On Tue, 13 May 2008, Sandy Thatcher, President, American Association
of University Publishers [AAUP] wrote:
> > SH: And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall
> > savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.
>
> I wish I had as much faith as Stevan that the "of course" follows from his
> preceding argument. The cynic in me says that it is just as likely that
> universities will use the "windfall savings" to expand their football
> stadiums!
>
> Maybe universities in Britain act "rationally" in this way to move
> available
> funds toward supporting research as a top priority. The history of higher
> education in the U.S. suggests that this is not always the top priority
> that
> probably everyone on this listserv would wish it to be.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention. The plain fact is that there is no
necessity for universities to face this question now. And (unless it is
an oxymoron or some other mis-trope to say so) there is no necessity to
pre-empt that necessity, by "committing" to anything at all, in advance.
The academic rule -- and for research universities, it definitely
trumps football fields, otherwise we are talking about the forces that
trump research itself, and that's beyond both our reaches -- is Publish
or Perish. Today, in the non-OA world, publishing is paid for by the
subscriber university, not by the author university (though they are
largely the same university).
Hence, the only thing missing today is OA (and perhaps football fields),
not the university's unnecessary advance commitment to pay (journal)
publishers for anything else at all. Journal publishers are being paid
in full for what they are selling today, and the universities are the
buyers. Anything more would simply be double-dipping at this time.
Self-archiving mandates are providing universities, their researchers and
research with exactly what they are missing today: OA. OA (in case it is
not already evident by now) is simply the natural online-age extension
of Publish or Perish: The reason universities already mandate that their
researchers have their research peer-reviewed and published is that
unpublished, unvalidated research is no research at all: it leads to no
benefits to anyone, neither knowledge fans nor football fans. Unvalidated,
unpublished research, sitting in a desk drawer, may as well not have
been done at all. No one can access it, use it, apply it, build upon it.
And research that may as well not have been done at all may as well not
have been funded at all, by either the university or the tax-payer.
So we have Publish or Perish, and in the online age, we have Self-Archive
to Flourish, because unnecessary access-barriers are unnecessary barriers
to using, applying and building upon research. Toll-access today is just
a bigger desk-drawer.
Toll-booths were necessary in the paper era, to pay the essential
costs of generating and disseminating hard copies. (That -- plus peer
review -- was what "publishing" meant, way back then.) But today, in
the online era, the essential costs of making research accessible to
any would-be user webwide reduce to just the costs of implementing peer
review -- and those costs (and then some) are currently being paid in
full by university journal subscriptions, thank you very much!
So Ian Russell (Chief Executive, ALPSP) is quite mistaken to call
his old Alma Mater, the University of Southampton, a "parasite" for
having been the first university in the world to adopt an "unfunded"
Green OA self-archiving mandate (beginning with the mandate of
Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science in 2001,
now university-wide).
What Southampton (and, since then, over twenty universities and
departments, including, Harvard, twice) as well as over twenty research
funding agencies (starting with the UK parliamentary Science and Technology
Committee's mandate recommendation in 2003, and lately including ERC and
NIH) have done in mandating Green OA for their own research output is not
parasitic by any stretch -- while universities continue to pay the costs
of publication through subscriptions. Indeed, such mandates could only
be "funded" if universities were foolish enough to fund double-dipping
by publishers (which Ian rightly disavows).
So, as I said, things would only begin to be parasitic if universities
elected not to pay for the costs of publishing their own research *once
those publishing costs were no longer being covered by subscriptions*
(from *other* universities).
For if (research) universities elected to build football fields out
of their windfall subscription cancellation savings even after the
(hypothetical OA-induced) collapse of subscriptions as the means of
covering the (sole remaining essential) cost of peer-reviewed journal
publishing (i.e., peer review), then research, researchers, and research
universities would simply perish: Publish or Perish.
If this extinction is indeed fated to happen, please blame football, force
majeure, not OA, or university parasitism! But until and unless football
really does prevail in the Academy [I'm not claiming it couldn't!],
trust that if push ever comes to shove, the Publish or Perish Mandate
itself will see to it that the pennies from the universities' windfall
subscription cancellation savings that need to be redirected to pay for
the true remaining costs of peer-reviewing their own research output can
and will indeed be so redirected. Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
But the point is that there is no Necessity -- hence no Parasitism
-- *now*.
Just a pressing need for universities to put a long-overdue end to their
needless daily, weekly, monthly, yearly research impact loss, cumulating,
foolishly, gratuitously, and irretrievably, since at least the 1990's.
This will of course all be obvious -- belatedly but blindingly -- to
historians in hindsight. To quote the wag (in 1999, in an "Opinion
piece [that did]... not necessarily reflect the views of D-Lib Magazine,
the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, or DARPA"):
"I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade
of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on
our planet, it may chuckle at us..."
http://dlib.ejournal.ascc.net/dlib/december99/12harnad.html
So the big lesson that still remains to be learned is the universities':
it is they (not publishers) who needlessly delayed (by well over a decade)
adopting the natural PostGutenberg upgrade of their paper-era Publish
or Perish Mandates to include the self-archiving of their own
peer-reviewed research output, so as to maximize its usage and impact.
The only lesson journal publishers need to learn from this is that they
are -- and always were -- merely service-providers for the universities,
who are the research-providers, and paying (through the teeth) for the
publishers' service, until further notice.
OA is obviously optimal for research, researchers and their
institutions. The publishing tail needs to learn to stop trying to wag the
research dog. Adapt to whatever is best for the research-providers and the
symbiosis (not parasitism) will continue, as it was always destined to do.
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 Wed May 14 2008 - 12:00:39 BST