RE: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:46:24 +0100 (BST)

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Velterop, Jan, Springer UK wrote:

> Peter Hirtle is right. Since a long time I have held the view
> that -- at least in the realm of peer-reviewed research
> publication -- copyright, particularly its transfer from author
> to publisher, is essentially used as a proxy for money. Often
> combined with real money in the form of e.g. page charges.
> Together, the transfer of copyright and real money charges are
> the price an author pays for the service of having his research
> formally published in a peer-review journal, which he needs,
> inter alia, for career and prospective funding purposes.

Actually (lest we forget), it's journal subscriptions that are paying for
all that. (And what the researcher/author needs in the online era is just
peer review. And that's what he's "paying" for by letting the publisher
charge to sell his work through the subscriptions, without even having
to pay a penny of royalties to the author. And that's also what the
peers are providing their review services (free) to the publisher to help
subsidize. Jan's long-held view is a complacent one: It makes it seem
as if the author and the referees are all supplicants to the publisher...)

> One could see the use of copyright as a proxy for money as
> inappropriate, but certainly in the print era it was a pragmatic
> and workable way of supporting the system of peer-reviewed formal
> research journals. Copyright, the property of the publisher after
> transfer, was converted into real money by exploiting the
> exclusive right to sell (access to) the material.

In the print era, subscription tolls were necessary in order to provide
access at all. And paper distribution and access was costly. In the
online era publishers are no longer needed in order to provide access.
They are only needed to provide (i.e., implement) peer review.

> In the web world, the situation is different. First of all,
> authors can quite easily disseminate their articles themselves on
> the web. That doesn't make them formally published in a
> peer-reviewed journal, but it does the job of spreading the
> knowledge. This is what preprints do, or at least can do
> (terribly antiquated word, 'preprints', but let's ignore that for
> now).

To repeat, what authors want is peer review. Peers review for free. The
publisher manages the process. In exchange they get to sell the paper
and online edition without even having to pay author royalties -- but
not to block the author from giving away his own work to those would-be
users who can't afford subscription access.

> Remains the issue of formal, official, publishing in a
> peer-reviewed journal. On the 'other planet' authors seem to
> expect publishers of journals to formally publish their articles
> in peer-reviewed journals (the reputations of which often took a
> long time to build up) for free, and to regard it as a right
> subsequently to be able just to add the label "formally published
> in journal XYZ" to their preprints in order to give those the
> needed authority and trustworthiness. The "Hop on the bus, Gus,
> the other suckers have paid for us" school of thought.

Jan seems to keep forgetting that on this planet publishers are making
ends meet, handily, by selling subscriptions.

> Open access is fundamentally incompatible with the use of
> copyright as a proxy for money to pay for formal peer-reviewed
> publication. I favour the transition to paying with plain money,
> and open access will be the entirely natural outcome of that.
> Technical and procedural problems exist, to be sure. But if the
> choice is between trying to solve those or to evade or even deny
> them, my vote goes to solving them.

As I have replied to Jan many, many times before, publishers can and
will be paid for peer review once researchers' institutions are no longer
being paid for it many times over by subscriptions (but not before). The
institutional subscription savings windfall will pay for the peer review
many times over. Right now, though, subscriptions are still paying the
(entire) bill (and its for a lot more than peer review). And authors can
and will and should already provide access to their work to all would-be
users who cannot afford the subscription access. Research is funded
and conducted for usage and impact, not in order to keep supporting
publishers in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Thu Aug 23 2007 - 02:46:34 BST