PRIMER ON PEER REVIEW, PAYMENT AND PUBLISHING
Stevan Harnad
Canada Research Chair
Institute of Cognitive Sciences
Universite du Quebec a Montreal
and
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Hyperlinked version of this essay:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/284-guid.html
As there is a concerted disinformation campaign now underway on the
part of some (but not all) members of the Association of American
Publishers (AAP), faithfully following the high-priced pit-bull script
that AAP purchased from corporate image trouble-shooter Eric Dezenhall
in January 2007 for the express purpose of combating Open Access, I
would like to bring some simple home truths to the attention of all
interested parties (for free):
(1) PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL-ARTICLE AUTHORS GIVE JOURNALS THEIR ARTICLES
FOR FREE: NO ROYALTIES. The authors of peer-reviewed journal articles,
unlike all other authors, donate their articles to journal publishers
for free, allowing the publisher to sell their articles for a
(subscription) fee that goes exclusively to the publisher: Not a
penny of royalty revenue, salaries or fees is sought or received by
these authors (or their funders, or their employers) out of the total
income that their publishers earn from selling their articles. This
is not "work for hire." The only thing these authors ask in exchange
for granting to their publishers the right to sell their articles
is peer review, to ensure and certify their article's quality.
The authors' research and writings are funded by government research
grants and/or by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).
(2) PEERS REVIEW FOR FREE. The peers who review the papers that
these authors submit to journals likewise donate their expertise
and time for free. Not a penny of compensation for their services
is sought or received by the peer reviewers (or their employers)
from the journal publisher. The only thing the peers ask in return
for donating their services to the journal is a fair management of
the peer review process, in order to ensure and certify quality.
The peers' reviewing work and time are funded by salaries from their
employers (mostly universities).
(3) PUBLISHER REVENUES FROM INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE CURRENTLY
PAYING THE FULL COST OF MANAGING THE PEER REVIEW, SEVERAL TIMES OVER.
The cost of managing the peer review process is recovered by the
journal publisher out of a small portion of the income earned from
selling subscriptions to the paper and online edition of the journal
(mostly to authors' institutions).
That is the status quo today: The costs of managing peer review are
covered, many times over, by selling -- mostly to the authors'
institutions -- paper and online access to the articles donated for
free by the authors, with the peer review donated for free by the
peers.
These authors, however (who are also the peers, as well as the users,
and whose progress and careers depend on the uptake of their research
by other author/researchers) have never been satisfied with leaving
their research accessible only to those users whose institutions could
afford subscription access to the journal in which it was published.
In the paper era, if a would-be user lacked subscription access, they
would write to the author to request a reprint, which the author would
then mail to the requester, at the author's own expense.
Then email made it faster and cheaper to send eprints to requesters by
email. And finally the web made it possible to self-archive the eprint
in the author's institutional repository, making it openly accessible
to all would-be users who could not afford access to the publisher's
version, without the bottle-neck of an email exchange. This is called
Open Access Self-Archiving or "Green OA."
The funder and university Green OA mandates that are the target of the
anti-OA lobby are simply the effort on the part of researchers funders
and universities to maximize the benefits of the research that they
themselves have funded and salaried, by ensuring that all of it is
deposited in an OA repository, freely accessible online to all those
would-be users webwide who cannot afford paid access.
Sixty-two percent of journals have already endorsed this new means of
maximizing access to research in the online era, while 38% still seek
to block or embargo access. But this is not what the anti-OA lobbying
is about, because the proposed and adopted funder and university Green
OA mandates can allow access embargoes (with semi-automatized email
eprint request buttons to tide over access needs during the embargo
period).
The anti-OA lobbying is instead based on the remarkable (and alarming)
claim that OA mandates will destroy peer review, and thereby
scientific quality.
But just a little reflection should make not only the falsity but the
self-servingness of this claim completely transparent:
(4) IF INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE EVER CANCELED, PEER REVIEW
MANAGEMENT COSTS WILL BE PAID OUT OF THE INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
CANCELLATION SAVINGS. If and when institutional subscriptions were
ever canceled unsustainably as a consequence of Green OA, the cost
of peer review could easily be paid for directly by institutions, on
behalf of their employees, per paper submitted, out of just a fraction
of the very same funds they have saved from their institutional
subscription cancellations. All access and archiving would then be
provided by the network of institutional OA repositories instead of
the publisher, who would only provide the peer review. This is called
"OA publishing" or "Gold OA."
The Gold OA cost-recovery model is premature today, when there is
still a healthy demand for the paper edition and the publisher's
online edition. But it is the natural and obvious answer to the
question of what will pay for managing peer review if and when that
demands disappears and subscriptions become unsustainable.
Hence what the anti-OA lobby is actually worrying about is the loss of
their subscription revenues, not the loss of peer review. So far,
however, there is no evidence that Green OA has caused any
subscription cancellations at all. The demand for both the paper
edition and the publisher's online edition are still healthy. But the
real question is whether the demonstrable benefits of OA to research,
researchers, their institutions, their funders and the general public
are to be renounced in order to protect journal publishers from a
possible risk to their revenue streams.
This is not about peer review at all, but about an industry trying to
resist adapting to technological developments in the online era merely
in order to maximize its own interests, at the expense of the public
interest.
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Sat Sep 01 2007 - 00:27:47 BST