Re: Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_COGPRINTS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2001 12:59:07 +0100

[Redirected from "No Free Lunches" Thread.]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2001, Andrew Wray wrote:

> But this still doesn't address the point of stable financing of the
> essential peer review process. This problem of stability is the main
> message I took from John Ewing's arcticle.
>
> Subscriptions are a financial firewall, author charges per page or
> per article might work for some authors but not all, and funding by
> governments, science funding bodies or universities seems likely to be
> unsustainable in the long term (>5-10 years).

I was too cryptic, but as it has been written out in longhand elsewhere,
just a brief preamble and then some quoted excerpts:

(1) The CHE Essay on which I was commenting
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i07/07b01401.htm
was about the PLoS boycott/petition enjoining publishers to give away
their full-text contents, and the likely economic consequences should
that petition succeed (the failure of the smaller, less expensive,
learned-society journals and their possible absorption by the larger,
more expensive, commercial publishers, who were better equipped
to survive a boycott or a temporary full-text give-away period).

(2) The essay argued that the "frills" (online enhancements for
indexing and search, such as reference-linking) might become
"essentials" and would justify the continuation of the financial
firewalls blocking free access.

(3) My comment was that this reasoning was based on "conflating the
essentials and the add-on options." Peer review is the only essential:
the refereed text, whether on-paper or on-line, plus all other
enhancements, such as reference-linking, are all frills, because authors
can give away their own refereed texts (in their own institutional
Eprint Archives) without the need for publishers to give away their
contents.

(4) Once it is clear that the only problem is the "stable financing of
the essential peer review process" (as you correctly state), it is also
clear that it is NOT a matter of page-charges: Publishers' pages,
whether on-line or on-paper are NOT essentials, they are frills (with
the advent of author/institution self-archiving of all refereed
research), and they can and should be sold and paid for as such, i.e.,
separately, not force-wrapped into the essentials.

(5) This de-conflation also makes it clear what funds will finance the
essential peer review process, if/when it is ever needed: The annual
institutional windfall savings from the cancelled financing of the
frills (if/when that ever occurs). No author page-charges or
government subsidies needed.

(6) But until then, author/institution self-archiving can proceed apace,
freeing access to the entire refereed research literature without
waiting for petitions, boycotts, or publisher give-aways.

    4. The Subversive Proposal
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4

                     4.1 Enough to free entire refereed corpus,
                     forever, immediately:

    Eight steps will be described here. The first four are not
    hypothetical in any way; they are guaranteed to free the entire
    refereed research literature from its access/impact-barriers right
    away. The only thing that researchers and their institutions need
    to do is to take these first four steps. The second four steps are
    hypothetical predictions, but nothing hinges on them: The refereed
    literature will already be free for all as a result of steps i-iv,
    irrespective of the outcome of predictions v-viii.

    i. Universities install and register OAI-compliant Eprint Archives
    (http://www.eprints.org).

           The Eprints software is free and will be open-sourced. It in
           turn uses only free software; it is quick and easy to
           install and maintain; it is OAI-compliant and will be kept
           compliant with every OAI upgrade:
           http://www.openarchives.org/. Eprints Archives are all
           interoperable with one another and can be (e.g.,
           http://arc.cs.odu.edu/) of the entire research literature,
           both pre- and post-refereeing.

    ii. Authors self-archive their pre-refereeing preprints and
    post-refereeing postprints in their own university's Eprint
    Archives.

           This is the most important step; it is insufficient to
           create the Eprint Archives. All researchers must
           self-archive their papers therein if the literature is to be
           freed of its access- and impact-barriers. Self-archiving is
           quick and easy; it need only be done once per paper, and the
           result is permanent, and permanently and automatically
           uploadable to upgrades of the Eprint Archives and the
           OAI-protocol.

    iii. Universities subsidize a first start-up wave of
    self-archiving by proxy where needed.

           Self-archiving is quick and easy, but there is no need for
           it to be held back if any researcher feels too busy, tired,
           old or otherwise unable to do it for himself: Library staff
           or students can be paid to "self-archive" the first wave of
           papers by proxy on their behalf. The cost will be negligibly
           low per paper, and the benefits will be huge; moreover,
           there will be no need for a second wave of help once the
           palpable benefits (access and impact) of freeing the
           literature begin to be felt by the research community.
           Self-archiving will become second-nature to all researchers
           once its benefits have become palpable.

    iv. The Give-Away corpus is freed from all access/impact barriers
    on-line.

           Once a critical mass of researchers has self-archived, the
           refereed research literature is at last free of all access-
           and impact-barriers, as it was always destined to be.


                                    4.2 Hypothetical Sequel:

    Steps i-iv are sufficient to free the refereed research literature.
    We can also guess at what may happen after that, but these are
    really just guesses. Nor does anything depend on their being
    correct. For even if there is no change whatsoever -- even if
    Universities continue to spend exactly the same amounts on their
    S/L/P budgets as they do now -- the refereed literature will have
    been freed of all access/impact barriers forever.

    However, it is likely that there will be some changes as a
    consequence of the freeing of the literature by author/institution
    self-archiving. This is what those changes might be:

    v. Users will prefer the free version?

           It is likely that once a free, online version of the
           refereed research literature is available, not only those
           researchers who could not access it at all before, because
           of S/L/P-barriers at their institution, but virtually all
           researchers will prefer to use the free online versions.

           Note that it is quite possible that there will always
           continue to be a market for the S/L/P options (on-paper
           version, publisher's on-line PDF, deluxe enhancements) even
           though most users use the free versions. Nothing hangs on
           this.

    vi. Publisher S/L/P revenues shrink, Library S/L/P savings grow?

           But if researchers do prefer to use the free online
           literature, it is possible that libraries may begin to
           cancel journals, and as their S/L/P savings grow, journal
           publisher S/L/P revenues will shrink. The extent of the
           cancellation will depend on the extent to which there
           remains a market for the S/L/P-based add-ons, and for how
           long.

           If the S/L/P market stays large enough, nothing else need
           change.

    vii. Publishers downsize to providers of QC/C service+ optional
    add-ons products?

           It will depend entirely on the size of the remaining market
           for the S/L/P options whether and to what extent journal
           publishers will have to down-size to providing only the
           essentials: The only essential, indispensable service is
           QC/C.

    viii. QC/C service costs funded by author-institution out of
    reader-institution S/L/P savings?

           If publishers can continue to cover costs and make a decent
           profit from the S/L/P-based optional add-ons market, without
           needing to down-size to QC/C provision alone, nothing much
           changes.

           But if publishers do need to abandon providing the S/L/P
           products and to scale down instead to providing only the
           QC/C service, then universities, having saved 100% of their
           annual S/L/P budgets, will have plenty of annual windfall
           savings from which to pay for their own researchers'
           continuing (and essential) annual journal-submission QC/C
           costs (10%); the rest of their savings (90%) they can spend
           as they like (e.g., on books -- plus a bit for Eprint
           Archive maintenance).

So petitions, boycotts and publisher give-aways are unnecessary (apart
from being unlikely to succeed). And the only ostensible obstacle to
the author/institution self-archiving of all ~2M annual refereed papers
in all ~20K refereed journals (apart from author sluggishness!) is
author misperceptions about copyright restrictions, which can likewise
be completely circumvented, legally:

              http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#5
                      5. PostGutenberg Copyright Concerns

    There is a great deal of concern about copyright in the digital
    age, and some of it may not be easily resolvable (e.g., what to do
    about the pirating of software and music). But none of that need
    detain us here, because digital piracy is only a problem for
    non-give-away work, whereas we are concerned here only with
    give-away work. (Again, failing to make the give-away/non-give-away
    distinction leads only to confusion, and the misapplication of the
    much bigger and more representative non-give-away model to the
    anomalous give-away corpus, which it does not fit.)

    The following digital copyright concerns are relevant to the
    non-give-away literature only:

    5.1. Protecting Intellectual Property (royalties)

           This is as much of a concern to authors of books as to
           authors of screenplays, music, and computer programs. It is
           also a concern to performers who have made digital audio or
           video disks of their work. They do not wish to see that work
           stolen; they want their fair share of the gate-receipts in
           return for their talent and efforts in producing the work.

           But the producers of refereed research reports do not wish
           to have protection from "theft" of this kind; on the
           contrary, they wish to encourage it. They have no royalties
           to gain from preventing it; they have only research impact
           to lose from access-blockage of any kind.

    5.2. Allowing Fair Use (user issue)

           "Fair Use" is another worthy concern. It has to do with
           certain sanctioned uses of non-give-away material, such as
           all or parts of books, magazine articles, etc., often for
           teaching purposes; the producers of these works do not wish
           to lose their potential royalty/fee-income from these
           works.

           The producers of refereed research reports, in contrast,
           wish to give their work away; hence fair-use issues are moot
           for this special give-away literature.

    5.3. Preventing Theft of Text (piracy)

           The producers of refereed research reports do not wish to
           prevent the theft of their texts; they wish to facilitate it
           as much as possible. (In the on-paper era they used to
           purchase and mail reprints to requesters at their own
           expense!)

    The following digital copyright concern is relevant to all
    literature, both give-away and non-give-away:

    5.4. Preventing Theft of Authorship (plagiarism)

           No author wants any other author to claim to have been the
           author of his work. This concern is shared by all authors,
           give-away and non-give-away. But it has nothing whatsoever
           to do with concerns about theft-of-text, and should not be
           conflated with such concerns in any way: Give-away work
           need not be held hostage to non-give-away concerns about
           theft-of-text under the pretext of "protecting" it from
           theft-of-authorship. (Unfortunately, many journal publishers
           try to write and use their copyright transfer agreements for
           precisely this purpose, and authors need to become aware of
           it.)

    The following digital copyright concern is relevant to the
    give-away literature only:

    5.5. Guaranteeing Author Give-Away Rights

           Apart from the protection from plagiarism and the assurance
           of priority that all authors seek, the only other
           "protection" the give-away author of refereed research
           reports seeks is protection of his give-away rights!

           (The intuitive model for this is advertisements: what
           advertiser wants to lose his right to give away his ads for
           free, diminishing their potential impact by charging for
           access to them!)

           Well, there is no need for the authors of refereed research
           to worry about exercising their give-away rights, for they
           can do it, legally, even under the most restrictive
           copyright agreement, by using the following strategy.

        http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim
                6. How to get around restrictive copyright legally so
        as to self-archive your own give-away refereed research

                             ("Harnad/Oppenheim strategy")

    6.1. Self-archive the pre-refereeing preprint

    Self-archiving the preprint is the critical first step. Before it
    has even been submitted to a journal, your intellectual property is
    your own, and not bound by any future copyright transfer agreement.
    So archive the preprints (as physicists have done for 10 years now,
    with over 130,000 papers, and cognitive scientists have done for 3
    years now, with over 1000 papers). This is a good way to establish
    priority, elicit informal feedback, and keep a public record of the
    embryology of knowledge.

    [Note that some journals have, apart from copyright policies, which
    are a legal matter,"embargo policies," which are merely policy
    matters (nonlegal). Invoking the " Ingelfinger (Embargo) Rule,"
    some journals state that they will not referee (let alone publish)
    papers that have previously been "made public" in any way, whether
    through conferences, press releases, or on-line self-archiving. The
    Ingelfinger Rule, apart from being directly at odds with the
    interests of research and researchers and having no intrinsic
    justification whatsoever -- other than as a way of protecting
    journals' current revenue streams -- is not a legal matter, and
    unenforceable. So researchers are best advised to ignore it
    completely (Harnad 2000a, 2000b), exactly as the authors of the
    130,000 papers in the Physics Archive have been doing for 10 years
    now. The "Ingelfinger Rule" is under review by journals in any
    case; Nature has already dropped it, and there are indications that
    Science may soon follow suit too.]

    6.2. Submit the preprint for refereeing (revise etc.)

    Nothing changes in author publication practises; nothing needs to
    be given up. Submit your preprint to the refereed journal of your
    choice, and revise it as usual in accordance with the directive of
    the Editor and the advice of the referees.

    6.3. At acceptance, try to fix the copyright transfer agreement to
    allow self-archiving

    Copyright transfer agreements take many forms. Whatever the wording
    is, if it does not explicitly permit online self-archiving, modify
    it so that it does. Here is a sample way to word it
    (http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/copyright.html):

        I hereby transfer to [publisher or journal] all rights to sell
        or lease the text (on-paper and on-line) of my paper
        [paper-title]. I retain only the right to distribute it for
        free for scholarly/scientific purposes, in particular, the
        right to self-archive it publicly online on the Web.


    Some publishers (about 10%) already explicitly allow self-archiving
    of the refereed postprint (e.g., the American Physical Society:
    ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc). Most other publishers
    (perhaps 70%) will also accept this clause, but only if you
    explicitly propose it yourself (they will not formulate it on
    their own initiative).

    6.4. If 6.3 is successful, self-archive the refereed postprint

    Hence, for about 80% of journals, once you have done the above, you
    can go ahead and self-archive your paper.

    Some journals (about 20%), however, will respond that they decline
    to publish your paper unless you sign their copyright transfer
    agreement verbatim. In such cases, sign their agreement and proceed
    to the next step:

    6.5. If 6.3 is unsuccessful, archive the"corrigenda"

    Your pre-refereeing preprint has already been self-archived since
    prior to submission, and is not covered by the copyright agreement,
    which pertains to the revised final ("value-added") draft. Hence
    all you need to do is to self-archive a further file, linked to the
    archived preprint, which simply lists the corrections that the
    reader may wish to make in order to conform the preprint to the
    refereed, accepted version.

    Everyone chuckles at this point, but the reason it is so easy is
    that this is the author give-away literature. No non-give-away
    author would ever dream of doing such a thing (archiving the
    prepublication draft for free, along with the corrigenda). And
    copyright agreements (and copyright law) are designed and conceived
    to meet the much more representative interests of non-give-away
    authors and their much larger body of royalty/fee-based work. Hence
    this simple and legal expedient for the special, tiny, anomalous,
    give-away literature has no constituency anywhere else.

    Yet this simple, risible strategy is also feasible, and legal
    (Oppenheim 2001) -- and sufficient to free the entire current
    refereed corpus of all access/impact barriers immediately!

So, to repeat, the CHE Essay was based on conflating the problem of
stably financing the essentials with the nonproblem of how to
continue funding the optional frills:

    3.1. S/L/P [Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View]:
    The impact/access-barriers
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#3

    S/L/P tolls are the access-barriers, hence the impact-barriers, for
    researchers and their give-away research. S/L/P is the journal
    publisher's means of recovering costs and making a fair profit.
    High costs were inescapable in the expensive and inefficient
    on-paper Gutenberg era; but today, in the on-line PostGutenberg
    era, continuing to do it all the old Gutenberg way, with its high
    costs, must be clearly seen as the optional add-on (for this
    give-away literature only: not for the royalty/fee-based
    literature!) that it has become, rather than as the obligatory
    feature it used to be.

    Beware of the language of obligatory "value-added," with which the
    peer-reviewed literature must, by implication, continue to be
    inextricably wrapped. The only essential service still provided by
    journal publishers (for this anomalous, author-give-away literature
    in the PostGutenberg era) is peer review itself.

    The rest -- on-paper versions, PDF on-line page images, deluxe
    online enhancements -- are all potentially valuable features, to be
    sure, but only as take-it-or-leave-it options. In the on-line era
    there is no longer any necessity, hence no longer any justification
    whatsoever, for continuing to hold the refereed research itself
    hostage to S/L/P tolls and whatever add-ons they happen to pay
    for.

    Beware also of any attempt to trade off S for L or L for P: Pick
    your poison, all three are access-barriers, hence impact-barriers,
    and hence all three must go -- or rather, they must all now become
    only the price-tags for the add-on, deluxe options that they buy
    for the researcher and his institution, but no longer also for the
    peer-reviewed essentials, which can now be self-archived for free
    for all.

    3.2. QC/C [Quality-Control & Certification]: peer review

    Peer review itself is not a deluxe add-on for research and
    researchers: This quality-control service and its certification
    (QC/C) is an essential (Harnad 1998/2000). Without QC/C, the
    research literature would be neither reliable nor navigable, its
    quality uncontrolled, unfiltered, un-sign-posted, unknown,
    unaccountable.

    But the peers who review it for the journals are the researchers
    themselves, and they review it for free, just as the researchers
    report it for free. So it must be made quite clear that the only
    real QC/C cost is that of implementing the peer review, not
    actually performing it.

    Estimates (e.g., Odlyzko 1998) as well as the real experience of
    online-only journals (e.g., Journal of High Energy Physics
    http://jhep.cern.ch/; Psycoloquy
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/) have shown that the QC/C
    implementation cost is quite low -- about 10% of the total amount
    that the world's institutional libraries (or rather, the small
    subset of them that can afford any given journal at all!) are
    currently paying annually per article in S/L/P tolls .

    Once the 90% S/L/P add-ons become optional, the essential 10% QC/C
    cost could easily be paid out of the 100% S/L/P savings -- if ever
    the world's libraries decide they no longer need the add-ons. (The
    other 90% savings can be used to buy other things, e.g., books,
    which are not, and never will be, author give-aways.)

    3.3. Separating (i) QC/C service-provision from (ii) eprint
    access-provision (and from (iii) optional add-ons)

    Researchers need not and should not wait until journal publishers
    voluntarily decide to separate the provision of the essential QC/C
    service from all the other optional add-on products (on-paper
    version, publisher's PDF version, deluxe enhancements) before their
    give-away refereed research can at last be freed of all access- and
    impact-barriers.

    All researchers can free their own refereed research now, virtually
    overnight, by taking the matter into their own hands; they can
    self-archive it in their institutional Eprint Archives:
    http://www.eprints.org. Access to the eprints of their refereed
    research is then immediately freed of all S/L/P barriers, forever.

    3.4. Interoperability: The Open Archive initiative (Oai)

    Papers self-archived by their authors in their institutional Eprint
    Archives can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, with no need to know
    their actual location, because all Eprints Archives are compliant
    with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) meta-data tagging protocol
    for interoperability: http://www.openarchives.org

    Because of their OAI-compliance, the papers in all Eprints Archives
    can be harvested and searched by Open Archive Services such as the
    Cross Archive Searching Service http://arc.cs.odu.edu/, providing
    seamless access to all the eprints, across all the Eprint Archives,
    as if they were all in one global, virtual archive.

    [Excerpt from: Harnad, S. (2001) For Whom the Gate Tolls? How and
    Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through
    Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now.
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm ]

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_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, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

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Received on Tue Oct 09 2001 - 13:22:50 BST

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