost journals are the norm? I referee regularly for five or six journals and in all cases the papers for review come directly from the editor rather than from the publisher, so I suspect that for many journals (and, given a probable Bradford/Zipf distribution for submissions to journals, those with thousands of submissions must be a very small minority) it is the editor's institution that is bearing the cost rather than the publisher - so, once again, academia is subsidising the publisher and perhaps this, rather than the $300 a paper for the JHEP is the norm. The case of scientific societies is rather different, since they often make the journals available to their members at rates well below the commercial and the whole activity takes the form of scientific collaboration. tw it ought to be debated whether a more economically efficient quality tw control process is to publish openly and freely without refereeing and tw rely upon the reader and user of the information to make his or her own tw quality judgements when using or deciding not to use a text. sh Such a question is not settled by debating but by testing. tw True, but is not debate necessary to persuade the scholarly community tw that testing would be worthwhile, and have they yet been persuaded, tw apart from the BMJ running a test, by - tw http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html? sh It is not the scholarly community that needs to be persuaded of sh anything. The only ones who can test variants or alternatives to sh classical peer review are (1) social scientists who do empirical sh research on peer review (such research is ongoing) and perhaps (2) sh journal editors who might wish to experiment with new methods (e.g., sh the BMJ experiment above). It seems that the scholarly community is still not completely persuaded of the virtues of freely accessible self-archiving (although I am persuaded - and have been since the idea was first mooted) - so there are at least some quarters of the community that need to be persuaded. Perhaps more difficulty is involved in persuading the universities that action of this kind is necessary - in spite of the economics of the situation there appears, at least in the UK, to be a kind of institutional blindness to the possibilites of reform, of which self-archiving is one. And the institutions are likely to have something to say in the matter, given the emerging awareness of their stake in intellectual property - some Universities may decree that, in certain areas, work is of such commercial significance that their stake must be protected. sh But what advocates of peer review reform have mostly tended to do is to sh promote untested, notional alternatives (such as open commentary, or no sh review at all) to the scholarly community. I think that is not very useful sh at all. But, of course, as you say, we have no empirical evidence as to whether it is useful or not. sh Besides, peer review reform has absolutely nothing to do with the sh movement to free the refereed journal literature, and it has repeatedly sh been pointed out in this Forum -- and in the discussion of the NIH/Ebiomed sh proposal and the Scholars Forum proposal -- that the fate of the latter sh should not be yoked to the former in any respect. There is no reason sh whatsoever why the freeing of the current refereed journal literature sh (such as it is) -- a desideratum that already has face validity as optimal sh for research and researchers now -- should depend in any way on the sh implementation of speculative notions about how peer review might be sh improved or replaced. I entirely agree - the issues are completely separate tw In any event, my suggestion is not that there should necessarily be tw public feedback from those who use specific texts productively, but that tw the citation record will reveal which texts have proved
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Sat, 27 Nov 1999, Prof. Tom Wilson wrote: sh it is not the referees who cost money, but the sh implementation of the refereeing. tw I totally agree with the last point - but I wonder if high tw submission, high cost journals are the norm? I referee regularly for tw five or six journals and in all cases the papers for review come tw directly from the editor rather than from the publisher, so I suspect tw that for many journals (and, given a probable Bradford/Zipf tw distribution for submissions to journals, those with thousands of tw submissions must be a very small minority) it is the editor's tw institution that is bearing the cost rather than the publisher - so, tw once again, academia is subsidising the publisher and perhaps this, tw rather than the $300 a paper for the JHEP is the norm. It is correct that academia subsidises all phases of refereed research publication -- from conducting the research, to writing it up, to refereeing it, to subsidizing journal editorial offices and functions. But even so, there are some residual costs. In some cases I agree that those costs are small enough to be borne completely by the editor's institution, but those are not the problem journals, nor the expensive ones, nor the high submission-volume ones, nor the high-impact ones -- in short, those are not the journals that are holding back the freeing of the refereed journal literature at the moment. It is the ones with the nonzero quality-control implementational costs that are the problem -- but the problem is small: $300 per paper is small enough to make people realize how absurd it is to hold the whole literature hostage to it at the reader-institution end, when it makes so much more sense to pay it at the author-institution end, out of 20% or less of the very savings that doing so would generate! tw The case of scientific societies is rather different, since they often tw make the journals available to their members at rates well below the tw commercial and the whole activity takes the form of scientific tw collaboration. But at the cost of keeping the papers behind a financial firewall for everyone else (and even the cost to members is non-zero)... tw It seems that the scholarly community is still not completely persuaded tw of the virtues of freely accessible self-archiving (although I am tw persuaded - and have been since the idea was first mooted) - so there tw are at least some quarters of the community that need to be persuaded. I agree, of course! The point was not that there isn't still a lot of persuading to do regarding the virtues of self-archiving; it was about the fact that the VALUE of self-archiving is already demonstrated, whereas the value of modifying peer review (and how) is most definitely not demonstrated, hence whether there is anything to persuade anyone about in that regard is moot. tw Perhaps more difficulty is involved in persuading the universities that tw action of this kind is necessary - in spite of the economics of the tw situation there appears, at least in the UK, to be a kind of tw institutional blindness to the possibilities of reform, of which tw self-archiving is one. I agree (and no one can say I'm not doing my bit to try to lead the academic cavalry to the waters of self-archiving as well as to get them to drink!)... tw And the institutions are likely to have something to say in the matter, tw given the emerging awareness of their stake in intellectual property - tw some Universities may decree that, in certain areas, work is of such tw commercial significance that their stake must be protected. Tom, this too has come up repeatedly in this forum (mostly from Joseph Ransdell in connection with Steve Koonin and the Provosts' initiative). I recommend a little reflection on this. Just as it was highly instructive, indeed essential, to make the critical distinction between the give-away and the non-give-away literature (roughly, journals vs. books) in order to see the light about self-archiving, so it is essential not to confound the case of patents, software piracy, etc., in which universities indeed have a stake, with the case of refereed research publication. Here is a simple algorithm: If the paper's NOT one that would have been published in a refereed journal in the Gutenberg Era, than that is NOT the kind of paper we are talking about here! Things that would have been held back from publication for the sake of patents or commercial exploitation, etc. are on the other side of the give-away line, and always have been. Even books (of all kinds, from specialist monographs to wide-spectrum popular books to textbooks) are on that side of the line; some universities might decide they want a cut in the royalties because the research was done on their time. I plead nolo contendere to all of that because it has NOTHING to do with the kind of literature I am talking about: The papers that appear in the refereed journals have one value, and one value only: their
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
- Original Message - From: Prof. Tom Wilson t.d.wil...@sheffield.ac.uk To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Sent: Saturday, November 27, 1999 1:32 PM Subject: Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) I totally agree with the last point - but I wonder if high submission, high cost journals are the norm? I referee regularly for five or six journals and in all cases the papers for review come directly from the editor rather than from the publisher, so I suspect that for many journals (and, given a probable Bradford/Zipf distribution for submissions to journals, those with thousands of submissions must be a very small minority) it is the editor's institution that is bearing the cost rather than the publisher - so, once again, academia is subsidising the publisher and perhaps this, rather than the $300 a paper for the JHEP is the norm. The case of scientific societies is rather different, since they often make the journals available to their members at rates well below the commercial and the whole activity takes the form of scientific collaboration. I've been an editor for a commercially-published journal, and I've held offices, including Treasurer, in a scientific society that has a journal. In both cases, the cost of the editor's office and his stipend were paid by the publisher. That is the norm, as far as I know. For very large journals, the position of editor may be full-time, salaried.
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Fytton Rowland wrote: Professor Stevan Harnad argued quite a while ago that the models that he has advocated refer to esoteric publications (his term), which roughly fit the old assumption that the authorship and readership of a specialised scholarly journal are the same people. He has always recognised, I think, that other types of publication are different, and will continue to operate on a trade model paid for by a combination of income from advertisers and from purchasers. Such publications often (but not invariably) pay their contributors too. New Scientist would fit this description. Under advice from Ann Okerson and others, the esoteric descriptor has now been dropped in favor of the (tautological) descriptor nontrade, but in its place there is now a simple algorithm: Does the author (1) seek/get any revenue for his text (royalties, fees) or does he instead (2) give it away, seeking only the eyes/minds of readers? If (1), it is trade, if (2) it is not. However, Don King -- always an invaluable source of real, verifiable *facts* about scholarly journals as opposed to opinions and attitudes -- Thanks for the implied compliment (read on)... points out that many scholarly journals have a far wider readership than is necessarily indicated by their citation patterns. Citation patterns are irrelevant to the trade/nontrade distinction. So is the size of the readership, according to the new, more precise algorithm above. It isn't true to say that only the authors ever read the journals -- the reader community is often wider. It was never true to say that only the authors read even the most esoteric of journals. The authors (opting for (2)) always hoped to capture more eyes/minds than that, and occasionally even managed to do so. But it was not just the rarefied subject matter of their articles that had conspired against these nontrade authors, who were seeking only eyes/minds for their texts; it was also the access barriers of (a) paper and (b) its economics, which necessitated toll-gates -- usually in the form of institutional Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) -- which denied entry for all unpaid eyes/minds to the author's freely given ideas/findings. In the online era, both of these barriers to the eyes/minds of nontrade authors' potential readership have ceased to be necessary; this give-away literature can at last be freed for everyone, everywhere, forever: http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ Examples would be: practitioners (physicians, engineers, lawyers, etc.) who don't actually do research; high school teachers; some of the educated lay public; and of course students, undergraduate as well as postgraduate. Completely irrelevant: Tell a nontrade author trying to maximize the eyes/minds that access his work that he should NOT self-archive it publicly for free for all, because in some magazines some people are willing/able to pay for it! So far as really esoteric journals are concerned I think Professor Harnad is right; they do not belong in the commercial world at all, and an author-pays system, with a moderate charge to cover the costs of peer review and of maintaining the document on the WWW in perpetuity, seems appropriate. The only open question -- and, thanks to the algorithm mentioned above, this is a matter of FACT, not opinion or attitude -- is: Which are the 'really esoteric journals' that fall into this category?. The answer will be loud and clear: The ENTIRE REFEREED JOURNAL LITERATURE, which the author gives away to his publisher for free, seeking only the eyes/minds of readers in return. At the other end of the scale, Nature, for example, is a very successful commercial enterprise, and there is no way it will cease to be reader-pays - but in any case, high circulations attract advertising revenue and generally help to keep cover prices down. Nature is hybrid. It has articles written by journalists for a fee, it has some borderline cases in which scientists are paid a very modest fee to provide commissioned articles, and it has the submitted, refereed reports of new research. The solution is simple: The trade portions can proceed apace, and the journal itself can continue to be sold via S/L/P for as long as there is a market. But the REFEREED articles can also be self-archived by authors for free for all. Nature's copyright agreement regarding online self-archiving, unlike that of Science, is closer to the right direction on this, but eventually it will have to conform fully to the model provided by the American Physical Society, with full online self-archiving rights guaranteed for both the unrefereed preprint and the refereed reprint: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0006.html There is a grey area in between, where journals such as those of the American Chemical Society, for example, have a large sale to commercial chemical and pharmaceutical companies.
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Fytton, et al, On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Fytton Rowland wrote: BACKGROUND/INTRODUCTORY TEXT DELETED So far as really esoteric journals are concerned I think Professor Harnad is right; they do not belong in the commercial world at all, and an author-pays system, with a moderate charge to cover the costs of peer review and of maintaining the document on the WWW in perpetuity, seems appropriate. At the other end of the scale, Nature, for example, is a very successful commercial enterprise, and there is no way it will cease to be reader-pays -but in any case, high circulations attract advertising revenue and generally help to keep cover prices down. There is a grey area in between, where journals such as those of the American Chemical Society, for example, have a large sale to commercial chemical and pharmaceutical companies. There is no reason on earth why academia should subsidise *them*, so surely a reader-pays system should stay. The argument comes down to this: how do we draw the lines between the different types of scholarly journal? Your analysis assumes a continuation of the current publishing model (albeit in e-form). However if we move to an archive/overlays model (as I interpret Prof Harnad's model) for inter-academic publishing the trade model cannot survive in anything like its present form because the real content of 'journals' (the articles) will be freely available in an archive (or from the author's/institution's own web site). My own model http://www.ukc.ac.uk/library/papers/jwts/d-journal.htm could survive the transition since the selection/pointing services (Subject Focal Points- SFPs) are separate from the archiving and evaluation activities. What the subscriber is paying for is the alerting/selection service of the SFPs. The author pays for the evaluation - the reader pays to be told about the existence of the article. Regards, John Smith, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
Prof Harnad, et al, On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Fytton Rowland wrote: Professor Stevan Harnad argued quite a while ago that the models that he has advocated refer to esoteric publications (his term), which roughly fit the old assumption that the authorship and readership of a specialised scholarly journal are the same people. He has always recognised, I think, that other types of publication are different, and will continue to operate on a trade model paid for by a combination of income from advertisers and from purchasers. Such publications often (but not invariably) pay their contributors too. New Scientist would fit this description. Under advice from Ann Okerson and others, the esoteric descriptor has now been dropped in favor of the (tautological) descriptor nontrade, but in its place there is now a simple algorithm: Does the author (1) seek/get any revenue for his text (royalties, fees) or does he instead (2) give it away, seeking only the eyes/minds of readers? If (1), it is trade, if (2) it is not. There are problems with this algorith. Applying it precisely would make review articles (for which the author received a small honorarium), some editorials and all commissioned surveys/reports (copies of which may be given away on request) 'trade' - while novels or poems published freely on the net would be 'non-trade'. I have nothing against novelists or poets but I don't think we mean to include their work with scholarly articles. Also the two categories are not absolutely mutually exclusive. For example an author of a commissioned review article might happily take the honorarium but his main impetus for undertaking the work involved might be the chance to reach a large number of readers. However, Don King -- always an invaluable source of real, verifiable *facts* about scholarly journals as opposed to opinions and attitudes -- Thanks for the implied compliment (read on)... points out that many scholarly journals have a far wider readership than is necessarily indicated by their citation patterns. Citation patterns are irrelevant to the trade/nontrade distinction. So is the size of the readership, according to the new, more precise algorithm above. The algorith may be precise but it is flawed (as pointed out above). It attempts to refute Fytton's argument by defining it out of existence - but the world isn't that simple. INTERMEDIATE TEXT DELETED The only open question -- and, thanks to the algorithm mentioned above, this is a matter of FACT, not opinion or attitude -- is: Which are the 'really esoteric journals' that fall into this category?. The answer will be loud and clear: The ENTIRE REFEREED JOURNAL LITERATURE, which the author gives away to his publisher for free, seeking only the eyes/minds of readers in return. At the other end of the scale, Nature, for example, is a very successful commercial enterprise, and there is no way it will cease to be reader-pays - but in any case, high circulations attract advertising revenue and generally help to keep cover prices down. Nature is hybrid. It has articles written by journalists for a fee, it has some borderline cases in which scientists are paid a very modest fee to provide commissioned articles, and it has the submitted, refereed reports of new research. The solution is simple: The trade portions can proceed apace, and the journal itself can continue to be sold via S/L/P for as long as there is a market. But the REFEREED articles can also be self-archived by authors for free for all. This solution actually circumvents the 'Rowland anomaly' (that *real* academic journals do not fall neatly into trade/non-trade categories) by moving from the journal to the article as the publishing unit and dividing these between 'trade' and 'non-trade'. It should be noted that this is done at the cost of weakening the concept of the 'journal' as a composite whole (i.e. that a journal is made up of parts, and that those parts *belong* together). However the problem could be avoided altogether if a publishing model was adopted that separated the evaluation/quality control role from the publishing/archiving role (making available) from the distribution role (making aware). Strangely enough :-) this is the core of my Distributed Journal model http://www.ukc.ac.uk/library/papers/jwts/d-journal.htm The more one considers it the more this whole area looks like a paradigm shift in action. According to Kuhn paradigm shifts start when it becomes impossible to accept the anomalies in the current paradigm (or model). The unacceptable annomaly in the current academic publishing paradigm is that authors give their work away free and want to maximise access but their publishers charge high prices and want to restrict access. Rather than abandon a current paradigm completely the usual move is to tinker with it in an attempt to release the tension
Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)
On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, J.W.T.Smith wrote: sh Does the author (1) seek/get any revenue for his text (royalties, sh fees) or does he instead (2) give it away, seeking only the sh eyes/minds of readers? sh sh If (1), it is trade, if (2) it is not. There are problems with this algorith. Applying it precisely would make review articles (for which the author received a small honorarium), some editorials and all commissioned surveys/reports (copies of which may be given away on request) 'trade' - For 99% of the refereed literature this algorithm applies perfectly well. The case of trivial honoraria was covered in the discussion of the hybrid journals like Nature (below). The case of editorials is trivial. Uncontested give-aways are irrelevant. The point of raising these inconsequential details is not at all clear. while novels or poems published freely on the net would be 'non-trade'. I have nothing against novelists or poets but I don't think we mean to include their work with scholarly articles. No one is including them amongst refereed journals. If other work also fits the nontrade descriptor, so be it. (I suspect that poets/novelists hope to be in the give-away phase only temporarily, to introduce their work, but eventually to be paid for it; refereed journal authors are in this give-away phase for life. Again, it is not clear why these irrelevant details are being raised here.) Also the two categories are not absolutely mutually exclusive. For example an author of a commissioned review article might happily take the honorarium but his main impetus for undertaking the work involved might be the chance to reach a large number of readers. The case was covered in the discussion of Nature; where the fee is a token, and what the author wants is minds/eyes, so be it; abjure the fee in favour of the give-away mode. Again, what is the point of bringing up these trivial details? Nothing of substance depends on them. fr points out that many scholarly journals have a far wider readership than fr is necessarily indicated by their citation patterns. sh Citation patterns are irrelevant to the trade/nontrade distinction. So sh is the size of the readership, according to the new, more precise sh algorithm above. The algorith may be precise but it is flawed (as pointed out above). It attempts to refute Fytton's argument by defining it out of existence - but the world isn't that simple. Nothing is being defined out of existence. Please focus on the substantive matter, which is the give-away literature where the author wants only eyes/minds. The rest of the details are irrelevant. sh The only open question... is: Which are the sh 'really esoteric journals' that fall into this category?. The answer sh will be loud and clear: The ENTIRE REFEREED JOURNAL LITERATURE, which sh the author gives away to his publisher for free, seeking only the sh eyes/minds of readers in return. fr At the other end of the scale, Nature, for example, is a very successful fr commercial enterprise, and there is no way it will cease to be fr reader-pays - but in any case, high circulations attract advertising fr revenue and generally help to keep cover prices down. sh Nature is hybrid. It has articles written by journalists for a fee, it sh has some borderline cases in which scientists are paid a very modest sh fee to provide commissioned articles, and it has the submitted, refereed sh reports of new research. The solution is simple: The trade portions can sh proceed apace, and the journal itself can continue to be sold via sh S/L/P for as long as there is a market. But the REFEREED articles can sh also be self-archived by authors for free for all. This solution actually circumvents the 'Rowland anomaly' (that *real* academic journals do not fall neatly into trade/non-trade categories) by moving from the journal to the article as the publishing unit and dividing these between 'trade' and 'non-trade'. It should be noted that this is done at the cost of weakening the concept of the 'journal' as a composite whole (i.e. that a journal is made up of parts, and that those parts *belong* together). Perhaps. So what? The point is that the give-away refereed literature need not and hence should not be held hostage to trade any longer. However the problem could be avoided altogether if a publishing model was adopted that separated the evaluation/quality control role from the publishing/archiving role (making available) from the distribution role (making aware). Strangely enough :-) this is the core of my Distributed Journal model You have repeated this point a number of times and it would now be useful to move on to matters of substance. The reply has in each instance been that self-archiving is self-archiving; peer review is peer review; there's the separation of function and that's all there is to it. Your own model introduces spurious (1) add-on quality markers (which have to be
