Re: Economist article + Faustian bargain

From: Albert Henderson <NobleStation_at_COMPUSERVE.COM>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 16:44:05 -0400

on Fri, 12 May 2000 Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> wrote:

> It is important for sophisticates of this Forum to note that there is no
> irony whatsoever in the fact that The Economist does not give away its
> contents for free on the Web.
>
> Why should it? Its journalists write the articles for a fee; their
> entirely valid objective is to sell, not to give away, their work.
>
> The WHOLE POINT of the initiative of freeing the refereed journal
> literature is that this (trade) model does not fit that anomalous
> literature, so fundamentally unlike everything else.
>
> Researchers are not journalists selling their words, they are scientists
> and scholars reporting their findings. Their rewards do not come from
> tolls charged for access to their texts; they come from accessing
> and making an impact on the minds and the research of other researchers.

Not so. Researchers make an economic exchange valued
more than cash, for recognition and dissemination
services that will reach their intended audiences,
present and future. Publishers bring order out of
chaos, setting standards for quality and objectivity.
They channel information to the readers who may use it.
Research papers are not ads. Nothing is "given away"
by either researcher or publisher. Thanks to libraries
and librarians, scientific discoveries and theories are
preserved and disseminated for the future, often long
after the authors and publishers have disappeared.


> The access-blocking tolls are hence working AGAINST these rewards, not
> for them. (Charging for access to their research makes about as much
> sense for researchers as charging for access to their ads would make
> sense to the advertisers of commercial products.)

Not so. Financial statistics indicate that access was
blocked by university managers. They manufactured the
"serials crisis" by cutting library spending and an
open season on publishers propaganda campaign to shift
the blame. Universities have been hoarding money at the
expense of knowledge assets for 30 years. The average net
profit of private research universities last year climbed
to about 25% of revenues.


> The access-blocking tolls are hence working AGAINST these rewards, not
> for them. (Charging for access to their research makes about as much
> sense for researchers as charging for access to their ads would make
> sense to the advertisers of commercial products.)

Not so. Starting with PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS, which
was founded as a for-profit venture by Henry Oldenburg,
journal publishing has been a win-win arrangement for over
300 years. It is widely supported by researchers and
considered an important source of financial support for
other activities that might include policy positions and
accreditation.


> In the papyrocentric era, such give-away authors had no choice but
> to make the Faustian bargain (with Gutenberg), that in order to defray
> the substantial expense of typesetting, printing and distribution, they
> would reluctantly acquiesce to the levying of access tolls to recover
> those costs -- knowing that if they did not acquiesce then there would be
> nothing at all for researchers to access (beyond what they reported
> orally or by writing one-on-one learned letters).

Not so. The Faustian bargain was made when academic
senates gave up control of policy to administrators so
that faculty could be free to pursue intellectual goals.
Unfortunately, the quest for knowledge has been undermined
by the financial priorities and petty ambitions of the
new bureaucracy.

This analysis, by the way, resonates comments made for
decades by observers that Robert Nisbet, Edward Shils, and
others going back to Max Weber. They include President
Eisenhower (former president of Columbia University), and
Newt Gingrich.

University managers' lack of interest in long-term goals,
such as preservation, is symbolic of a mentality that
regularly sheds its skin.

Libraries and librarians are being squeezed out via budgets.
They once shared 6 percent of university spending -- now
they get less than 3 percent. An article in Publishers
Weekly predicted major libraries would be unable to buy
anying in a decade or two.

It's not just about libraries. Instruction has also received
smaller shares of spending while administrative shares of
budget have climbed. Tenure is under attack as well as
copyrights, full-time teaching and off-campus organizations
that may control or influence accreditation.

Today, the academic senate has little or no influence over
budgets. Moreover, administrators have Balkanized formerly
collegial members of the academic community. In the
competition for mis-managed resources, some knowledge workers
too readily waste energy by attacking each other rather than
the source of their problems. Others join the bureaucracy.
Just look, for instance at the emasculated "standards" for
libraries published by the ACRL itself -- revised to eliminate
any objective measure of library quality..

Albert Henderson
Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY
<70244.1532_at_compuserve.com>


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Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT