Journal publishing and author self-archiving:
Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration
Or: No, Mandating Self-Archiving Is Not Like Invading Iraq!
On Sun, 24 Dec 2006, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
> Stevan, you seem averse to speculation, but I'd like to propose
> that speculation - at least, informed speculation - has an important
> role to play in planning. "Worst case scenario" planning is
> frequently used in business, in the military, etc., and for good
> reason, especially for those who are risk-averse.
Sandy, I was not averse to speculation for the first 5 years, 1994-1999,
but the next 5 years (see again the links at the end of this message)
seemed rather over the top, especially since the handwriting has been
quite prominently on the wall all along.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm
So by all means plan for the worst-case scenario (H3), but meanwhile,
self-archiving and self-archiving mandates, already long overdue, need
to proceed apace.
> It appears that
> the Bush administration didn't do enough of this kind of
> speculating when it ordered the invasion of Iraq, confident that
> its assumption of controlled change to an orderly democratic
> society was correct. We all know what happened as a result!
The analogy's a bit shrill! Nor is it clear what the counterpart of
invading Iraq is meant to be: If it's mandating self-archiving, I'm
afraid I would have to reject the analogy as pure alarmism. If the only
point is that publishers need to plan ahead for a worst-case scenario
(H3), by all means, they should do that (and in my prior replies in
this thread I gave some rather obvious suggestions on how to go about
doing that).
> What I am hypothesizing for the transition to OA is more the kind of
> short-term chaos that has transpired in Iraq than the smooth
> transition to a functioning new system that you are counting on.
I continue to see gradual change (H2) as far more probable than sudden
change, for many, many reasons I have listed before, but we are repeating
ourselves: If publishers think sudden change (H3) more likely, then by
all means let them plan for sudden change! The steps to be taken for
that have also been listed before in this exchange (modularizing,
hybridising, etc.).
What I am afraid I would have to reject completely, however, is any
attempt to frighten research institutions or funders out of mandating
self-archiving on the grounds of H3. It is for publishers to plan to
adapt to H3, not for the research community to refrain from mandating
self-archiving, and its sure benefits to research, in order to forestall
the hypothetical possibility of H3. H3 is merely sudden change, not
ruination. It is planning and adaptation on the part of the publishing
community that needs to be done to forestall ruination (on H3); it is
not for the research community to forswear its own reachable access and
impact potential instead. Research publishing is done in the service of
research, not vice versa.
> I'm urging university administrators not to make the same mistake
> that the Bush administration did!
Sandy, it is pure alarmism to liken mandating self-archiving to the
invasion of Iraq! I strongly urge you to take a more rational and
practical tack.
> As for the conflation of costs for supporting OA journals and
> costs for supporting editorial offices on university campuses, I
> admit that I wasn't thinking so much of BMC, PLoS, etc., as being
> the model for the future as you evidently are.
I wonder why not? H3 is the hypothesis that mandated self-archiving will
cause sudden change in the form of the collapse of subscriptions. If OA
publishing is not to be the way to cover costs, then you should state
your alternative way. Renouncing self-archiving and its benefits is not
an alternative.
> Given the steep
> increases in fees that those two OA publishers have recently
> instituted, it isn't clear to me that they are viable models for
> the long run, or will be around for many more years. (Foundation
> funding is usually short term, and PLoS has survived largely on
> that kind of funding so far.)
The reason OA publishing is having trouble making ends meet today is
very simple: it is the fact that conditions today all still support
Hypothesis H1 (no change). While subscriptions are still covering
costs for most journals, and while the available funds being spent
by institutions on journals are still concentrated almost 100% on
subscriptions, OA journals will have trouble making ends meet (by
charging publication fees), and are essentially treading water.
But on your own hypothesis of sudden collapse of subscriptions (H3),
the situation changes radically for OA journals, and their chances of
making ends meet from publication fees (plus the funds available to pay
those fees) suddenly skyrocket hand in hand with the sudden collapse of
subscriptions, again on your own hypothesis.
> I also suspect-though I do not
> know- that the vast majority of 2,500 OA journals listed in the
> directory are "mom and pop" operations run out of editorial
> offices based on campuses, rather than parts of larger BMC-type
> operations.
You are quite right that most of the OA journals are not of the calibre
of PLoS and BMC. (Nor, for that matter, are most non-OA journals.) There
are many low-budget, cottage-industry journals, and a number of them
come and go every year.
> It was these journals I was thinking about, and
> supposing that the migration would mainly be handled by
> individual editors of journals abandoned by commercial
> publishers, who most likely would turn to their own universities
> first for support before seeking out a BMC (if any still exists
> at that point in time).
Migrating journals might go to commercial OA publishers (like BMC and
Hindawi), learned society OA publishers, university OA publishers,
independent non-profit OA publishers (like PLoS); or some may try to
do it mom-and-pop style. This is all speculation too, but nothing much
hangs on it. The relevant question is: How much will journals still
have to do, once the print edition is gone, the online edition is gone,
access-provision, storage and preservation are all off-loaded onto the
network of institutional IRs, subscriptions are gone (H3), and only peer
review (including editing) remains to be done, and paid for? How much
will that cost, and how will it be paid for? (One thing is for sure:
It can only cost less -- and substantially less -- then what it costs
to do it all today.)
> Many of the large commercial publishers now provide substantial
> funding for the operation of editorial offices on campus. This is
> the funding that will disappear and need to be replaced. It is
> not just for administrative support. Editors are also paid for
> their work. Will all of them be willing to continue dedicating
> their time when they are not being paid?
We are speculating now about what the residual cost will be after
downsizing to OA publishing alone: It will be whatever it will be,
but it will be a good deal less than what it is now, because so many
products and services will have been phased out or offloaded onto the IR
network. And whatever the residual cost of the essentials turns out to
be, that is the cost that will have to be recovered out of OA publishing
costs. And the funds out of which it will be covered are the institutional
subscription savings (H3), which are currently already covering all
those costs several times over.
> And what about
> copyediting? You nowhere mention this as a cost, and it can be
> significant. In my experience, very few academic editors are able
> to do line editing very well (nor should they spend their
> valuable time doing so anyway), and very little of academic
> writing is not in need of editing. (I understand that the British
> have a different attitude about copyediting, but in the U.S. it
> is generally valued a lot, and expected, by most authors.) I
> speak from experience here, as I did copyediting full-time for
> the first three years of my publishing career and continued it
> part-time for another twenty years. If you abandon copyediting,
> you will have a significantly degraded product. Good copyediting
> comes at a cost, though, at about $25 an hour.
It is an empirical question whether copy-editing will be part of
the downsized OA publishing essentials. (The one substantive finding
of the PRC study was was that librarians don't seem to set much store by
copy-editing in their acquisition/cancellation criteria.) To the extent
that copy-editing continues to be part of the downsized OA publishing
essentials, it will be paid for, on the OA publishing cost-recovery
model, out of the institutional subscription savings, per outgoing
article published. (How many hours of copy-editing do you estimate an
article needs, at $25 per hour, in the online age?)
> Yes, author fees can cover this cost, too, but your model for
> transferring costs from libraries to on-campus editorial offices
> or BMC-type publishers assumes a smooth transfer. Have you had
> any experience in university administration? Nothing works that
> smoothly in universities, I assure you. A one-to-one transfer of
> library serials expenditures to faculty publishing fees is no
> simple matter, nor is there any guarantee that the funds freed up
> by cancelled subscriptions would migrate directly to author fees
> anyway. There are plenty of other uses to which such funds might
> be put. Libraries have multiple needs, and supporting faculty
> publication may not immediately be at the top of their lists.
> Even today, when costs might be seemingly passed on easily to
> faculty who avail themselves of library e-reserve operations, it
> doesn't happen because the administrative costs of such transfers
> are perceived by some libraries as steeper than the costs of
> paying for all e-reserve permission fees themselves.
On your own hypothesis of sudden change (H3), two things will
happen, suddenly, and at exactly the same time: sudden collapse of
institutional subscriptions and sudden institutional windfall savings
on subscriptions. Necessity is the mother of invention; with journals
suddenly unable to make ends meet, and obliged to charge for publication
on the OA model, and institutional authors suddenly obliged to pay to
publish, it will not be lost on anyone that authors' own institutions
have the sudden windfall resources from which to pay for their sudden
rainfall of costs.
(I think you are perhaps getting carried away with free speculation if you
feel that it is part of the "worst case scenario" that universities are
simply too thick to see that they must transfer some of their windfall
subscription savings to their authors' sudden rainfall of OA publishing
needs under these acute conditions. Such oversights are among the pitfalls
of unconstrained speculation!)
> Your model also assumes that subscription savings will balance
> out author fees at any given university. That is a very big
> assumption to make. Yes, the most active authors are probably at
> the most research-intensive universities, but I doubt there is
> any one-to-one correspondence. Some universities may find that
> they have to spend much more in author fees than they save in
> subscriptions, whereas others may find the reverse. Also, I
> suspect that, to the extent this correspondence exists in
> science, it exists much less so in the humanities and social
> sciences. Over time we have found in university press publishing
> that there has been a very significant dispersion of talent to
> non-ARL campuses, such that we are publishing many more authors
> from second- and third-tier universities and colleges than we
> did, say, twenty or thirty years ago. The savings from
> subscription cancellations on those campuses may well not come
> close to covering author fees for their faculty, who will thereby
> be disadvantaged in getting their writing published unless their
> universities can tap some other source of revenue for that
> purpose.
(On this question of net provider vs. net consumer institutions, both for
subscriber journal input and for published article output, please do the
google search:
site:www.ecs.soton.ac.uk amsci net providers consumers
discussion already began in 1999!)
There is every reason to expect that savings and costs will balance out
comfortably. The two main reasons are these:
(1) There is undoubtedly a high correlation between the size of an
institution's research output and the size of an institution's research
journal intake.
(2) Downsizing means that substantially less money will be changing hands
(costs will probably be less than a third of today's expenditure). This
means there is a 2:1 buffer against any net-journal-consumer
net-article-provider imbalances).
> Now, you might say, OA journals will take these inequities into
> account and charge lower fees to such authors, or waive them
> altogether. But then you introduce a whole new level of
> administrative cost into the system because there has to be some
> way to verify "hardship" cases, especially if you are dealing
> with authors in this country and not from some very poor
> developing countries. If all this is done on the "honor" system,
> you open the system to a significant level of corruption and
> free-riding. Moreover, the costs still have to be paid, and this
> scenario would mean that the wealthier universities would again
> be supporting the cost of the whole system that benefits
> everyone, as they do now for university presses.
The research-active institutions will pay the lion's share of the research
publication costs because they do the lion's share of the research. They
also pay the lion's share of the subscriptions today, and hence will have
the lion's share of the savings out of which to pay for OA publishing. The
problem of authors from poor institutions and the problem of unaffiliated
authors is a small minority problem in the OA world, and it will
be solved, in very obvious ways. In any case, it is not part of the
sudden-change scenario (H3) that we are contemplating here, which was
supposed to be about the hypothetical hardships of *publishers* struggling
to make ends meet after the hypothetical sudden collapse of subscriptions,
not about the hypothetical hardships of *authors* from poor institutions,
struggling to pay OA publishing costs.
(No publisher is worrying about the hardships of all those researchers
worldwide who cannot afford access today; OA is the remedy for those
researchers. Let publishers not now -- as a pretext for continuing to
deny researchers that remedy -- plead that it is in order to protect
those same researchers as authors that the access is to continue to
be denied! That would be the tail wagging -- or rather restraining --
the dog, and the tune would not ring true!)
> You're also assuming that library fees would be readily
> transferred outside the university to publishers like BMC or
> society OA publishers through author fees. That would introduce
> yet another level of complexity into the system, as I do not
> share your assumption that universities would as readily allow
> transfer of funds to such an entity as they would to another
> university-based publisher.
Sandy, I think you already said this once above -- that universities
will not redirect incoming subscription savings to outgoing publication
costs: The answer is that of course it is not "complex" and of course they
will. (And they will pay the author's chosen journal; it is irrelevant who
the publisher is -- commercial, learned-society, university, independent
non-profit, or mom-pop: Relevant only is the author's choice of journal.)
> Procedures would no doubt be
> instituted for evaluating such "external" publishers, similar to
> procedures that already exist to vet bids from faculty who need
> publication subventions for their monographs.
Why on earth would you imagine this, Sandy? It is research funders and
research performance evaluation committees that pass judgment on the
author's choice of journals, as they always did.
> I should also point
> out that the subvention system for monograph publishing, despite
> a clearly understood and documented need, is very fragmented and
> scattershot. Many large and wealthy universities will not provide
> such subventions at all, whereas some small colleges do. And at
> some universities that have no centralized funds, some individual
> departments will subsidize their faculty whereas others will not.
But we are not talking about monographs; we are talking about refereed
journals (the very first and most important of the five PostGutenberg
distinctions underlying OA):
Distinguish the non-give-away literature from the give-away literature
http://cogprints.org/1639/01/resolution.htm#1.1
> There is no rhyme or reason to the "system" as it exists today,
> and I wouldn't expect it to be any different with respect to
> supporting faculty who need to pay for journal articles to be
> published. If you want "evidence" of what exists today in order
> to predict the future, here it is, and it doesn't lend any
> credence to your scenario!
I'm afraid I can't follow that argument at all. Yes, there's a lot of
irrationality, always. But there are occasional flashes of practicality
too. And necessity is the mother of invention. OA, and its benefits,
are within the research community's immediate, practical reach, via
self-archiving mandates. I don't think you have given the research
community any reason at all not to grasp what is within its reach.
> So, my message boils down to this: assumptions matter, and they
> need to be examined carefully, and planning done accordingly to
> avoid the worst possibilities that could ensue.
By all means. And let the publishing community plan for the worst-case
scenario (H3) if it deems it probable. But it is not for research
institutions and research funders to refrain from grasping the OA that
is within their reach in order to immunise the publishing community from
the risk of the possibility of H3.
> My observation of
> efforts by universities to change the tenure-and-promotion system
> over four decades in the face of obvious dysfunction doesn't make
> me optimistic that universities can bring about even gradual
> change very easily, let alone swift and comprehensive change!
This is incomparably simpler. All universities need to do is mandate a few
extra keystrokes per year, for record-keeping purposes; and their mandates
will be backed up by the mandates of their research funders. Nothing
radical or complicated; just some simple administrative practices,
already quite natural in the online era.
Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the
Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
Best wishes, Stevan
Pertinent Prior AmSci Subject Threads:
"Savings from Converting to On-Line-Only: 30%- or 70%+ ?"
(Started Aug 27 1998)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#3
"The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition" (Started Sep 1998!)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0077.html
"The Logic of Page Charges to Free the Journal Literature"
(Started April 29 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#211
"2.0K vs. 0.2K" (Started May 7 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#229
"Online Self-Archiving: Distinguishing the Optimal from the
Optional" (Started May 11 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#249
"The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)"
(Started July 5 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#304
"Separating Quality-Control Service-Providing from
Document-Providing" (Started November 30 1999)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#467
"Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons"
(Started July 2001)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#1438
"Author Publication Charge Debate" (Started June 28 2001)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#1388
"JHEP will convert from toll-free-access to toll-based access"
(Started January 5 2002)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#1813
"The True Cost of the Essentials" (Started April 2 2002)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#1974
"The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review - NOT!)"
(Started April 1 2002)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#1966
"Journal expenses and publication costs" (Started January 10 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#2590
"Scientific publishing is not just about administering peer-review"
(Started October 15 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#3069
"The Economics of Open Access Journal Publishing"
(Started November 3 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#3142
"The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition"
(Started January 7 2004)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#3379
Received on Sun Dec 24 2006 - 20:50:39 GMT