> On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
>
> The technology and economics of the internet mean that the marginal
> costs of disseminating research articles are decreasingly rapidly. By
> comparison, the digital doubling of research articles by way of
> institutional repositories is cumbersome, time consuming and expensive. It
> needs to be mandated. And then policed Why bother?
Because converting journals to OA publishing requires the willingness of the journals
to convert, and that willingness is not there (with good reason, as the experiment
puts their current revenue streams at risk, and it is not at all clear whether the
model will scale, and is sustainable).
And because OA is for the benefit of researchers; and it is by and for researchers
that research is provided. So mandating self-archiving can and is being done, and
has already been demonstrated to work successfully. No "policing" necessary, just a
formal mandate.
Nor is either self-archiving -- or the mandating of self-archiving --
either cumbersome, time-consuming or expensive.
What is cumbersome and time-consuming is waiting and trying to convert
journals to OA publishing, one by one, instead of researchers just
providing OA by and for themselves.
And it is for the journals, not the researchers, that converting to OA
publishing is risky and expensive. For if journals ever do eventually
convert, then the institutional subscription cancellation savings will
be more than enough to cover OA publication costs. It's just that
journals will not take the risk of converting of their own accord,
and they certainly cannot be mandated to do it.
(A self-archiving mandate for researchers might possibly set the
cancellation process into motion, but that is not the objective of OA:
The objective of OA is OA, and self-archiving mandates will already have
provided it.)
> [Some] OA advocates..
> think that they must either archive all the peer-reviewed journals
> again in OA (in which case national licenses, implemented worldwide,
> would surely be cheaper and quicker in converting research articles into
> a public good)
It is not journals that are self-archived by authors, it is each author's
own journal articles, in their own institutional repositories. That is
the obvious and optimal way to *supplement* non-OA access with OA access
for those would-be users who cannot afford the non-OA access. It is not
a *substitute* for journal publishing.
National licenses are a non-starter: Not only would they be encouraging
oligopoly, but they would be spending non-existent money (poached from
research funds?) to pay for what is already being paid for via subscriptions
today. What is needed now is OA, not a means of funding what is already
funded. (If and when that generates unsustainable cancellation pressure,
that is the time to talk about redirecting funds from what is saved to
cover publication costs.)
> or else clone the traditional journal online but charge
> the author
The traditional journal is already cloned online (virtually all journals are
hybrid today) and the only issue is, once again, conversion to OA publishing:
Publishers cannot and need not be cloned or coerced into converting. If research,
researchers, their institutions and their funders want and need OA so much -- and
they do -- then OA self-archiving need simply be mandated.
> Both solutions are neither creative nor adequate: they are fundamentally
> incompatible with the technology and economy of the internet. The WWW
> Galaxy means that dissemination is cheap and certification is expensive -
> a reversal of the premises of the Gutenberg Galaxy, in which peer review
> was cheap and printing costly.
Peers review for free and the cost of peer review has gone down, not
up, in the online age. But peer review is implemented by autonomous,
answerable journals, with answerable track-records for quality. Apart
from the Gutenberg-era function of text-generation and access-provision,
now obsolescent, journals are merely peer-review service-providers and
certifiers. But the demand for the journal's official paper and online
editions has not yet subsided, so it is all wrapped in one non-OA product,
paid for by subscription/licenses.
Unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get journals to convert
to OA publishing (at a rate faster than the glacial rate at which they
are concerting now), it is better to step aside and let the self-archiving
mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe.
And unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get researchers
to self-archive voluntarily,, it is better to step aside and let the
self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the
universe. (Theorizing about the severing of peer review from access-provision
own't do it!)
> Surely, it is important to think through the consequences for open access
> to research articles? It seems amazing that OA advocates would go about
> re-erecting price barriers by ignoring the possibility of providing
> publishing services that are free to readers and authors -- like ArXiv,
> SSRN, RePEc.
Arxiv, SSRN and RePec (and CogPrints, and Citeseer, and OAIster and
Google Scholar) are not publishing services, they are access-provision
mechanisms. That is the very same thing what author self-archiving in
Institutional Repositories -- and institutional and funder mandates to
do so -- amounts to. And all those articles continue to be submitted to
and published in peer-reviewed journals. Those are all supplements to --
not substitutes for -- journal publishing.
OA publishing is indeed a substitute for non-OA publishing, but not nearly
enough publishers are doing it, and there's no way to mandate them to do it.
And it would be absurd for the research community to wait until they do,
since they can mandate *themselves* to provide OA by supplementing non-OA
access with self-archived OA access, immediately.
I agree that author charges today are premature.
> Indeed, how do we justify author charges of USD 1000, 2000 or even 3000
> per article when there is positive proof that open access to research
> articles may be had for USD 1, 2 or 3 per article?
No one needs to justify them: Those authors who can pay them, and wish
to, should go ahead and pay them. Those who cannot, should self-archive
(and their institutions and funders should mandate they do it, extending
their existing publish-or-perish mandate to publish-and-self-archive, for
the good of the research, researchers, their institutions, their funders
and the public that funds them, and for whose benefit the research is
being performed).
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
Received on Thu Nov 02 2006 - 11:40:03 GMT