Slight correction: The Kurtz STM talk will
be at the Frankfurt Book Fair (all next week)
http://www.stm-assoc.org/conferences/oct182005.php
The Frankfurt Scientific Publishing Meeting
http://www.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/messe/symposium2005/programme.html
follows on from that, over the following weekend.
Stevan Harnad
On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote:
>
> > As far as the 'self-archiving' route to OA is concerned, I must have
> > explained our concern a hundred times; let me spell it out yet again:
> >
> > Let us assume that self-archiving mandates become widespread, and that
> > tools such as Google Scholar make self-archived articles as easy to
> > discover as the published versions.
> >
> > Then if free substitute versions are available for all or most of the
> > content of a given journal, and if these are used by library patrons in
> > preference to the published version, the rational librarian will not
> > purchase the published version
>
> But if, as all the studies to date show, library patrons use the library
> licensed published version for those articles that their libraries can
> afford, and use the author's self-archived OA version for those they
> cannot, what is Sally's and ALPSP's rationale for keeping them deprived of
> the articles their libraries cannot afford? and for keeping the authors
> of those articles deprived of that usage and impact? Is the rationale
> that the need to protect publishers' from any possibility of risk of
> a decline in subscription revenues (for which there does not yet exist
> even a single shred of evidence today ) takes precedence over all these
> author and user needs -- over all of these *research* needs?
>
> Nor do subscriptions and cancellations depend primarily on the "rational
> librarian": they depend on their user/author communities, who are not
> calling for cancellations, but for access to what their libraries cannot
> afford, and for the impact that their own articles lose, from users at other
> institutions whose libraries cannot afford the journal they were published
> in.
>
> > If subscriptions fall dramatically, journals will no longer be viable and
> > will cease publication
>
> Repeating this "a hundred times" and a hundred times more does not make it one
> whit more a statement of actual fact, rather than the counterfactual "if/then"
> conjecture that it is, and continues to be, with not a shred of evidence to
> support the "if."
>
> I advise Sally to attend the STM session in Frankfurt next week in which
> Michael Kurtz of astrophysics of Harvard will be presenting the data
> of Edwin Henneken on usage by astrophysicists, showing how they switch
> from using the preprint to using the publisher's published version as
> soon as it is available -- except those who cannot afford access, who
> continue to use the self-archived postprint.
>
> http://www.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/messe/symposium2005/programme.html
>
> > If journals are no longer there to carry out their current functions (not
> > just the management of peer review, but also
> > selection/refinement/collection of content of particular relevance to a
> > given community of interest) that will be a great loss to scholarship
>
> So would every other negative if/then counterfactual that I or Sally
> or Pascal or anyone else could dream up, but that doesn't make their
> if-premises any truer either, not even after being repeated thousands
> of times. And the more use raise the hypothetical ante, the more ominous
> it sounds -- without becoming one bit truer.
>
> "Pascal's Wager and Open Access"
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/21-guid.html
>
> So let me say it straight out: All evidence is that what is in the best interests of
> the research community and what is in the best interests of the publisher community
> can co-exist peacefully with self-archiving. But if there ever were a conflict of
> interest, there is no doubt whatsoever about the direction in which it would have
> to be resolved: the dog (research production), not the tail (research publishing).
>
> > I do not argue that society or indeed other publishers have any right to
> > continue to perform their current function. I'm just pointing out that they
> > may be unable to do so if self-archiving sweeps the board as some would
> > like it to do. That is why we are urging caution to those who would
> > mandate immediate self-archiving.
>
> Self-archiving mandates are not for "sweeping the board," they are
> for providing access to those researchers who *actually* can't afford
> it today, and thereby providing their lost impact to the research and
> researchers that are actually losing it today. The sweepingly overboard
> statements about counterfactual disaster scenarios, in contrast, are
> coming from those who are trying to protect actual, unchanged publisher
> revenue streams from counterfactual, hypothetical risk, at the cost of
> certain and sizeable benefits to research, researchers, their institutions,
> their funders, and the public that funds their research -- i.e., the canid
> rather than its queue.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
Received on Thu Oct 13 2005 - 22:14:56 BST