The
following exchange took place between 10 and 13 July 1999 as a self-contained
module of the American Scientist Forum (a final contribution being offered
on 23 November, 1999).
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
The main participants
in the exchange were Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton and
Hal Varian, of the University of California, Berkeley, with Bob Parks of
Washington University providing an additional comment toward the end.
The origins of
the discussion lie with a thesis Harnad has expounded in a number of recent
publications. Put very quickly, Harnad maintains that academics working
in the esoteric fields of scientific and scholarly publication do not produce
written work with a view to selling it; they merely wish to have it read
by their peers. This being the case, Harnad makes the ‘subversive proposal’
that such scholars should no longer publish their work on paper, but should
instead put it straight on the Net in pre-print form:
For
centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric
publications entered into the Faustian bargain of allowing a price-tag
to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership,
for that was the only way they could make their work public at all during
the age when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) was
the only option. But today there is another way, and that is PUBLIC FTP.
ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloq…blic-e-print-archives-subversive-proposal
Archiving the
work of esoteric authors in pre-print form in globally accessible local
ftp archives would have a number of extremely significant consequences,
Harnad contends. Perhaps most importantly, it would free academics from
restrictive copyright agreements with publishers, agreements which function
to restrict access to academic research to those who can afford to pay
for it. (To provide an example which may give a sense of exactly what is
at stake here, copy right agreements have recently enabled publishers to
clamp-down on the extent to which university lecturers in the UK are able
to provide photocopies of relevant course material for their students).
As a recent article in the Times Higher explained, the system would
get round the problem of copyright in the following manner:
First
the author posts a pre-print of his or her paper on the web. Then they
submit the paper to a refereed journal. The author makes amendments in
light of referees’ and editors’ comments, then signs the publisher’s copyright
agreement …
The author then
posts a note onto the web pre-print, pointing out where areas of correction
might need to be made, in effect turning the pre-print into a version of
the draft refereed paper.
(Patel, K. (2000)
‘Team Finds Way Round Copyright’, The Times Higher Education Supplement
(February 12): 12)
Putting everything
on-line in this way would thus make access to academic research freely
available to all twenty-four hours a day.
The exchange
between Harnad and Varian included here focuses on the problematic issue
- crucial to Harnad’s thesis - of the extent to which academic authors
are prepared to give their work away by making it freely available, without
charge, on the Net. Although the exchange has been edited slightly
to make the discussion easier to follow, it seemed appropriate, given the
subject matter, to otherwise retain the marks of its original quote/comment
format. Harnad begins by emphasising 11 of his argument’s main points,
and by providing addresses for the various locations on the Net where the
relevant publications can be found.
----------------------------
Date:
Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
(1) I am speaking
ONLY about refereed journal articles, not books or
magazines.
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/thes.html
(2) Unlike all
other literature, their authors write these papers to
report their
ideas and findings, not to make money on their texts. All
they want is
to reach the eyes and minds of a maximum of fellow
researchers,
present and future, once their findings have passed peer
review.
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
(3) They accordingly
give them away for free to their publishers,
and, after peer
review, give away free reprints to all requesters.
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html
(4) Online self-archiving
now makes it possible for them to give away
their refereed
reprints to one and all forever on the broadest possible
scale.
http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html
(5) Publishers
should in no way to attempt to prevent free
self-archiving
by authors by trying to forbid it in copyright
agreements.
This is the eye of the storm. See:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
(6) The American
Physical Society has already provided a model
copyright policy:
Authors may self-archive both the unrefereed
pre-print and
the refereed reprint for free for all. The Publisher
retains all
rights to SELL either the paper or online version
of the journal.
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0006.html
(7) The effect
of online author self-archiving will be a transition of
the reader/user
community to the free online versions.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions
http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_weekly_graph
(8) Eventually
this will produce cancellation pressure (although it has
not done so
yet in Physics, where it is most advanced). If/when it does,
my prediction
is that publishers will have to restructure and down-size
so as to provide
only the service of quality control and certification
[peer review,
editing, tagging as accepted by Journal X].
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
(9) The much
reduced cost of providing solely this service will be
recoverable
from author-institution publication charges, which will in
turn be recoverable
from institutional savings from cancelling
Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View
(S/L/P).
(10) The critical
difference is that reader-institution-end payment
(S/L/P) is access-blocking,
whereas author-institution-end payment is
not. But as
long as author self-archiving rights are guaranteed (5,6),
the market can
decide whether or not S/L/P can survive alongside it
(and how long).
(11) The infrastructure
for self-archiving is emerging as we speak,
led by Los Alamos,
soon to be followed by E-bionet, and then all the
other disciplines.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/
http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/ebiomed.htm
http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
The self-archiving
initiative in this very special subdomain of
literature --
the give-away refereed research literature -- is
unstoppable,
because ethics, pragmatics, and logic, as well as the
inherent interests
of research itself and hence of all of society, are
all behind it.
Its progress can only be slowed temporarily by playing
on confusions
and uncertainties in people's minds, simply because it is
all so new and
they have not yet thought it through. It would be to
publishers'
long-term advantage to try to see ahead rather and
restructure
accordingly, rather than to try to hold the literature
hostage to the
status quo. They must come to terms with what it in the
best interests
of research and researchers in the new online world, and
design a new
niche for themselves in the PostGutenberg Galaxy.
A tide-over consortial
subsidy out of windfall S/L/P savings to smooth
the transition
from reader-institution-end cost-recovery via S/L/P to
author-institution-end
cost-recovery via quality-control/certification
charges would
be worth planning out with the library-institution
and research-funding
community in advance.
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:
Hal Varian
On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> (2) Unlike
all other literature, their authors write these papers to report their
ideas and findings, not to make money on their texts. All they want
is to reach the eyes and minds of a maximum of fellow researchers, present
and future, once their findings have passed peer review.
>
I think that
this point is wrong. I would claim that most authors write to present
their ideas and visions, not to make money. The evidence is the highly
skewed distribution of income from writing. Like artists and actors,
only a very, very small fraction of trade authors make money from their
writing. I conjecture that their motivation is more often glory or
recognition, just like academics.
By way of evidence,
let me point you towards the US Dept of Labor
Occupational
Outlook Handbook, writers and editors section, where it is
asserted that
the average starting salary for writers and editorial
assistants in
1996 was $21,000. Writers with more than 5 years of
experience make
more than ‘more than $30,000’. These are not substantial
sums for highly
educated workers! Freelance writers earn much, much less
on average than
professional authors; they can't be in it for the money.
However, I don't
think that this claim has any impact on the rest of your
argument.
After all, all you need to assert is that academic authors
aren't in it
for the money---whether other authors are or not is
irrelevant to
your claims. It does suggest that if the rest of your
argument is
right it will apply more broadly than just to academic
authors.
Hal Varian
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Hal Varian wrote:
> ...I would
claim that most authors write
> to present
their ideas and visions, not to make money...
> ...only a
very, very small fraction of trade authors make money from
> their writing.
I conjecture that their motivation is more often glory or
> recognition,
just like academics....
> Freelance
writers earn much, much less
> on average
than professional authors; they can't be in it for the money.
Eppur, eppur
... And yet I doubt that they would want to lock themselves
into giving
it away for life! To start with, by way of promotion, perhaps,
but forever?
Is that really what you think? (Where there's life, there's
hope!)
Whereas refereed
journal article authors do not have the slightest
desire to deter
a single pair of potential eye-balls for their findings
on the off-chance
there might be gate-receipts to be made! They never
have, and they
never will. There is a profound and significant divide
here, despite
the statistics on the earnings and success of the average
trade author.
> ...if the rest
of your
> argument is
right it will apply more broadly than just to academic
> authors.
Online self-archiving
may be a means for authors to launch their trade,
but I doubt
you'll find many for whom it's an end in itself (apart from
the ones who
were only destined for a Vanity Press anyway)...
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:
Hal Varian
On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> Eppur, eppur
... And yet I doubt that they would want to lock themselves
> into giving
it away for life! To start with, by way of promo, perhaps,
> but forever?
Is that really what you think? (Where there's life, there's
> hope!)
Look at the data---hardly
any authors actually make their living from
writing.
And the ones that do make a very poor living. I conclude that
even for trade
authors, economic compensation is not the primary factor
leading them
to write. Undoubtedly, they would be happy to be paid for
writing, but
academic authors would be happy to be paid for their writing
too.
> Whereas refereed
journal article authors do not have the slightest
> desire to
deter a single pair of potential eye-balls for their findings
> on the off-chance
there might be gate-receipts to be made! They never
> have, and
they never will. There is a profound and significant divide
> here, despite
the statistics on the earnings and success of the average
> trade author.
No author wants
to deter eyeballs, even trade authors. Some are willing
to do so because
they are compensated monetarily. If academic authors
were sufficiently
compensated for deterring eyeballs, I expect many would
be happy to
do so. If a referred journal offered you payment for an
article, would
you turn it down? (Several refereed journals in business
and medicine
do pay for articles, by the way.)
Furthermore,
even academic authors make money from their publications,
albeit indirectly.
If you regress earnings on publications and citations
you find a large
and significant coefficient on refereed journal
publications
and citations. Academic authors who publish more are paid
more, and part
of the motivation for academic publishing is the prospect
of academic
advancement and higher salaries.
> Online self-archiving
may be a means for authors to launch their trade,
> but I doubt
you'll find many for whom it's an end in itself (apart from
> the ones who
were only destined for a Vanity Press anyway) ...
Well, there is
an awful lot of vanity publishing on the Web. Of course
these authors
would love to be paid for their writing, but I suspect they
will continue
to write, paid or not.
The point of
my note is that motivations are not as far apart as you
claim: there
is an (indirect) financial motivation in publication for
academic authors
and there is a large component of desire to communicate
in trade authors.
There is certainly a difference in the economic model
in the two industries,
but the divide in the motivations of the authors is
not as ‘profound
and significant’ as you claim.
But again, I
don't think this point makes much difference for the rest of
your argument.
Hal Varian
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Hal Varian wrote:
> Undoubtedly,
[trade authors] would be happy to be paid for
> writing, but
academic authors would be happy to be paid for their writing
> too.
I'm afraid I
have to disagree. The answer is ‘yes’ when the academic
authors are
wearing their trade hats (writing books or magazine
articles) but
the answer is ‘no’ when they are reporting their
research in
peer-reviewed journals.
> No author wants
to deter eyeballs, even trade authors.
You might as
well say no producer of any product wants to deter greater
consumption
of their product (it's just that they would like to get
paid for it!).
> If academic
authors
> were sufficiently
compensated for deterring eyeballs, I expect many would
> be happy to
do so. If a referred journal offered you payment for an
> article, would
you turn it down? (Several refereed journals in business
> and medicine
do pay for articles, by the way.)
I'm afraid I
have to disagree again: It would require a MONSTROUSLY
large amount
of money to make a research author trade off his potential
impact on research
for the impact on his pocketbook. (And many
scientists and
scholars, still recalling why they chose the leaner path
of Learned Inquiry
rather than heading straight for the junk bond market
in the first
place, would decline even that!)
But no peer reviewed
journal could (or would) afford to make it worth an
author's while
anyway.
Here's a test:
How much would (should) the author of a refereed journal
article accept
to SELL his self-archiving rights to his publisher?
(My guess: a
lot more than any publisher could ever afford to offer!
This is not
big-market literature we're talking about! And that's the
point!)
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/thes.html
> Furthermore,
even academic authors make money from their publications,
> albeit indirectly.
If you regress earnings on publications and citations
> you find a
large and significant coefficient on refereed journal
> publications
and citations. Academic authors who publish more are paid
> more, and
part of the motivation for academic publishing is the prospect
> of academic
advancement and higher salaries.
Correct, but
TOTALLY irrelevant! The author is not being paid out of the
access-blocking
toll-gate receipts from the sale of his papers by S/L/P!
On the contrary,
if you properly regressed THOSE on earnings, you would
find that they
REDUCE impact and hence earnings!
This is a completely
spurious, non-causal correlation, and the simple
act of self-archiving
shows it to be so. (Have the 100,000 authors who
have self-archived
in Los Alamos reduced or enhanced their impacts and
incomes?)
http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions
> The point of
my note is that motivations are not as far apart as you
> claim: there
is an (indirect) financial motivation in publication for
> academic authors
and there is a large component of desire to communicate
> in trade authors.
There is certainly a difference in the economic model
> in the two
industries, but the divide in the motivations of the authors is
> not as ‘profound
and significant’ as you claim.
>
> But again,
I don't think this point makes much difference for the rest of
> your argument.
I'm afraid I
disagree, and I do think it makes a great difference. The
similarities
between the two populations are partial, superficial and,
in the present
context, misleading. The deep differences are in the
means/ends:
For most trade authors, self-archiving their work free for
all is only
a temporary means to an end (hopeful, eventual
compensation);
for (most?) refereed journal authors it IS the end
(widest possible
access to their findings for peer eyes/mind, present
and future).
The reason stressing
the similarities between the trade and non-trade
literatures
here is misleading is that the self-archiving model I have
been advocating
for refereed journal papers is decidedly NOT the right
model for the
rest of the literature, and conflating the two simply
blurs the critical
insight at the core of all this.
But this can
be settled empirically: Let a line be drawn in Cyberspace,
and let those
who are interested in giving away their products
(whatever they
are) as freebies in perpetuo step to the left of it
(say), and let
those who are not step to the right.
The entire refereed
journal authorship will be on the left. Perhaps
some others
will be too. Let's see wait and see who. I'm predicting
that most book
and magazine authors will not (and note that I said ‘in
perpetuo’, not
in ‘pro-tem promo’!).
In any case,
that is the literature I am dedicated to freeing (from its
hostage-hood
to the trade model and S/L/P) -- not every product of the
human mind!
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:
Hal Varian
On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> > No author
wants to deter eyeballs, even trade authors.
>
> You might
as well say no producer of any product wants to deter greater
> consumption
of their product (it's just that they would like to get
> paid for it!).
Indeed. You've
now stated the correct principle: authors (academic and
trade) are happy
to be paid for their work. There is no difference in
their motivation
in this regard. The primary motivation for each
group is visibility,
but neither group disdains monetary compensation.
> I'm afraid
I have to disagree again: It would require a MONSTROUSLY
> large amount
of money to make a research author trade off his potential
> impact on
research for the impact on his pocketbook. (And many
> scientists
and scholars, still recalling why they chose the leaner path
> of Learned
Inquiry rather than heading straight for the junk bond market
> in the first
place, would decline even that!)
The evidence
contradicts you. Many academics choose to devote part of
their time to
writing textbooks, trade books, consulting and other such
compensated
pursuits. They could be spending this time doing academic
research. It
appears that they are choosing to trade off some research
output and recognition
for some financial gains.
>Correct, but
TOTALLY irrelevant! The author is not being paid out of the
>access-blocking
toll-gate receipts from the sale of his papers by S/L/P!
That's true enough,
but that wasn't your original assertion. Your
original claim
was
‘(2) Unlike all
other literature, their authors write these papers to
report their
ideas and findings, not to make money on their texts. All
they want is
to reach the eyes and minds of a maximum of fellow
researchers,
present and future, once their findings have passed peer
review.’
I asserted that
this statement is not entirely true: part of the motivation of
academic authors
is economic, due to the relationship between rank,
publication,
and salary. I agree that academics would prefer to make more
money without
reducing the number of readers, but this is trivial and
obvious: the
same is true of non-academic authors.
> This is a completely
spurious, non-causal correlation, and the simple
> act of self-archiving
shows it to be so. (Have the 100,000 authors who
> have self-archived
in Los Alamos reduced or enhanced their impacts and
> incomes?)
Increased them,
I would claim, since by increasing their visibility they
have, indirectly,
enhanced their income.
>I'm afraid I
disagree, and I do think it makes a great difference. The
>similarities
between the two populations are partial, superficial and,
>in the present
context, misleading. The deep differences are in the
>means/ends:
For most trade authors, self-archiving their work free for
>all is only
a temporary means to an end (hopeful, eventual
>compensation);
for (most?) refereed journal authors it IS the end
>(widest possible
access to their findings for peer eyes/mind, present
>and future).
Suppose you cut
all linkages between compensation and publication and had
a rigid formula
between years-on-the job and academic salary. Don't you
think that academic
publication rates would go down? (As they do in
countries with
such rigid academic compensation systems.)
Suppose you offered
publication to trade authors with minimal financial
compensation.
Don't you think a lot of people would take you up on this? I
submit the answer
is yes since very little trade publication is
compensated
to any great degree even now. In fact, it could easily be the
case that the
average academic author makes more from publishing a book
(via the impact
on promotion and salary) than the average trade author
makes from publishing
a book (via royalties).
> The reason
stressing the similarities between the trade and non-trade
> literatures
here is misleading is that the self-archiving model I have
> been advocating
for refereed journal papers is decidedly NOT the right
> model for
the rest of the literature, and conflating the two simply
> blurs the
critical insight at the core of all this.
I guess I don't
know what ‘right’ means here. If you mean ‘economically
sustainable’
I would argue that self-archiving is sustainable in both
environments,
since the cost of self-archiving is so low.
> But this can
be settled empirically: Let a line be drawn in Cyberspace,
> and let those
who are interested in giving away their products
> (whatever
they are) as freebies in perpetuo step to the left of it
> (say), and
let those who are not step to the right.
>
> The entire
refereed journal authorship will be on the left. Perhaps
> some others
will be too. Let's see wait and see who. I'm predicting
> that most
book and magazine authors will not (and note that I said ‘in
> perpetuo’,
not in ‘pro-tem promo’!).
Look at the non-academic
textual content on the WWW. The vast
majority of
it is available for free. Some of this free material
involves compensation
for the author, some doesn't. I would argue
that fundamental
economic forces will keep it that way. So the left
side of your
line will be heavily populated by both academic and
non-academic
authors.
> In any case,
that is the literature I am dedicated to freeing (from its
> hostage-hood
to the trade model and S/L/P) -- not every product of the
> human mind!
I don't disagree
with the rest of your argument. I just think that your
story about
why academic publishing differs from trade publishing is
wrong.
You argue that there is a fundamental difference in motivation
between academic
authors and trade authors: academic authors seek readers,
and trade authors
seek money. In reality, academic authors and trade
authors both
seek money and readership. And, in each case, readership
is the primary
driver.
The real difference
between the economics of academic and trade publishing
is not due to
having an entirely different set of motivations as you
claim, but rather
in the nature of the academic research process. Academic
articles are
both an input to research and an output of research, which is
rather different
from trade publications. (Compare citation patterns in
the two literatures.)
Because the literature
is both an inputs and an output, up until the last
decade or so,
it made sense for researchers to pay an intermediary to
organize the
selection, beautification, production, and distribution of
academic research.
But now that the costs of beautification, production
and distribution
have declined so dramatically, the role of the
intermediary
has been dramatically changed, and it may make sense for
authors to take
on much more of the intermediary's role. But the primary
reason for this
is due to the change in technology and the associated
change in costs---it
isn't due primarily to the difference in motivations,
as you assert.
Hal Varian
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Hal Varian wrote:
> > It would
require a MONSTROUSLY
> > large amount
of money to make a research author trade off his potential
> > impact on
research for the impact on his pocketbook.
>
> The evidence
contradicts you. Many academics choose to devote part of
> their time
to writing textbooks, trade books, consulting and other such
> compensated
pursuits. They could be spending this time doing academic
> research.
It appears that they are choosing to trade off some research
> output and
recognition for some financial gains.
Yes, but the
question was whether they would trade it off for their
refereed journal
articles, not for their books and other activities.
(It would have
been absurd of me to suggest that the authors of refereed
journal articles
don't care about making money at all: It's just that
they don't want
to make money by selling THOSE articles.)
> >The author
is not being paid out of the
> >access-blocking
toll-gate receipts from the sale of his papers by S/L/P!
>
> That's true
enough, but that wasn't your original assertion. Your
> original claim
was
>
> ‘(2) Unlike
all other literature, their authors write these papers to
> report their
ideas and findings, not to make money on their texts. All
> they want
is to reach the eyes and minds of a maximum of fellow
> researchers,
present and future, once their findings have passed peer
> review.’
Perhaps the meaning
of ‘make money on their texts’ was not entirely
clear the first
time. I hope that now it is: It is the blockage of free
access to THOSE
texts (and not other texts they may write, or other
things they
may do with their time, that we are discussing here).
> I asserted
that this statement is not entirely true: part of the motivation
> of academic
authors is economic, due to the relationship between rank,
> publication,
and salary. I agree that academics would prefer to make more
> money without
reducing the number of readers, but this is trivial and
> obvious: the
same is true of non-academic authors.
I said something
stronger, and I repeat it: The authors of refereed
journal articles
are not interested in making money on THOSE texts at
all.
> > This is a
completely spurious, non-causal correlation, and the simple
> > act of self-archiving
shows it to be so. (Have the 100,000 authors who
> > have self-archived
in Los Alamos reduced or enhanced their impacts and
> > incomes?)
>
> Increased
them, I would claim, since by increasing their visibility they
> have, indirectly,
enhanced their income.
Fine, but you
are missing a rather fundamental point, repeatedly: The
income from
the sale of THOSE texts is not the income of the author!
And if the income
from the sale of THOSE texts plays any causal role at
all in the author's
visibility and hence income, then that is a
negative role:
The fact that access is denied till tolls are paid
REDUCES the
author's visibility, hence his income.
And self-archiving
(i.e., making those texts available for free for
all) enhances
their visibility, hence (if you wish) the author's
income. Now
is the dissociation (and even opposition) between the two
incomes clear?
This is not the case when the income to the AUTHOR comes
from the sale
of the text.
The conclusion
is that in the case of the refereed journal literature
only, the author
has an interest in there being NO INCOME (to anyone)
from sale of
his texts, because income means access-blockage. This is
also in the
interest of the author's institution, which likewise gains
kudos (and grant
income) from the impact of his research (not to
mention their
savings from S/L/P cancellations!)
So with refereed
journals it makes sense (and with books it does not)
that costs should
be paid for at the author-institution end (yielding
free access
for all) rather than the reader-institution end (blocking
access, impact
income).
I don't think
that the DISanalogy could be any more complete than this.
> Suppose you
cut all linkages between compensation and publication and had
> a rigid formula
between years-on-the job and academic salary. Don't you
> think that
academic publication rates would go down? (As they do in
> countries
with such rigid academic compensation systems.)
Sure they would,
but so what? That still would not connect the author's
income CAUSALLY
to the income from the sale of his (refereed-journal)
texts. (And,
to simplify, if we say directly that it is
impact/visibility,
and not publication, on which the income
ladder depends,
then the NEGATIVE causal relation between S/L/P access
barriers and
author/institution income becomes even clearer.)
> Suppose you
offered publication to trade authors with minimal financial
> compensation.
Don't you think a lot of people would take you up on this? I
> submit the
answer is yes since very little trade publication is
> compensated
to any great degree even now. In fact, it could easily be the
> case that
the average academic author makes more from publishing a book
> (via the impact
on promotion and salary) than the average trade author
> makes from
publishing a book (via royalties).
I agree, insofar
as esoteric monographs are concerned. Those no-market
speciality items
have always been more like journal articles than more
mainstream academic
or non-academic books, their royalties are often a
joke, and many
do not even succeed in finding a publisher.
But that happens
to be the very subset of the non-journal literature
that I have
always said fits the give-away formula too! It is in no way
representative
of the book market, however, being at least as esoteric
as, and even
more minoritarian than, the refereed journal literature
itself.
And your hypothetical
situation above simply amounts to speculating
about what it
would be like if more books were more like journals in
this way for
academic authors: But one gets out of such a hypothesis
exactly what
one puts into it: If more books did fit the esoteric,
give-away formula,
then they too would fall on the left of that
figurative line
in Cyberspace I invoked in the prior posting (quoted again
below)!
And if your point
was only that online self-archiving will make it
possible to
publish more no- or low-market esoteric monographs online
than has been
possible in paper, that is certainly true too. (It is an
interesting
empirical question what proportion of current scholarly
monographs would
have voluntarily gone the royalty-renunciation route
in exchange
for the enhanced reach! I don't doubt it would be a
non-negligible
number.)
> > The reason
stressing the similarities between the trade and non-trade
> > literatures
here is misleading is that the self-archiving model I have
> > been advocating
for refereed journal papers is decidedly NOT the right
> > model for
the rest of the literature, and conflating the two simply
> > blurs the
critical insight at the core of all this.
>
> I guess I
don't know what ‘right’ means here. If you mean ‘economically
> sustainable’
I would argue that self-archiving is sustainable in both
> environments,
since the cost of self-archiving is so low.
The trade/non-trade
divide is fairly represented by desire and
the expectation
of revenue directly from the sale of the text. The trade
model continues
to be the right one for most books, and it does not
help, in trying
to bring out the anomalous state of affairs on the
non-trade side
(where refereed journal articles are representative), to
dwell on similarities
with esoteric monographs (which are NOT
representative
of the trade side and never have been).
Most people (authors,
publishers, readers, economists) think of texts
as products
that authors, jointly with their publishers, SELL to the
readers (or
reader-institutions). It is this reader/consumer intuition
that prevents
them from seeing that this reader-end market is the wrong
one for refereed
journal articles, which authors have always wanted to
give away, but
have been prevented from doing so by the economics of
paper.
These economics
change in the online medium, radically, for these
anomalous authors.
Their institutions (which paid the costs anyway
already, at
the reader-institution end) can now pay much lower costs at
the author-institution
end, freeing this literature at last.
But this author-end
market does NOT generalize to most books, which
will continue
to be bought and sold on the old, trade model. To blur
this crucial
distinction in either direction is to miss the fundamental
development
that the old, trade model, which was ‘right’ for ALL texts
before, is no
longer right for refereed journals.
How much else
it is also no longer right for is an empirical question,
and the boundary
lines are not nearly as clear or illuminating, though
I expect that
the algorithm I've proposed:
‘Does the author (1) seek/get any revenue for his text (royalties,
fees) or does he instead (2) give it away, seeking only the
eyes/minds of readers? If (1), it is trade, if (2) it is not.’
probably still
captures it.
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind99&L=september-forum&F=lf&S=&P=15054
> > But this
can be settled empirically: Let a line be drawn in Cyberspace,
> > and let
those who are interested in giving away their products
> > (whatever
they are) as freebies in perpetuo step to the left of it
> > (say), and
let those who are not step to the right.
>
> Look at the
non-academic textual content on the WWW. The vast
> majority of
it is available for free. Some of this free material
> involves compensation
for the author, some doesn't. I would argue
> that fundamental
economic forces will keep it that way. So the left
> side of your
line will be heavily populated by both academic and
> non-academic
authors.
Fine. I'm actually
losing my grip on what we are disagreeing about ...
But just as thinking
in terms of the reader-end trade model for
publication
has been an obstacle to people's realizing where the
refereed journal
literature is headed, so has thinking in terms of
freeware and
the general give-away spirit of the Net!
For freebies
are then associated with the vanity press, without quality
control (peer
review). From this it becomes clear that SOMETHING still
has to be paid
for here, and that is the IMPLEMENTATION of the quality
control (for
referees referee for free). That is what leads to the
unintuitive
shift from a reader-institution market to an
author-institution
market for the SERVICE of quality control and
certification
(instead of the PRODUCT of a text).
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
Again, the give-away
spirit of the Net is no guide in any of this.
Net freebies
are not quality controlled or certified!
> > In any case,
that is the literature I am dedicated to freeing (from its
> > hostage-hood
to the trade model and S/L/P) -- not every product of the
> > human mind!
>
> I don't disagree
with the rest of your argument. I just think that your
> story about
why academic publishing differs from trade publishing is
> wrong.
You argue that there is a fundamental difference in motivation
> between academic
authors and trade authors: academic authors seek readers,
> and trade
authors seek money. In reality, academic authors and trade
> authors both
seek money and readership. And, in each case, readership
> is the primary
driver.
It's not academic
vs. trade authors! It's academics when they wear
their refereed-journal-author
hats and every other author, including
themselves,
when wearing their book-author hats (except in the case of
esoteric monographs).
> The real difference
between the economics of academic and trade publishing
> is not due
to having an entirely different set of motivations as you
> claim, but
rather in the nature of the academic research process. Academic
> articles are
both an input to research and an output of research, which is
> rather different
from trade publications. (Compare citation patterns in
> the two literatures.)
This is all no
doubt true. But books, academic and non-academic, can in
principle bring
direct incomes to their authors, and journal articles
can't, and that's
the point.
> Because the
literature is both an input and an output, up until the last
> decade or
so, it made sense for researchers to pay an intermediary to
> organize the
selection, beautification, production, and distribution of
> academic research.
But now that the costs of beautification, production
> and distribution
have declined so dramatically, the role of the
> intermediary
has been dramatically changed, and it may make sense for
> authors to
take on much more of the intermediary's role. But the primary
> reason for
this is due to the change in technology and the associated
> change in
costs---it isn't due primarily to the difference in motivations,
> as you assert.
What you say
about beautification and self-beautification applies
indifferently
to all texts, but nothing follows from it. There are still
texts that the
author wants to sell. Let's call those trade (and they're
mostly books)
and texts the author wants to give away (let's call them
non-trade, and
ALL refereed journal articles fall into that category --
from their author's
viewpoint).
And there is
one critical piece of ‘beautification’ that an author
cannot do all
on his own, and that is peer review. That is a service
another ‘provider’
will have to continue to provide. In the case of
scholarly books,
its cost can be wrapped into the cost of publication,
recovered from
sales of the text; in the case of refereed journal
articles, it,
and it alone, can be recovered another way, eliminating
the need for
all sales barriers (to the eternal benefit, if you like, of
the author's
and the author's institution's ‘visibility’, and hence the
indirect income
accrued therefrom).
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:
Hal Varian
On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> Yes, but the
question was whether they would trade it off for their
> refereed journal
articles, not for their books and other activities.
But of course
they do---the time spent writing textbooks, consulting,
and so on takes
away from time spent writing and publishing academic
articles.
> (It would have
been absurd of me to suggest that the authors of refereed
> journal articles
don't care about making money at all: It's just that
> they don't
want to make money by selling THOSE articles.)
I agree that
under the current system they don't expect to make money, but
if they were
offered a payment for academic articles, few would turn it
down.
> Perhaps the
meaning of ‘make money on their texts’ was not entirely
> clear the
first time. I hope that now it is: It is the blockage of free
> access to
THOSE texts (and not other texts they may write, or other
> things they
may do with their time, that we are discussing here).
This is a very,
very limited sense of ‘make money on their texts’.
Obviously academics
make money on their works since they are paid,
in part, to
publish them. Perhaps you meant to say that academic
authors would
prefer to maximize the readership of their works.
I agree that
this is true. But it is also true of non-academic
authors.
> I said something
stronger, and I repeat it: The authors of refereed
> journal articles
are not interested in making money on THOSE texts at
> all.
I submit they
would be happy to make money on those texts, as long as it
didn't dramatically
reduce the readership. You have implicitly assumed
that the only
way to ‘make money on those texts’ is to charge people to
read them, thereby
limiting access. I think this is a very narrow view,
and limits the
kinds of business models you might consider for information
industries.
> The conclusion
is that in the case of the refereed journal literature
> only, the
author has an interest in there being NO INCOME (to anyone)
> from sale
of his texts, because income means access-blockage. This is
> also in the
interest of the author's institution, which likewise gains
> kudos (and
grant income) from the impact of his research (not to
> mention their
savings from S/L/P cancellations!)
Here is where
your confusion lies. It is false (as an economic
proposition)
that there is a direct relationship between ‘no income’ and
‘access blockage’.
Consider a field where there is an economic demand for
the research
(engineering, medicine, finance, etc.) It is common to see
research produced
in these fields where publication is delayed. It is
first made available
for a high price via consultancies, newsletters,
affiliates,
etc., and later made available to the academic world at large.
This way the
authors have their cake and eat it too---make money, and
still make the
research available to all. Obviously this practice can be
abused, but
that is beside the point. The point is that income can be
made even while
providing broad access.
A similar example
is JSTOR, where back issues journal articles are
available at
zero marginal price to subscribing institutions.
Indeed, this
model is becoming somewhat common in the for-profit trade
literature.
An author first publishes a book, then 2 or 3 years puts the
text up on his
or her web site.
This is ‘second
degree temporal price discrimination’ and presents one
interesting
business model for information goods. See various papers
at:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html
for other examples.
Or see my trade book at:
http://www.inforules.com
Or either of
my textbooks at:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/books.html.
They all tell
the same story with respect to this issue, simply directed at
different audience.
> So with refereed
journals it makes sense (and with books it does not)
> that costs
should be paid for at the author-institution end (yielding
> free access
for all) rather than the reader-institution end (blocking
> access, impact
income).
The conclusion
has some merit, but I disagree with the analysis. I claim
that the fundamental
force is not the difference in motivation of the
authors (since
trade authors and academic authors like both money and
readers) but
in the nature of the production process of research, and, in
particular,
that the producers and consumers are the same people. To see
why, look at
another genre with this characteristic---fanzines for
hobbiests (science
fiction, collectors, etc.). In the print fanzine world
authors were
not paid and the readers paid for zine via subscription, just
as in the academic
genre. Now most of the hardcopy zines have moved to
the Web where
they are freely available. I think you are right that this
will happen
with academic journals, but it isn't because academic authors
wouldn't like
to get paid for their texts.
> Sure they would,
but so what? That still would not connect the author's
> income CAUSALLY
to the income from the sale of his (refereed-journal)
> texts. (And,
to simplify, if we say directly that it is
> impact/visibility,
and not publication, on which the income
> ladder depends,
then the NEGATIVE causal relation between S/L/P access
> barriers and
author/institution income becomes even clearer.)
Well, we could
quarrel about the metaphysics of ‘cause’, I guess, but I
would say that
there is a pretty direct causal relationship between the
number of readers
of one's refereed articles and one's academic salary in
the US.
(This differs, of course, from field to field.)
> The trade/non-trade
divide is fairly represented by desire and
> expectation
of revenue directly from the sale of the text.
This is simply
wrong. Most trade books make very little money for the
author directly
from royalty revenues. You only have to look at the
statistics on
authors' incomes. The National Writers Union publishes
such a survey
and the numbers are strikingly small.
> prevents seeing
that this reader-end market is the wrong one for
> refereed journal
articles, which authors have always wanted to give
> away, but
have been prevented from doing so by the economics of paper.
Again you are
making the leap from ‘maximize the readership of’ to
‘give away’.
I agree with the former motivation (at least to the first
order) but I
deny that it immediately follows that the content must
be given away.
This is one tool, but not the only one.
> But this author-end
market does NOT generalize to most books, which
> will continue
to be bought and sold on the old, trade model. To blur
> this crucial
distinction in either direction is to miss the fundamental
> development
that the old, trade model, which was ‘right’ for ALL texts
> before, is
no longer right for refereed journals.
Well, I can hardly
dispute the claim that ‘[physical] books will be
bought and sold
on the old trade model’, but the more interesting
question is
how ‘writing’ will be distributed. I claim that a smaller
and smaller
fraction of total written works will be sold in the trade
model. The majority
of written work will be given away on the Web
(in fact, that
is probably true today).
> Fine. I'm actually
losing my grip on what we are disagreeing about...
The only substantive
point on which we disagree is that I claim that the
stark distinction
between trade publication and academic publication that
you make is
overstated. I say this from the perspective of an author who
has written:
1) journal articles that are read by thousands of people each year
(according to
the Social Science Citation Index);
2) textbooks that are read by tens of thousands of people each year
(according to
my royalty statements);
3) technical trade books that are read by a thousand or so people each
year); and
4) a non-technical trade book that has sales in the many tens of
thousands.
I've also edited
an academic journal read by tens of thousands of people a
year, and have
self-archived many of my publications online for 10 years
using gopher,
ftp and the Web.
In my experience,
most publication is a mixture of economic and
non-economic
motivations. My textbooks and trade book were successful
because my academic
papers were widely read. The visibility resulting
from the academic,
text, and trade books leads to more offers for speeches
and consulting.
I don't see the stark division that you describe.
> For freebies
are then associated with the vanity press, without quality
> control (peer
review). From this it becomes clear that SOMETHING still
> has to be
paid for here, and that is the IMPLEMENTATION of the quality
> control (for
referees referee for free). That is what leads to the
> unintuitive
shift from a reader-institution market to an
> author-institution
market for the SERVICE of quality control and
> certification
(instead of the PRODUCT of a text).
I agree that
the filtering is what need to be paid for. (A quibble:
some referees
are paid, though typically not a sum that covers the
time cost.)
> It's not academic
vs. trade authors! It's academics when they wear
> their refereed-journal-author
hats and every other author, including
> themselves,
when wearing their book-author hats (except in the case of
> esoteric monographs).
Hmm. So academic
authors like money when they write trade books and don't
like money when
they write trade books? This seems rather strange. A
more accurate
account is that they like money and readership
whichever hat
they are wearing.
The real difference
is not at the level of the author, but at the level of
the industry.
In the trade book industry the authors and the readers are
quite distinct,
whereas in the academic publishing industry the authors
and readers
are, by and large, the same people. The academic publications
are both an
input to and an output of the research process. Other
publishing industries
where authors and readers are the same people had
similar business
models, and, I suggest will have similar dynamics in
their move to
the Web. (The apparent necessity of paying for the
refereeing overhead
makes things a bit more complicated in the academic
markets.)
> This is all
no doubt true. But books, academic and non-academic, can in
> principle
bring direct incomes to their authors, and journal articles
> can't, and
that's the point.
I agree that
journal articles don't bring direct income to the authors
under the current
business model, but that is a rather obvious
observation.
Whether they ‘can't’ or not could be disputed. But the more
interesting
observation is that trade books generally don't bring much
direct income
to authors either. Authors publish trade books because of
glory they get,
for the most part, some of which can be translated into
money.
> There are still
> texts that
the author wants to sell. Let's call those trade (and they're
> mostly books)
and texts the author wants to give away (let's call them
> non-trade,
and ALL refereed journal articles fall into that category --
> from their
author's viewpoint).
You are simply
making the same false claim over and over again. Authors
would be happy
to make money from their journal articles, it's just that
few publishers
offer them this option. So it is not the motivation of the
authors that
is relevant, but rather the business model for the industry.
I don't have
substantive quarrels with the rest of your argument, or
with your understanding
of the academic publishing industry. I just
think that you
don't understand the economics of the trade publishing
industry.
The simple fact is that very, very few authors make any
substantial
sum of money in the trade industry, and their motivation
for publishing
trade books is more complex than you assert.
Hal Varian
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Sun, 11 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
An intrinsically
interesting side-issue is emerging from the exchanges
with Hal Varian.
Nothing substantive hinges on it for the purposes
of the strategy
and outcome I happen to advocate -- what I have taken to
calling the
‘optimal and inevitable’ one for the refereed journal
literature:
freeing the literature online for everyone, everywhere, forever,
through (1) universal public self-archiving of all refereed journal
papers, and, when the time comes, (2) a downsizing of journals to
providers of the service of quality control and certification, paid
for on the author-institution out of S/L/P savings rather than at
the reader-institution end via access-blocking S/L/P.
Our disagreement
is only about whether I am exaggerating the difference
between the
motivations of refereed-journal papers-authors (regarding
THOSE papers)
and authors in general -- of books, magazine articles,
etc. -- in suggesting
that the former are, and have always been,
interested ONLY
in giving those papers away, whereas other authors (as
well as themselves,
when wearing other hats) have at least the hope of
some direct
revenue from the sale of their texts.
If I AM exaggerating
this difference, then Hal's view would be that
the ‘optimal
and inevitable’ for the refereed journal literature may well
prove to be
the optimal and inevitable for much of the rest of the
literature too.
Let me declare
my cards at this point: I consider myself quite expert
on many aspects
of the refereed journal literature (having edited one
major refereed
paper journal for over two decades and one of the first
refereed online-only
journals for nearly a decade, having provided an
online public
archive for the self-archiving of unrefereed and refereed
papers over
two years now, and having written a number of articles on
peer review
and online journal publication), but I do NOT consider
myself expert
on any other forms of publication (nor on ANY kind of
economics!).
So I am taking
up the gauntlet here for one reason only: That if I
should happen
to be right and Hal should happen to be wrong about the
reality of the
fundamental motivational difference between
refereed-journal
authors and (just about) all others, then it is
important to
sort this out, because it is only too easy otherwise to
dismiss self-archiving
initiatives as naive and Quixotic, tilting at
the very Windmills
of Capitalism, rather than as bringing out a
little-known
home-truth about a small, anomalous subset of the
published corpus,
a home-truth with radical implications (but for that
small literature
only).
There have been
several repeated points of misunderstanding. One has
been that I
am clearly not claiming that refereed-paper authors don't
care about money!
Nor that if there were some hypothetical,
counterfactual
way that they could have their cake and eat it too --
i.e., if everyone
everywhere could and would have free access to their
esoteric papers
in perpetuo AND some entity were also prepared to pay
them (the authors)
for it -- then they would quite happily accept the
eyes/minds AND
the cash!
The trouble is,
that in reality there is a trade-off: If money must
change hands
in exchange for access, this entails that access is
reduced. Moreover
(again, in reality), none of the money that changes
hands in exchange
for access to the refereed journal corpus actually
ever reaches
its authors! So they get the worst of both worlds from the
present system:
Fewer (much fewer) eyes/minds, and no cash! Nor would
the cash that
IS made from the toll-booths be nearly enough to
compensate them
for the trade-off, even if it WERE passed on to the
authors.
Now what I contend
is that this non-optimal paradigm simply does not fit
book publishing
in general (nor even scholarly/academic book publishing
in general --
although I agree that it may fit the special case of
esoteric scholarly
monographs with only the hope of a success d'estime, or
perhaps no hope
of publication at all).
So it is not
saintliness about potential direct revenue from these
papers, if revenue
could drop like Manna from heaven, that sets these
authors (when
wearing these hats) apart. It is the reality of the
trade-off, which
means revenue here could only come at the expense of
access barriers,
and there isn't faintly enough potential revenue to
make it even
thinkable to embrace that trade-off.
So much for potential
misunderstandings about DIRECT revenue, from the
sale of the
papers themselves. There is no contest on the subject of
INDIRECT revenue,
from the IMPACT of the papers, and the way that can
enhance the
incomes of their authors and their authors' institutions.
Here too, refereed-paper
authors are anything but saintly.
But there IS
a persisting misunderstanding about the CONTINGENCY (or
causal relation)
between the direct and indirect revenues: My point is
that (as we
have established that the direct S/L/P revenue (a) does not
go into the
author's pocket in any case -- and (b) it would not be
nearly large
enough to compensate for the trade-off of eyes/minds for
cash even if
it did) it follows that for this special literature the
fact that ANY
DIRECT INCOME AT ALL is being made by ANYONE from
charging S/L/P
tolls for access to the papers is actually NEGATIVELY
correlated with
the INDIRECT-revenue benefits to the authors.
And causality
is indeed the issue, rather than mere correlation, for
Hal is merely
pointing to the overall positive correlation between
publication/sales
and impact/income: {more publication, more sales} --
{more impact,
more income}. Sure! But if there were no sales, the
impact/income
would be still higher (MUCH higher, by my lights)!
Now here comes
my ignorance about the rest of the literature: I feel,
intuitively
and anecdotally, that this paradigm does not fit it, as it
does the refereed
journal literature. It's certainly true that authors'
(and especially
academic authors') careers are likewise enhanced, the
more they are
read. And that if their books were given away for free,
they would certainly
be read more. I'm even ready to believe that their
indirect income
(from being read) outweighs their direct income (from
the gate-receipts)
in some cases (especially for beginning authors,
vanity authors,
and authors who, for whatever reason, are not destined
to have many
readers -- I have already conceded the authors of esoteric
academic monographs
as a special case).
But (and it is
hard to put this in formal terms), I still feel that
that this is
not the PARADIGMATIC case for books, as it IS for refereed
papers; with
books, is not the ‘name of the game’, and hence it would be
misleading to
treat it as such.
But that's my
best shot. I have no stronger arguments. So I now proceed
to quote/comment
mode with someone who is clearly far more expert in
such matters
than myself:
On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Hal Varian wrote:
>sh> Yes, but
the question was whether they would trade it off for their
>sh> refereed
journal articles, not for their books and other activities.
>
> But of course
they do---the time spent writing textbooks, consulting,
> and so on
takes away from time spent writing and publishing academic
> articles.
This is a misunderstanding
I have tried twice to correct! I am talking
about trading
off (a) the collection of gate receipts for a given
article, and
even the receipt by the author of all revenue therefrom, in
exchange for
(b) the loss of eyes/minds therefrom.
In other words,
it's about whether they would rather have the eyes or
the cash (even
if the cash were forthcoming -- which in this literature
it is not!),
NOT about how they trade off the rest of their timetable of
activities.
I can't understand
why Hal's alternative, irrelevant and arbitrary
trade-off keeps
being swapped for the relevant one I had singled out
from the outset.
We are talking about the trade-off between selling it
and giving it
away; and in this special literature (papers) -- as
opposed to the
rest (books) -- there is simply NO CONTEST!
Perhaps the direct/indirect
trade-off would be resolved the same way
for some no-
or low-market books too, or at some early embryonic stages
of their authors'
careers, but those would be case-by-case decisions,
whereas for
the refereed literature it is, as they say, an open and
shut case, paradigmatic.
(Or am I the
only one who continues to see a profound disanalogy here,
where direct
revenue could at least in principle, if not always in
practise, offset
the trade-off in the one case, but not even in
principle in
the other?)
>sh> Perhaps
the meaning of ‘make money on their texts’ was not entirely
>sh> clear the
first time. I hope that now it is: It is the blockage of free
>sh> access
to THOSE texts (and not other texts they may write, or other
>sh> things
they may do with their time, that we are discussing here).
>
> This is a
very, very limited sense of ‘make money on their texts’.
> Obviously
academics make money on their works since they are paid,
> in part, to
publish them. Perhaps you meant to say that academic
> authors would
prefer to maximize the readership of their works.
> I agree that
this is true. But it is also true of non-academic
> authors.
Let's just talk
in terms of the direct/indirect income trade-off
(direct = sales
royalty income; indirect = income from impact); it
encapsulates
it all. And let's even throw out the red herring of the
non-academic
author. So henceforth we are only talking about academic
authors. And
let's drop the polysemous trade/non-trade vocabulary
(because academics
write both ‘trade’ and ‘scholarly’ books).
So it's just
about journal-papers vs. books (by academics). And my
contention is
that, because of the direct/indirect trade-off, the
PARADIGM for
journal-papers is give-away and the paradigm for the rest
is not (although
there are exceptions, such as esoteric monographs).
> > I said something
stronger, and I repeat it: The authors of refereed
> > journal
articles are not interested in making money on THOSE texts at
> > all.
>
> I submit they
would be happy to make money on those texts, as long as it
> didn't dramatically
reduce the readership. You have implicitly assumed
> that the only
way to ‘make money on those texts’ is to charge people to
> read them,
thereby limiting access. I think this is a very narrow view,
> and limits
the kinds of business models you might consider for information
> industries.
Insofar as my
refereed journal articles are concerned, For-Fee or
For-Free ARE
the only pertinent options. (I will get to the putative
alternative
‘business models’ presently; to let the cat out of the bag,
though: the
story does not change one bit if one introduces a ‘delay’
variable – ‘fee
now, free later: the trade-off is the same, and so is
the outcome;
besides, the author doesn't get the fee anyway, and even if
he did, it wouldn't
be worth his while, now or later; and research
authors want
immediacy as well as impact for their work!)
>sh> The conclusion
is that in the case of the refereed journal literature
>sh> only, the
author has an interest in there being NO INCOME (to anyone)
>sh> from sale
of his texts, because income means access-blockage. This is
>sh> also in
the interest of the author's institution, which likewise gains
>sh> kudos (and
grant income) from the impact of his research (not to
>sh> mention
their savings from S/L/P cancellations!)
>
> Here is where
your confusion lies. It is false (as an economic
> proposition)
that there is a direct relationship between ‘no income’ and
> ‘access blockage’.
Consider a field where there is an economic demand for
> the research
(engineering, medicine, finance, etc.) It is common to see
> research produced
in these fields where publication is delayed. It is
> first made
available for a high price via consultancies, newsletters,
> affiliates,
etc., and later made available to the academic world at large.
> This way the
authors have their cake and eat it too---make money, and
> still make
the research available to all. Obviously this practice can be
> abused, but
that is beside the point. The point is that income can be
> made even
while providing broad access.
Good case in
point: The reply, insofar as my refereed journal papers are
concerned, is
loud and clear: Forget about the pennies I could make from
the gate by
denying or delaying access. Let everyone have it for free
NOW. There aren't
pennies enough in the (realistic) world to make me
change my mind.
No, offering
the author a cut of the gate receipts will NOT cut it in
this peculiar
literature, and if that's the alternative ‘business
model’, it's
a non-starter here. (And hence the analogies where it may
work are simply
irrelevant, again.)
> A similar example
is JSTOR, where back issues journal articles are
> available
at zero marginal price to subscribing institutions.
Yes, IF (equals
where, and when) the subscription is paid. Tell that to
all my potential
readers who are NOT lucky enough to be at an
institution
that can afford the subscription!
(The weasel-word
was ‘marginal price’, because it glosses over the
S/L/P barrier
itself. Nor is an author happy about having his
retrospective
journal publications held hostage to S/L/P either: why
should he be?)
Remember, the
alternative to each of these cases is self-archiving (which
authors can
do retrospectively too!).
> Indeed, this
model is becoming somewhat common in the for-profit trade
> literature.
An author first publishes a book, then 2 or 3 years puts the
> text up on
his or her web site.
Interesting,
but its relevance to the journal literature is unclear,
for the reasons
mentioned above.
(Moreover, short-half-life
print runs and the actuarial statistics behind
them are probably
behind the practise you mention, as is the current
inconvenience
of on-screen discursive reading for book-length
materials: Immediacy,
and constant on-line accessibility and
navigability
are assets peculiar to the journal literature.)
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html
> This is ‘second
degree temporal price discrimination’ and presents one
> interesting
business model for information goods.
Might be useful
to a journal publisher looking for add-ons to help
preserve an
S/L/P market, but the author wants immediate visibility, so
it is a minus,
not a plus for him, with or without the pennies.
>sh> So with
refereed journals it makes sense (and with books it does not)
>sh> that costs
should be paid for at the author-institution end (yielding
>sh> free access
for all) rather than the reader-institution end (blocking
>sh> access,
impact income).
>
> The conclusion
has some merit, but I disagree with the analysis. I claim
> that the fundamental
force is not the difference in motivation of the
> authors (since
trade authors and academic authors like both money and
> readers) but
in the nature of the production process of research, and, in
> particular,
that the producers and consumers are the same people.
I'm afraid I
can't entirely agree. First, the trade/academic distinction
is a red herring
here; it's journal-papers by academics vs. books by
academics that
we are focusing on now.
It is true that
both of these have a smaller and more inbred
constituency
than the non-academic book authorship/readership, but even
in the former
it is not literally true that the producers and consumers
of any given
work are the same (not even to the extent that it is true
that contemporary
composers compose only for one another!). It may very
well be that
a large proportion of the readers of my refereed journal
articles are
themselves authors of refereed journal articles, but so
what? And so
what if (when) it is true that most of the buyers of a
book by an academic
author are themselves authors of refereed journal
articles? (The
buyers can't be mostly book-authors -- not enough to go
'round except
in the special case of those esoteric monographs, for a
narrow circle
of peers only, which are again non-representative.)
I don't think
any principles follow from this inbredness -- except for
that last special
case where fellow-specialists are the only ones
willing to shell
out for an esoteric volume in their own speciality. The
academic community
is simply too large to be treated as just a peer
market for one
another's work.
I think a potentially
much more important side-effect of this
inbredness,
though, is peer review itself, and here again, the
implications
are different, and much more profound, for journals:
For we are not
only the authors and the consumers of the refereed
literature,
we are also its referees: WE do the quality controlling,
and we do it
for free, motivated, when all is said and done, by
the Golden Rule,
intrinsic interest (and perhaps some superstition and
sometimes worse)
more than anything else.
The fact that
even the quality controllers are us means that if journal
publishers should
prove (as I hope they will not) to be inclined to try
to hold the
literature hostage to access-tolls by trying to prevent us,
through regressive
copyright agreements, from self-archiving, then
editorial boards
are certainly in a position to bolt (as they have
already done
-- or threatened to do -- in a few cases)...
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
> To see
> why, look
at another genre with this characteristic---fanzines for
> hobbiests
(science fiction, collectors, etc.). In the print fanzine world
> authors were
not paid and the readers paid for zine via subscription, just
> as in the
academic genre. Now most of the hardcopy zines have moved to
> the Web where
they are freely available. I think you are right that this
> will happen
with academic journals, but it isn't because academic authors
> wouldn't like
to get paid for their texts.
This is the general
Net freeware/vanity-press analogy, and I'm afraid I
still don't
find it helpful: Yes, refereed journal articles are
give-aways,
like fanzines, but they are quality-controlled, certified
give-aways,
hence not vanity press (and they still require an economic
model for covering
the essential costs of
quality/control/certification).
http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html
> Well, we could
quarrel about the metaphysics of ‘cause’, I guess, but I
> would say
that there is a pretty direct causal relationship between the
> number of
readers of one's refereed articles and one's academic salary in
> the US.
Please see above
for a more fine-grained causal analysis of the causal
structure of
that correlation!
>sh> The trade/non-trade
divide is fairly represented by desire and
>sh> expectation
of revenue directly from the sale of the text.
>
> This is simply
wrong. Most trade books make very little money for the
> author directly
from royalty revenues. You only have to look at the
> statistics
on authors' incomes. The National Writers Union publishes
> such a survey
and the numbers are strikingly small.
Are those figures
adjusted for time-lines? At any given time, there must
be a large number
of authors at the earliest embryonic stages, where
their output
is not matched by income. And perhaps the profession also
contains a large
proportion of failures. But surely no writer's desires
and expectations
are based on the actuarial facts about starters and
failures!
There is a counterpart
in refereed-journal writing too, though. Most
articles are
read by few and cited by none (except the author himself).
Does this restore
the analogy? Hardly, for the dream of the researcher
is of making
an important finding and thereby making an important impact
on further research
(and, yes, its indirect income-enhancing
consequences);
what is the non-academic writer's dream, if not being
widely read?
(I made a mistake
when I wrote earlier that reaching a maximum number
of eyes/minds
was an end in itself for the researcher, rather than just
a means of making
money from the sales of the texts: the end is
actually reaching
the RIGHT minds, the ones that will understand, build
upon, and, yes,
cite their work. What is the non-academic author's
counterpart
for this?)
We had agreed
we would only speak of academic authors' though: DO
academic authors
write books with motivations so different from
those of non-academic
authors? Are they really primarily after the
indirect benefits
rather than the direct ones from sales? It would be
interesting
to see the statistics for that specific literature (and
controlled for
cumulative life-cycle effects -- and perhaps even culled
for esoteric
‘failures’)... But remember that ‘desire and expectation’
does refer to
motivation (dreams), and not actuarial realism ...
>sh> this reader-end
market is the wrong one for
>sh> refereed
journal articles, which authors have always wanted to give
>sh> away, but
have been prevented from doing so by the economics of paper.
>
> Again you
are making the leap from ‘maximize the readership of’ to
> ‘give away’.
I agree with the former motivation (at least to the first
> order) but
I deny that it immediately follows that the content must
> be given away.
This is one tool, but not the only one.
Would you not
say that the long-standing practise of distributing free
(paper) reprints
to reprint-requesters tends in my direction? As does
the absence
of a corresponding tendency with books (except in the case
of Vanity Press)?
(Publishers are always happy to pay royalties to an
author in the
form of free copies of his book: Why is this not taken up
more by authors?)
I would be interested
to know what would be a BETTER ‘tool’ for maximizing
access to my
papers than making them available online for free for all
forever. For
self-archiving is within reach of one and all. Paul
Ginsparg has
led us to the water, and all we need do now is drink...
> I claim that
a smaller
> and smaller
fraction of total written works will be sold in the trade
> model.
The majority of written work will be given away on the Web
> (in fact,
that is probably true today).
Would you say
that the rising success of Amazon Books was evidence for or
against your
prediction?
> In my experience,
most publication is a mixture of economic and
> non-economic
motivations. My textbooks and trade book were successful
> because my
academic papers were widely read. The visibility resulting
> from the academic,
text, and trade books leads to more offers for speeches
> and consulting.
I don't see the stark division that you describe.
Uncontested.
And still the papers are give-aways whereas the rest are
not.
> I agree that
the filtering is what need to be paid for. (A quibble:
> some referees
are paid, though typically not a sum that covers the
> time cost.)
A propos, from
a previous posting:
There is another Harnad, not myself, but a mathematical physicist by
the name of John Harnad (and the one who first drew my attention to the
Ginsparg
Archive way back in the early '90s). J. Harnad has some further recommendations
on the
subject of referee answerability and compensation: He recommends
that (a) all referees should be paid to referee papers; (b) payment
for a rejected paper should be minimal (say, $200), but payment for
an accepted paper should be commensurate with the effort of seeing
it through the successive revisions (say, $2000) to successful
publication; and, to avoid the potential abuse discussed above, (c)
if a paper is accepted, the name of the accepting referee(s) should
be co-published with it, to share the responsibility, praise or
blame. He feels this would raise the quality of the refereeing and
make the entire process much more answerable, hence effective, than
it is now.
Obviously this proposal is compatible with the transition from
reader-institution-end payment to author-institution-end payment,
but it is an as yet untested peer-review reform proposal; all such
reform proposals need to be tested empirically and practically
before being implemented on any scale. Hence it should not detain
us on the road to freeing the CURRENT refereed literature, such as
it is.
(I also think that there is not enough money in the world to pay
fairly for the precious time that referees steal from their own
research in order to do the mostly thankless task of peer review;
hence the Golden Rule is probably the only one we can continue to
rely on! SUBMISSION charges, creditable toward PUBLICATION charges
should the paper be accepted, may not be a bad idea to levy on
authors, though, with or without referee payment, for it to might
help raise submission standards and even revision
conscientiousness, hence perhaps even lightening some of the burden
on the work-horse referees; but this too would need pre-testing.)
>sh> It's not
academic vs. trade authors! It's academics when they wear
>sh> their refereed-journal-author
hats and every other author, including
>sh> themselves,
when wearing their book-author hats (except in the case of
>sh> esoteric
monographs).
>
> Hmm. So academic
authors like money when they write trade books and don't
> like money
when they write [journal papers]?
Correct. Vide
supra.
> The real difference
is not at the level of the author, but at the level of
> the industry.
In the trade book industry the authors and the readers are
> quite distinct,
whereas in the academic publishing industry the authors
> and readers
are, by and large, the same people. The academic publications
> are both an
input to and an output of the research process. Other
> publishing
industries where authors and readers are the same people had
> similar business
models, and, I suggest will have similar dynamics in
> their move
to the Web.
This again conflates
books/journals and separates academic/non-academic,
which I think
are the wrong fault lines. (I have tried to discuss the
inbred issue
above.) Perhaps you could give another example (besides
esoteric monographs)
that fits the give-away algorithm of refereed
papers?
> (The apparent
necessity of paying for the
> refereeing
overhead makes things a bit more complicated in the academic
> markets.)
Vide supra.
>sh> This is
all no doubt true. But books, academic and non-academic, can in
>sh> principle
bring direct incomes to their authors, and journal articles
>sh> can't,
and that's the point.
>
> I agree that
journal articles don't bring direct income to the authors
> under the
current business model, but that is a rather obvious
> observation.
Whether they ‘can't’ or not could be disputed.
I'd like to hear
a realistic scheme for this! To my mind it founders on
the following:
Journal papers average next to no readers/citers
(with the access
barriers of both paper and S/L/P). Going on-line is one
step forward;
bypassing S/L/P through self-archiving is a second. Can
you think of
a better way?
> But the more
> interesting
observation is that trade books generally don't bring much
> direct income
to authors either. Authors publish trade books because of
> glory they
get, for the most part, some of which can be translated into
> money.
So how do most
trade authors make their fortunes? Is it all appearances
and movie rights
now?
> You are simply
making the same false claim over and over again. Authors
> would be happy
to make money from their journal articles, it's just that
> few publishers
offer them this option. So it is not the motivation of the
> authors that
is relevant, but rather the business model for the industry.
By what business
model would authors make money from their journal
articles? How
much? And how do you think that would fare against
self-archiving?
(Another way to put it -- I think I've already asked
this once: How
much money would the publisher of my refereed paper have
to pay me so
that I relinquish my self-archiving right? And where would
he get enough
money for that?)
> I don't have
substantive quarrels with the rest of your argument, or
> with your
understanding of the academic publishing industry. I just
> think that
you don't understand the economics of the trade publishing
> industry.
The simple fact is that very, very few authors make any
> substantial
sum of money in the trade industry, and their motivation
> for publishing
trade books is more complex than you assert.
If none of my
comments so far bears on how this is to be interpreted or
applied, then
I acquiesce to your much more extensive knowledge on that
subject!
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Mon, 12 Jul 1999
From:
Hal Varian
Stevan Harnad
wrote:
> Our disagreement
is only about whether I am exaggerating the difference
> between the
motivations of refereed-journal papers-authors (regarding
> THOSE papers)
and authors in general -- of books, magazine articles,
> etc. -- in
suggesting that the former are, and have always been,
> interested
ONLY in giving those papers away, whereas other authors (as
> well as themselves,
when wearing other hats) have at least the hope of
> some direct
revenue from the sale of their texts.
>
> If I AM exaggerating
this difference, then Hal's view would be that
> the ‘optimal
and inevitable’ for the refereed journal literature may well
> prove to be
the optimal and inevitable for much of the rest of the
> literature
too.
Yes, I think
that this is correct---we will certainly see much more
‘author pays’
production of literature, now that the Web has lowered the
costs of distribution
so dramatically. Indeed, we already see a huge amount of
writing on the
Web that has no (direct) compensation at all.
The big question,
as you have rightly identified, is the role of the
editors/referees/filterers
of information. What is the economic
model for this
activity, in both the academic and the non-academic
literature?
You argue that the author should pay for this filtering
role.
Perhaps that is right, but one could also make a case that the
reader should
pay since he is the direct beneficiary of the filtering,
and that is
the real value added in the publication process, especially
now that the
other costs have been driven so low.
> There have
been several repeated points of misunderstanding. One has
> been that
I am clearly not claiming that refereed-paper authors don't
> care about
money! Nor that if there were some hypothetical,
> counterfactual
way that they could have their cake and eat it too --
> i.e., if everyone
everywhere could and would have free access to their
> esoteric papers
in perpetuo AND some entity were also prepared to pay
> them (the
authors) for it -- then they would quite happily accept the
> eyes/minds
AND the cash!
I would say that
this ‘counterfactual’ is exactly what the system of
government research
funding agencies & university libraries does: the funding
agencies pay
researchers to produce papers which are sent to journals to be
evaluated and,
in most cases, published, which are then purchased by
libraries for
the free use of the researchers. Indeed, I would claim that it
is the role
of intermediaries that has got us into the current mess; if
the authors/researchers
faced the true costs of the current publication
system, they
would find a way to reform it quite quickly!
> So it is not
saintliness about potential direct revenue from these
> papers, if
revenue could drop like Manna from heaven, that sets these
> authors (when
wearing these hats) apart. It is the reality of the
> trade-off,
which means revenue here could only come at the expense of
> access barriers,
and there isn't faintly enough potential revenue to
> make it even
thinkable to embrace that trade-off.
There is something
of a trade-off, but perhaps less than you think.
There are ways
to vary access and recover costs from customers. Even
now you can
purchase a journal subscription directly or go access
it ‘for free’
in your library. Here are two different kinds of access,
one more convenient
than the other, and they are priced accordingly.
So it isn't
‘access’ vs. ‘no access’ but different degrees of access.
The same can
be done in the online world; whether this is desirable or
not is a different
question.
> And causality
is indeed the issue, rather than mere correlation, for
> Hal is merely
pointing to the overall positive correlation between
> publication/sales
and impact/income: {more publication, more sales} --
> {more impact,
more income}. Sure! But if there were no sales, the
> impact/income
would be still higher (MUCH higher, by my lights)!
This may be correct,
but then we come back to the issue of filtering.
I can self-archive/publish
for free on the Web, but I probably end up
with more readers
(of my technical articles) by publishing in a journal,
since the articles
are vetted by peer review. You argue that author
charges could
pay for peer review. This maybe correct, but I worry
about the incentives
in such a system. Under reader pays, the
publisher has
an incentive to keep quality high in order to attract readers. Under
author pays,
the publisher has an incentive to get as many authors to
pay as possible,
and other mechanisms must be used to maintain quality.
> But (and it
is hard to put this in formal terms), I still feel that
> that this
is not the PARADIGMATIC case for books, as it IS for refereed
> papers; with
books, is not the ‘name of the game’, and hence it would be
> misleading
to treat it as such.
I think a lot
depends on how you average in creating your paradigm.
Most books don't
make much money, if any. A few books make a lot. The
same goes for
authors. The primary motive for authors, I think, is to
be read.
They would like to be paid for this activity, but only
a few manage
to do so.
I turn now to
the direct responses, limiting myself only to those
where something
new can be said.
> Yes, IF (equals
where, and when) the subscription is paid. Tell that to
> all my potential
readers who are NOT lucky enough to be at an
> institution
that can afford the subscription!
JSTOR price discriminates
as well---large organizations pay more than
small ones.
In general, the savings in shelf space vastly outweighs
the cost of
JSTOR. So if an organization ‘can't afford’ access, it is
likely an accounting
illusion rather than actual lack of money.
> It may very
> well be that
a large proportion of the readers of my refereed journal
> articles are
themselves authors of refereed journal articles, but so
> what?
> I don't think
any principles follow from this inbredness ...
The important
principle is that the readers are willing to pay something
for the filtering
services provided by the journal. And it is this
willingness-to-pay
that supports the current business model. You could
be right that
‘author pays’ is superior for the reasons you cite. But
my worry is
that the economic incentives to provide value to the reader
(via filtering)
are weakened.
> This is the
general Net freeware/vanity-press analogy, and I'm afraid I
> still don't
find it helpful: Yes, refereed journal articles are
> give-aways,
like fanzines, but they are quality-controlled, certified
> give-aways,
hence not vanity press (and they still require an economic
> model for
covering the essential costs of
> quality/control/certification).
>
> http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html
We are, I think,
agreed on this point---that the costs of quality
control must
still be covered by someone. The issue is, should it be the
author or the
reader? I maintain that the reader gets substantial value
from the quality
control, which is as argument for making the reader
pay. This
doesn't negate your argument---I perfectly agree that the
author gets
value from having his works published, which is an argument
for making the
author pay. I just don't know what the net of these two
effects is.
> And perhaps
the profession also
> contains a
large proportion of failures. But surely no writer's desires
> and expectations
are based on the actuarial facts about starters and
> failures!
>
> There is a
counterpart in refereed-journal writing too, though. Most
> articles are
read by few and cited by none (except the author himself).
> Does this
restore the analogy? Hardly, for the dream of the researcher
> is of making
an important finding and thereby making an important impact
> on further
research (and, yes, its indirect income-enhancing
> consequences);
what is the non academic writer's dream, if not being
> widely read?
This is a fair
point---it may be that authors of book want to make
money, but few
of them do. And, as you say, authors of journal articles want
to be read,
but few of them are.
> Would you not
say that the long-standing practise of distributing free
> (paper) reprints
to reprint-requesters tends in my direction? As does
> the absence
of a corresponding tendency with books (except in the case
> of Vanity
Press)? (Publishers are always happy to pay royalties to an
> author in
the form of free copies of his book: Why is this not taken up
> more by authors?)
I would say that
paper reprints are provided to me for free, or
at least can
be purchased via a grant. But copies of my book have
to be purchased
out of my own pocket. I don't find it remarkable
that authors
give away for free something that they receive for free,
but wish to
charge for something they have to pay for.
> > I claim that
a smaller
> > and smaller
fraction of total written works will be sold in the trade
> > model.
The majority of written work will be given away on the Web
> > (in fact,
that is probably true today).
>
> Would you
say that the rising success of Amazon Books was evidence for or
> against your
prediction?
Last year the
aggregate sales of books in the US fell by 2%, after
several years
of increase. Amazon's success is coming at the expense of other
vendors, not
from an increase in the total sales of books.
> By what business
model would authors make money from their journal
> articles?
how much? and how do you think that would fare against
> self-archiving?
(Another way to put it -- I think I've already asked
> this once:
How much money would the publisher of my refereed paper have
> to pay me
so that I relinquish my self-archiving right? And where would
> he get enough
money for that?)
Remember, the
real question at issue here is not whether the author gets
paid or not---the
debate started when I asserted that authors of trade
books don't
get paid much either. The question that is of primary
concern to you
is whether readers pay. You argue that authors derive the most
value from publication,
therefore it makes sense for them to pay
for the costs
of publishing. This may be right, but another argument
is that readers
benefit the most from the filtering, so they should pay
for the costs.
Hal Varian
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Mon, 12 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
The exchange
with Hal Varian has been very interesting, but in the
interests of
hastening convergence, I will be more telegraphic in
my quote/commenting
in this round, but first a summary:
The only two
substantive issues now are (1) an error (about ‘author
charges’) and
(2) a disagreement (about who should pay for peer
review).
(1) Hal speaks
of AUTHOR charges, and I keep speaking of
AUTHOR-INSTITUTION
charges. The annual costs for quality
control/certification
(QC/C) (less than 1/3 of the total institutional
S/L/P costs
for full paper and online publication in the present,
obsolete system)
will not and should not come from authors' pockets but
from (less than
1/3 of) author-institution's annual S/L/P savings from
total S/L/P
cancellation.
The rest of the
(marginally vanishing) costs of periodical publication
in the new system
are to be borne by centralized self-archiving
facilities (Los
Alamos, E-biomed, CogPrints, Scholar's Forum), backed
up by distributed
institutional self-archives, plus the increased
off-loading
of word-processing (and soon tagging/mark-up) onto authoring
software (which
is on the rise anyway).
(2) Hal acknowledges
the trade-off between direct benefits (royalty
income) from
the sale of texts and indirect benefits (‘impact’ income).
(I put this
in crass income terms just for the sake of simplicity.)
The trade-off
is that charging for access (royalty income) means loss of
access to those
who can't/won't pay (impact income). (I won't even
mention that
journal authors don't even get the pennies from the royalty
income!)
Yet, despite
acknowledging this loss of potential readership (hence
indirect revenue)
caused by S/L/P barriers, and despite agreeing that
self-archiving
may even be the way for many books, let alone journals,
when it comes
to the question of how to recover the much lower residual
costs of quality
control/certification [QC/C], Hal regresses on the
S/L/P trade
model, seemingly forgetting both the trade-off and the
self-archiving
option!
Part of this
misunderstanding may revolve around institutional S/L/P,
which currently
SUBSIDIZES readers (at that lucky institution); Hal
contrasts this
with PERSONAL (out-of-pocket or out-of-grant) payment
of author charges
in the proposed system, whereas the most natural way
to think of
it is simply as rechannelling what is already an
institutional
subsidy from S/L/P costs to the much lower up-front QC/C
costs!
If you must think
in terms of who the ‘consumer’ is and how he
benefits, the
consumer is the author-institution in both cases, the
benefit in the
former case (reader-institution end S/L/P) being to buy
in SOME of the
journal literature for the use of its scholars and
scientists (to
enhance their research impact), the benefit in the
latter case
(author-institution end QC/C) being to buy in ALL of the
journal literature
for the use of ALL scholars and scientists (thereby
enhancing everyone's
potential impact) -- and at less than 1/3 of the
price!.
When you speak
of retaining S/L/P from the author-institution's point
of view, always
keep in mind their lost potential impact on the
eyes/minds of
the many institutions and countries that cannot afford
that particular
journal...
In fact, the
best intuition pump I have found for why charging S/L/P for
access makes
no sense for the refereed research literature is that it
is for exactly
the same reason that charging for access to
advertisements
would make no sense!
Now to (telegraphic)
quote/comment mode:
On Mon, 12 Jul
1999, Hal Varian wrote:
> ... You argue
that the author should pay for this filtering
> role. Perhaps
that is right, but one could also make a case that the
> reader should
pay since he is the direct beneficiary of the filtering,
> ...now that
the other costs have been driven so low.
But this makes
the author and author-institution the LOSER of all those
potential eyes/minds
(and impact income) -- and PARTICULARLY considering
how low those
"filtering" (QC/C) costs really are!
> ... the funding
agencies pay researchers to produce papers which are sent
> to journals
to be evaluated and, in most cases, published, which are
> then purchased
by libraries for the free use of the researchers.
> ... it is
the role of intermediaries that has got us into the current
> mess; if the
authors/researchers faced the true costs of the current
> publication
system, they would find a way to reform it quite quickly!
Indeed they would,
but it would not be by simply lowering S/L/P
barriers, but
by eliminating them completely, through author-institution
end QC/C payment
out of 1/3 of S/P/P savings, plus author self-archiving.
> There is something
of a trade-off, but perhaps less than you think.
> There are
ways to vary access and recover costs from customers. Even
> now you can
purchase a journal subscription directly or go access
> it ‘for free’
in your library. Here are two different kinds of access,
> one more convenient
than the other, and they are priced accordingly.
> So it isn't
‘access’ vs ‘no access’ but different degrees of access.
> The same can
be done in the online world; whether this is desirable or
> not is a different
question.
And what about
the many countries and institutions that can't afford
either form
of access? (And re-calculate that at least 14,000 times for
each of the
refereed journals in Ulrich's that some institutional
author's work
might appear in.)
‘It is easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for
scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically
interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable
from any researcher's desk world-wide.’
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html
As an author,
how many potential readers of my work would I like to
deprive of this
resource -- in the interests of a reader-end S/L/P
model (from
which I do not make a penny, and which costs my institution
at least twice
as much as barrier-free QC/C would)?
And what is the
counterpart of personal vs. library access in the
desk-top, networked
world?
> You argue that
author charges could pay for peer review. This maybe
> correct, but
I worry about the incentives in such a system. Under
> reader pays,
the publisher has an incentive to keep quality high in
> order to attract
readers. Under author pays, the publisher has an
> incentive
to get as many authors to pay as possible, and other
> mechanisms
must be used to maintain quality.
I have already
replied to this, in response to Frank Norman at the
National Institute
for Medical Research. This ‘vanity press’ model of
author-pays
profoundly misunderstands peer review!
Nothing like this will happen; it is based on a misunderstanding of
peer review -- and of what it is that makes the prestigious
journals prestigious, and hence makes authors prefer to submit to
them rather than elsewhere:
The prestige of the top journals is based on their quality, which
in turn depends on their quality-control standards: They only
accept the very best papers (and their typically high citation
impact factors reflect this). (They are not ‘designer labels’, for
the patina of which a ‘consumer’ is willing to pay more!)
The way that high standards of quality are maintained is through
rigorous peer review: One cannot BUY success in that process;
authors must EARN it (by doing high quality work). Otherwise the
prestigious journals would simply lose their prestige (and be
replaced by other, more rigorously refereed journals, that
recapture their standards, and THEREBY the best papers. [And, no,
they will not LOWER their charges to capture to higher-prestige
authors either! This sort of market thinking is all based on the
wrong, old, reader/consumer-end model: or, to put it another way,
the ‘competition’ in this non-trade literature is for high-quality
papers, not for author-dollars.]).
On the contrary, it is much lower down in the peer review
hierarchy, as one approaches the vanity press, that some abuse of
the author-end system is conceivable: Authors may try to buy their
way into the pages of low-quality journals when they have failed to
earn their way into the high-quality ones. But, frankly, I don't
find this at all worrisome! Vanity publications are apparent to
everyone; they wear the result (low quality) on their sleeves (and
their contents, their authorships, and their impact factors); and
such journals already exist today, where the ‘subsidy’ currently
comes on the reader-institution end rather than the
author-institution end -- everyone knows which ones they are, and
that caveat emptor prevails when it comes to deciding whether to
read them or rely on what they report.
And don't forget:
The peers review for free ... QC/C costs are only for
IMPLEMENTING
refereeing, not for the referees themselves (who, like the
author, contribute
for free). Vide supra.
> if an organization
‘can't afford’ access, it is
> likely an
accounting illusion rather than actual lack of money.
I'd like to see
the data for that, not even for all 14K journals in
Ulrichs, but
just, say, the top 6.5K indexed by the ISI. And please
tell me the
figures per journal, per institution, per country. As an
author/advertiser,
I would like to know how many potential customers I
am really LOSING
if I endorse the SELLING of my papers/ads, instead of
having my institution
pay up front to GIVE them away to one and all...
> The important
principle is that the readers are willing to pay
> something
for the filtering services provided by the journal. And it is
> this willingness-to-pay
that supports the current business model. You
> could be right
that ‘author pays’ is superior for the reasons you cite.
> But my worry
is that the economic incentives to provide value to the
> reader (via
filtering) are weakened.
Vide supra. Peer
review will take care of itself (money is not involved
in refereeing);
focus on my POTENTIAL readers whose institutions
CANNOT pay...
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Mon, 12 Jul 1999
From:
Hal Varian
On Mon, 12 Jul
1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> The only two
substantive issues now are (1) an error (about ‘author
> charges’)
and (2) a disagreement (about who should pay for peer
> review).
>
> (1) Hal speaks
of AUTHOR charges, and I keep speaking of
> AUTHOR-INSTITUTION
charges.
No problem there;
I just shortened the phrase in the interests
of my weary
fingers.
> If you must
think in terms of who the ‘consumer’ is and how he
> benefits,
the consumer is the author-institution in both cases
Completely agreed.
In fact, you will remember that I argued that it is
this point (that
the readers and the authors are by-and-large the same) is
the critical
aspect of academic publishing that differentiates it from the
trade press,
as opposed to the different motivations of the authors that
you emphasize.
(Perhaps it is not surprising that a psychologist
emphasizes motivations
and economist emphasizes industry structure.)
> When you speak
of retaining S/L/P from the author-institution's point
> of view, always
keep in mind their lost potential impact on the
> eyes/minds
of the many institutions and countries that cannot afford
> that particular
journal...
I agree that
S/L/P, as currently implemented, reduces readership.
However, that's
not the end of the story. I think you need to look
at why and how
S/L/P was created and survived for many years. You may
end up being
right that S/L/P is no longer appropriate given the change
in costs.
If it was so inefficient, how could it have survived for so
long?
This very fact calls for a deeper analysis of the economic
forces that
kept it alive in the face of the inefficiency you describe.
> > There is
something of a trade-off, but perhaps less than you think.
> > There are
ways to vary access and recover costs from customers. Even
> > now you
can purchase a journal subscription directly or go access
> > it ‘for
free’ in your library ....
> And what about
the many countries and institutions that can't afford
> either form
of access? (And re-calculate that at least 14,000 times for
> each of the
refereed journals in Ulrich's that some institutional
> author's work
might appear in.)
And what about
countries and institutions that can't afford submission
fees?
In the long run, the same costs have to be paid. Your argument is
that the author-institution
pays system covers the costs and allows for
broader readership,
an observation with which I agree. However, there is
a more subtle
issue. An economic system tends to favor those who pay. If
the authors
pay, then the system will lean towards the author's goal
(getting published)
whereas if the readers pay the system will lean
towards the
reader's goal (effective filtering.)
I'm not sure
which effect is larger. But, of course, there is no
reason why both
sides couldn't pay, if that turned out to be the
appropriate
way to align incentives.
>
‘It is easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for
>
scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically
>
interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable
>
from any researcher's desk world-wide.’
>
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html
>
> As an author,
how many potential readers of my work would I like to
> deprive of
this resource -- in the interests of a reader-end S/L/P
> model (from
which I do not make a penny, and which costs my institution
> at least twice
as much as barrier-free QC/C would)?
The publication
system shouldn't be designed only to serve authors---it
has to serve
the needs of readers as well (especially if they are the same
people!). One
might add terms like ‘all meritorious papers, systematically
evaluated and
vetted’ to your ‘ideal online resource’. (I realize that
you acknowledge
elsewhere that refereeing is a critical part of academic
publication,
even though it ends up being missing as a desideratum here.)
> I have already
replied to this, in response to Frank Norman at the
> National Institute
for Medical Research. This ‘vanity press’ model of
> author-pays
profoundly misunderstands peer review!
>
The prestige of the top journals is based on their quality, which
>
in turn depends on their quality-control standards: They only
>
accept the very best papers (and their typically high citation
>
impact factors reflect this). (They are not ‘designer labels’, for
>
the patina of which a ‘consumer’ is willing to pay more!)
I think that
your subsequent analysis is a more-or-less correct analysis
of the pressures
for quality in the current system. Essentially, low
quality journals
are cancelled since their benefits aren't worth their
costs.
But in your proposed system, the reader bears no costs, so
this particular
feedback is eliminated.
You may well
respond that authors will want to submit to quality journals,
a point I accept.
But what does ‘submit’ really mean in this world?
I have argued
elsewhere that when publication costs were expensive,
it made sense
to evaluate ex ante. Now that publication costs are
cheap, it makes
sense to evaluate ex post. Furthermore, there is
no reason to
use a 0-1, publish/don't publish scale any more---much
more sophisticated
systems could be used.
One scenario
is for public-archiving and self-archiving as the publication
mechanism and
an essentially separate system of cataloguing/ranking/peer
reviewing as
the filtering system. The question then is who should pay
for the peer
reviewing? I submit that it may well be the readers, due to
the incentive
effects described above.
> > if an organization
‘can't afford’ access, it is
> > likely an
accounting illusion rather than actual lack of money.
>
> I'd like to
see the data for that, not even for all 14K journals in
> Ulrichs, but
just, say, the top 6.5K indexed by the ISI. And please
> tell me the
figures per journal, per institution, per country.
See Lemberg,
Richard, 1996 thesis on costs of digitization, UC Berkeley.
JSTOR did some
calculations with the same conclusion, which are reported
in part by a
speech from Bill Bowen, which, I believe, is available
on the JSTOR
Web site.
Hal Varian
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Mon, 12 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
On Mon, 12 Jul
1999, Hal Varian wrote:
> You may end
up being right that S/L/P is no longer appropriate given
> the change
in costs. If it was so inefficient, how could it have
> survived for
so long?
The answer couldn't
be simpler: Because of the technology and economics
of print-on-paper!
In that medium, S/L/P was the only viable option if
one wanted to
be published at all.
In the PostGutenberg,
online-only era, for refereed journals, the days
of S/L/P are
over!
But S/L/P is
STILL fine for the trade literature (books, magazines).
It's only the
anomalous, give-away literature that has been freed at
last of the
‘Faustian Bargain’ that held it hostage to S/L/P tolls
until now.
>sh> And what
about the many countries and institutions that can't afford
>sh> either
form of access? (And re-calculate that at least 14,000 times for
>sh> each of
the refereed journals in Ulrich's that some institutional
>sh> author's
work might appear in.)
>
> And what about
countries and institutions that can't afford submission
> fees? In the
long run, the same costs have to be paid.
I knew, as I
wrote that, that this would be the come-back!
The answer is:
(1) Those disenfranchised
institutions are currently NET CONSUMERS of
the literature
(they aspire only to READ it, if they could only afford
it!). They are
not net providers (they are not publishing much). They
could not afford
most of the journals under the S/L/P system. So their
researchers
had much less basis for publishing anything either, being
starved of access
to the literature.
In the up-front
system, these institutions will simply get a free ride
from the NET
PROVIDERS (research-active, high publishing-rate
institutions),
but no one will lose as a result of this. (Stealing my
paper to read
is a victimless crime in the post-print-photocopy age!
Among other
things, this is the end of the ‘Copyright Clearance Center’
for the journal
literature, which is merely a variant of the ‘P’ in
S/L/P.)
It should still
average out to less than 1/3 of every institution's
prior S/L/P
budget being rechannelled toward up-front costs.
And as the institutions
that were disenfranchised by S/L/P barriers
begin to become
more research-active as a result of free access to the
literature,
their research productivity and income should rise, as
should their
publication rate, and the resulting revenue available for
covering those
increasing publication costs. (Research and
research-impact
revenue should always be ahead of QC/C costs by at
least a factor
of two, if my 1/3 figure holds.)
(2) What about
institutionally unaffiliated scholars? I think a modest
slush fund should
be able to cover that minoritarian need quite
adequately.
> Your argument
is
> that the author-institution
pays system covers the costs and allows for
> broader readership,
an observation with which I agree. However, there is
> a more subtle
issue. An economic system tends to favor those who pay. If
> the authors
pay, then the system will lean towards the author's goal
> (getting published)
whereas if the readers pay the system will lean
> towards the
reader's goal (effective filtering.)
This is the vanity-press
argument again. Reply: Peer Review. The peer
community will
continue to maintain the standards, as always, for free!
It is only the
IMPLEMENTATION of peer review that needs to be paid for,
not referee
time/effort. And journal rejection-rates and impact-factors
will continue
to be the marks of quality (and the magnet for authors),
not the money
exchanged for implementing peer review!
> I'm not sure
which effect is larger. But, of course, there is no
> reason why
both sides couldn't pay, if that turned out to be the
> appropriate
way to align incentives.
Heaven forfend!
The worst of all possible worlds! You have to pay to
read AND you
have to pay to be published! Insult upon Injury!
> >
‘It is easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for
> >
scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically
> >
interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable
> >
from any researcher's desk world-wide’
> >
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html
> >
> > As an author,
how many potential readers of my work would I like to
> > deprive
of this resource -- in the interests of a reader-end S/L/P
> > model (from
which I do not make a penny, and which costs my institution
> > at least
twice as much as barrier-free QC/C would)?
>
> The publication
system shouldn't be designed only to serve authors---it
> has to serve
the needs of readers as well (especially if they are the same
> people!).
One might add terms like ‘all meritorious papers, systematically
> evaluated
and vetted’ to your ‘ideal online resource’. (I realize that
> you acknowledge
elsewhere that refereeing is a critical part of academic
> publication,
even though it ends up being missing as a desideratum here.)
Precisely. It
is and always has been the freeing of the REFEREED JOURNAL
LITERATURE to
which all these efforts have been directed. And as far as
I can tell,
that completely nullifies your objection here!
>sh> This ‘vanity
press’ model of
>sh> author-pays
profoundly misunderstands peer review!
>
>sh>
The prestige of the top journals is based on their quality, which
>sh>
in turn depends on their quality-control standards: They only
>sh>
accept the very best papers (and their typically high citation
>sh>
impact factors reflect this). (They are not ‘designer labels’, for
>sh>
the patina of which a ‘consumer’ is willing to pay more!)
>
> I think that
your subsequent analysis is a more-or-less correct analysis
> of the pressures
for quality in the current system. Essentially, low
> quality journals
are cancelled since their benefits aren't worth their
> costs.
But in your proposed system, the reader bears no costs, so
> this particular
feedback is eliminated.
The way for a
reader to vote is not with his (institution's) S/L/P
dollars, but
with his eyes, his citations, his refereeing, and his
research! This
is not commerce we are talking about, but Learned
Inquiry.
> You may well
respond that authors will want to submit to quality journals,
> a point I
accept. But what does ‘submit’ really mean in this world?
> I have argued
elsewhere that when publication costs were expensive,
> it made sense
to evaluate ex ante. Now that publication costs are
> cheap, it
makes sense to evaluate ex post.
Untested speculations
about replacing peer review by post-publication
peer commentary
are a can of worms on which I've written before:
Excerpt from:
Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review.
Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998)
http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible.html
Peer Commentary vs. Peer Review
‘And is peer commentary (even if we can settle the vexed "peer"
question) really peer review? Will I say publicly about someone
who might be refereeing my next grant application or tenure
review what I really think are the flaws of his latest raw
manuscript? (Should we then be publishing our names alongside
our votes in civic elections too, without fear or favour?) Will
I put into a public commentary -- alongside who knows how many
other such commentaries, to be put to who knows what use by who
knows whom -- the time and effort that I would put into a
referee report for an editor I know to be turning specifically
to me and a few other specialists for our expertise on a
specific paper?
If there is anyone on this planet who is in a position to
attest to the functional difference between peer review and
peer commentary (Harnad 1982, 1984), it is surely the author of
the present article, who has been umpiring a peer-reviewed
paper journal of Open Peer Commentary (Behavioral and Brain
Sciences http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs.html, published
by Cambridge University Press) for over 2 decades (Harnad
1979), as well as a peer-reviewed online-only journal of Open
Peer Commentary (Psycoloquy, sponsored by the American
Psychological Association,
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html for what will soon
be a decade too).
Both journals are rigorously refereed; only those papers that
have successfully passed through the peer review filter go on
to run the gauntlet of open peer commentary, an extremely
powerful and important SUPPLEMENT to peer review, but certainly
no SUBSTITUTE for it. Indeed, no one but the editor sees [or
should have to see] the population of raw, unrefereed
submissions, consisting of manuscripts eventually destined to
be revised and accepted after peer review, but also (with a
journal like BBS, with a 75% rejection rate) many manuscripts
not destined to appear in that particular journal at all.
Referee reports, some written for my eyes only, all written for
at most the author and fellow referees, are nothing like public
commentaries for the eyes of the entire learned community, and
vice versa. Nor do 75% of the submissions justify soliciting
public commentary, or at least not commentary at the BBS level
of the hierarchy.’
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html
Food for thought:
Would you rather have an ailing relative treated on
the basis of
the traditionally peer-reviewed biomedical literature,
with referees
selected and their reports adjudicated by a qualified,
answerable Editor,
or on the basis of navigating a Netnews chatgroup
peppered with
‘articles’ and ‘comments’ by God knows who (guided by hit
rates?).
[cf. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/shtml/misc/peer/index.shtml]
> Furthermore,
there is
> no reason
to use a 0-1, publish/don't publish scale any more---much
> more sophisticated
systems could be used.
On this topic,
see:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html
1999 Thread:
Independent scientific publication - Why have journals at all?
Short answer:
Peer review is not 0/1, red/green light. It is an
interactive,
iterative feedback cycle that sometimes leads to a paper
that passes
the threshold for THAT journal in the hierarchy (everything
gets published
SOMEWHERE eventually). But referees are a scarce
resource, and
journal quality is equivalent to referee quality and
rigour (and
rejection rate).
> One scenario
is for public-archiving and self-archiving as the publication
> mechanism
and an essentially separate system of cataloguing/ranking/peer
> reviewing
as the filtering system.
This is already
covered by the dichotomy: ‘U’ unrefereed pre-print vs.
‘R’ refereed
reprint (+ journal name ‘JX’). BOTH can be self-archived (and
suitably tagged).
> The question
then is who should pay
> for the peer
reviewing? I submit that it may well be the readers, due to
> the incentive
effects described above.
No, the readers
need merely CHOOSE to search only on items tagged ‘R’
in the free
Eprint Archive. The refereeing can be provided by peer
review (which
ain't broke, hence don't need fixin' -- let alone
replacing by
untested alternatives).
> >hv> if an
organization ‘can't afford’ access, it is
> >hv> likely
an accounting illusion rather than actual lack of money.
> >
>sh> I'd like
to see the data for that, not even for all 14K journals in
>sh> Ulrichs,
but just, say, the top 6.5K indexed by the ISI. And please
>sh> tell me
the figures per journal, per institution, per country.
>
> See Lemberg,
Richard, 1996 thesis on costs of digitization, UC Berkeley.
> JSTOR did
some calculations with the same conclusion, which are reported
> in part by
a speech from Bill Bowen, which, I believe, is available
> on the JSTOR
Web site.
That does not
answer my question: We are not talking about the costs of
digitization,
current or retrospective. We are talking about how many
institutions/countries
can and do afford how many journals!
You focus on
capturing the available money (via S/L/P), whereas I ask
‘Why not give
it away for free for all, and pay the small remaining cost
-- quality control
-- out of the S/L/P SAVINGS?’
If there is no
other way to free your intuitions from reader-end market
thinking, run
your whole argument through on advertisements: Why
shouldn't advertisers
give their ads only to those who can afford to pay
for it?
Answer: Ads are
not the right PRODUCT to think of! It is ad companies'
SERVICES that
advertisers want to pay for. (But before this segues into
the vanity-press
argument again, note that it's only an analogy; for
something closer
to a homology, you would have to make it the services
of a quality-controller/certifier
(the FDA?), and one in which the
quality assessment
itself is done by independent and incorruptible --
because unpaid!
-- assessors [referees]!)
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Mon, 12 Jul 1999
From:
Hal Varian
On Mon, 12 Jul
1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> In the PostGutenberg,
online-only era, for refereed journals, the days
> of S/L/P are
over!
>
> But S/L/P
is STILL fine for the trade literature (books, magazines).
> It's only
the anomalous, give-away literature that has been freed at
> last of the
‘Faustian Bargain’ that held it hostage to S/L/P tolls
> until now.
This is what
strikes me as peculiar in your position. You argue that
the dramatic
change in costs will have a big effect on the academic
publishing model,
and yet the same S/L/P model ‘is still fine’ for the trade
literature.
Doesn't it seem
strange that the same change in costs will have such a big
effect in one
area and a tiny effect in another? I argue that the change
in costs will
also have a dramatic effect in the trade literature with
lots of free
publication of unvetted material (see the Web) with people
paying for filtering/vetting.
Hence the business model for the two
literatures
will tend to become more similar.
> > An economic
system tends to favor those who pay. If
> > the authors
pay, then the system will lean towards the author's goal
> > (getting
published) whereas if the readers pay the system will lean
> > towards
the reader's goal (effective filtering.)
>
> This is the
vanity-press argument again. Reply: Peer Review. The peer
> community
will continue to maintain the standards, as always, for free!
> It is only
the IMPLEMENTATION of peer review that needs to be paid for,
> not referee
time/effort. And journal rejection-rates and impact-factors
> will continue
to be the marks of quality (and the magnet for authors),
> not the money
exchanged for implementing peer review!
But, as you well
know, peer review varies dramatically in its quality.
There are good
journals (which tend to be more selective) and bad journals
(which tend
to be less selective) under the current system. If authors
pay to get published,
there will be a natural tendency to increase the amount
published and
reduce average quality.
> > I'm not sure
which effect is larger. But, of course, there is no
> > reason why
both sides couldn't pay, if that turned out to be the
> > appropriate
way to align incentives.
>
> Heaven forfend!
The worst of all possible worlds! You have to pay to
> read AND you
have to pay to be published! Insult upon Injury!
But you are paying
for different things: authors are paying for
the hosting,
readers are paying for the filtering. This makes sense
since the authors
value being published (as you repeatedly emphasize)
and the readers
value selectivity. I think that your 1/3 figure for
refereeing process
is about right (I have made the same estimates in my
papers), so
it's the same total amount paid, by essentially the same people,
in either case.
And if there
are those that don't want to pay for filtering, they are welcome
to go out and
search for the material they want on their own, spending time
rather than
money. But if there are those that want to pay money to have
the searching
and filtering done for them, why should you object?
> Precisely.
It is and always has been the freeing of the REFEREED JOURNAL
> LITERATURE
to which all these efforts have been directed. And as far as
> I can tell,
that completely nullifies your objection here!
My argument is
that you seem to think that you can take the existing
refereed journal
literature, reverse the payment system, and have nothing
else change.
To a social scientist, this is highly unlikely. The existing payment
system influences
incentives, and changing the payment system will change
the incentives.
> The way for
a reader to vote is not with his (institution's) S/L/P
> dollars, but
with his eyes, his citations, his refereeing, and his
> research!
This is not commerce we are talking about, but Learned
> Inquiry.
Hmm. I
thought we were talking about the economics of learned inquiry.
> > You may well
respond that authors will want to submit to quality journals,
> > a point
I accept. But what does ‘submit’ really mean in this world?
> > I have argued
elsewhere that when publication costs were expensive,
> > it made
sense to evaluate ex ante. Now that publication costs are
> > cheap, it
makes sense to evaluate ex post.
>
> Untested speculations
about replacing peer review by post-publication
> peer commentary
are a can of worms on which I've written before:
I'm not talking
about post-publication peer commentary; I'm talking
about post-publication
peer review, just as you describe in the following
excerpt:
> This is already
covered by the dichotomy: ‘U’ unrefereed pre-print vs.
> ‘R’ refereed
reprint (+ journal name ‘JX’). BOTH can be self-archived (and
> suitably tagged).
> > The question
then is who should pay
> > for the
peer reviewing? I submit that it may well be the readers, due to
> > the incentive
effects described above.
>
> No, the readers
need merely CHOOSE to search only on items tagged ‘R’
> in the free
Eprint Archive. The refereeing can be provided by peer
> review (which
ain't broke, hence don't need fixin' -- let alone
> replacing
by untested alternatives).
Here, I think,
is a difference in our conceptions. You think of the ‘R’ and
‘U’ as being
bound to the archive. But that seems rather limited. Why not
have different
organizations providing the ‘R’s and ‘U’s with pointers to the
archive?
This way you get competition for rating services, with the
appropriate
incentives for keeping quality up and price down. Some reviewing
services may
charge for their services and some not; let the users decide
what they want.
> >sh> I'd like
to see the data for that, not even for all 14K journals in
> >sh> Ulrichs,
but just, say, the top 6.5K indexed by the ISI. And please
> >sh> tell
me the figures per journal, per institution, per country.
> >
> > See Lemberg,
Richard, 1996 thesis on costs of digitization, UC Berkeley.
> > JSTOR did
some calculations with the same conclusion, which are reported
> > in part
by a speech from Bill Bowen, which, I believe, is available
> > on the JSTOR
Web site.
>
> That does
not answer my question: We are not talking about the costs of
> digitization,
current or retrospective. We are talking about how many
> institutions/countries
can and do afford how many journals!
Part of the thesis
dealt with the costs of shelving, costs of Web hosting,
etc. Certainly
figuring out which institutions can afford journals
involves looking
at how much they are paying now vs. how much they would
have to pay
for online access.
> You focus on
capturing the available money (via S/L/P), whereas I ask
> ‘Why not give
it away for free for all, and pay the small remaining cost
> -- quality
control -- out of the S/L/P SAVINGS?’
This is a misreading
of my claim. I don't have any quarrel with giving
the writing
away for free, and having the authors pay for posting.
(Remember, my
original argument was precisely that this is what most
authors want,
not just academic authors.) The question is who will
pay for the
filtering? Just as the authors benefit from being published,
and will pay
to do so, the readers benefit from filtering and will pay
for high quality
filtering.
Of course, if
the authors are willing to pay for the filtering (as you
assume), there
is no need for the readers to pay. But the incentives
are poor in
that system---I think that it would tend to degenerate into
the vanity press
you correctly deride.
> If there is
no other way to free your intuitions from reader-end market
> thinking,
run your whole argument through on advertisements: Why
> shouldn't
advertisers give their ads only to those who can afford to pay
> for it?
> Answer: Ads
are not the right PRODUCT to think of! It is ad companies'
> SERVICES that
advertisers want to pay for. (But before this segues into
> the vanity-press
argument again, note that it's only an analogy; for
> something
closer to a homology, you would have to make it the services
> of a quality-controller/certifier
(the FDA?), and one in which the
> quality assessment
itself is done by independent and incorruptible --
> because unpaid!
-- assessors [referees]!)
In your system,
the authors pay the journals to have their papers published.
The analogy
is that the drug companies would pay the FDA to have their
drugs approved.
Do you see a problem with the latter business model?
[This isn't to
say the current FDA model is right, either. There is a lot
of evidence
that the incentives in the FDA are bad---if a bureaucrat delays a
good drug no
one knows. If they approve a bad drug, they loose their job.
This leads to
a possibly overly conservative approval process. But the costs of
bad drugs are
very different from those of bad papers, so I hesitate to
extend the analogy!]
Hal Varian
--------------------------------------------------
Date:
Mon, 12 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
On Mon, 12 Jul
1999, Hal Varian wrote:
> This is what
strikes me as peculiar in your position. You argue that
> the dramatic
change in costs will have a big effect on the academic
> publishing
model, and yet the same S/L/P model ‘is still fine’ for the
> trade literature.
>
> Doesn't it
seem strange that the same change in costs will have such a big
> effect in
one area and a tiny effect in another?
(It's not academic
vs. trade publishing, but refereed journal papers
vs. everything
else: including books -- both academic and trade -- and
magazine articles.)
I think it has
become clear why this disagreement persists. I can't
bring myself
to believe that books are really a give-away literature,
in the way journal-papers
always have been (for their authors).
The data you
adduce in support of your position consist of the
statistics on
how little it is that book authors ACTUALLY make for
their texts,
on average, and I do not contest that, but I don't think
it's the decisive
evidence (and NOT just because I am a psychologist,
concerned only
with authors' hopes!).
I think the fact
that books have always been commissioned with
contracts specifying
royalty payments (even if in most cases the
royalties are
tiny or never materialize at all), whereas refereed
journal articles
never have been, is evidence in my favour.
So too, I believe,
would be the results of the following 3 thought
experiments:
How many (1)
book authors would have instead signed contracts that
promised them
limitless public archiving in perpetuo on the Web, in
exchange for
signing away all royalty rights? -- compared to (2)
journal article
authors offered the same proposition?
[Prediction:
(1) few; (2) all]
How many (1)
book authors would be willing to PAY
(and how much)
to ADD to their existing, royalty-based contracts the
right to self-archive
in perpetuo? -- compared to (2) journal
article authors
offered the same proposition?
[Prediction:
(1) few (and little); (2) most (and surprisingly much)]
How much would
book authors demand to be PAID in order to alter their
existing, royalty-based
contracts, so as to add a clause that this work
can NEVER be
archived free for all? -- compared to (2) journal article
authors offered
the same proposition?
[Prediction:
(1) surpassingly little; (2) (more than it is realistic
to imagine anyone
could ever afford to offer)]
> I argue that
the change
> in costs will
also have a dramatic effect in the trade literature with
> lots of free
publication of unvetted material (see the Web) with people
> paying for
filtering/vetting. Hence the business model for the two
> literatures
will tend to become more similar.
I accept that
an increasing number of things, including texts, will be
(and are being)
given away on the Web for free, over and above refereed
journal papers!
But we are talking
about conditional probability here, not raw
probability:
What is the probability that an item will be a Web
give-away-wannabe,
GIVEN that it is a book, vs. the probability that it
will be a Web
give-away-wannabe, GIVEN that it is a refereed-journal
paper?
I predict that
the latter will be 100% whereas the former will be much,
much lower (and
even if we don't add the ‘in perpetuo’ clause, allowing
temporary web-archiving
for promotional purposes); and when electronic
book technology
becomes more friendly to linear bed/bath/beach
reading, the
discrepancy will become bigger, not smaller!
As to modular
‘vetting’ -- I haven't a clear enough case in mind, other
than peer review,
so I'm not sure what would be on sale here: movie
reviews?
> But, as you
well know, peer review varies dramatically in its quality.
> There are
good journals (which tend to be more selective) and bad journals
> (which tend
to be less selective) under the current system. If authors
> pay to get
published, there will be a natural tendency to increase the amount
> published
and reduce average quality.
Please see prior
postings on peer review: The journal quality hierarchy
will remain
in place. Their respective peers will continue to perform
(independently,
and for free) as now. High rejection rates will
continue to
prevail at the top; vanity-press, pay-your-way-in at the
bottom. And
everyone will continue to know the difference, as they do
now.
So the effects
you describe will only be felt at the bottom of the
hierarchy, where
they already are now.
>sh> Heaven forfend!
The worst of all possible worlds! You have to pay to
>sh> read AND
you have to pay to be published! Insult upon Injury!
>
> But you are
paying for different things: authors are paying for
> the hosting,
readers are paying for the filtering.
Hosting expenses
have not even come up. They are part of the academic
infrastructure
already. I don't reckon the pennies it costs to archive
my papers on
my institutional server any more than I reckon the pennies
it would cost
to archive my personal photo albums there (as many do).
Same is true
with self-archiving on Los Alamos, E-Biomed or CogPrints.
The marginal
cost per paper is negligible. Hosting costs are a red
herring (for
academics).
The ONLY author
(institution) costs I have ever mentioned have been
those of quality
control/certification (QC/C).
I don't believe
for a minute in reader-end QC/C costs: QC/C costs are
like the Cheshire
cat's smile. They are all that is left of journal
publication
costs once production and dissemination are off-loaded on
public Archives.
It is not at all clear what the READER would be buying
if he wanted
to buy THAT! It's a service (to the author-institution);
its OUTPUT --
the refereed paper -- is already in the public archive
for free!
> This makes
sense
> since the
authors value being published (as you repeatedly emphasize)
> and the readers
value selectivity.
I'm afraid this
doesn't make sense to me at all! I know what the
author-institutions
are buying: the vetting and certification of their
‘product’. But
what are the reader-institutions supposed to be buying,
given that that
‘product’ is archived for free for all?
Yes, readers
value selectivity. And it is (in part) because readers
value selectivity
that authors value the service of QC/C!
> I think that
your 1/3 figure for
> refereeing
process is about right (I have made the same estimates in my
> papers), so
it's the same total amount paid, by essentially the same people,
> in either
case.
Yes, but if that
same 1/3 amount is paid at the reader-institution end,
then only the
readers at THAT institution get access, whereas if it is
paid at the
author-institution end, ALL readers get access (including
those at less
solvent institutions). And, as we agreed, that enhanced
visibility is
a benefit to author-institutions! And since we're talking
about the same
institutions spending the same 1/3 in both cases, it
seems to be
a choice between spending it the access-blocking vs. the
access-enhancing
way. What possible advantage can there be to the
former? (Please
don't revert to the vanity-press argument!)
> And if there
are those that don't want to pay for filtering, they are welcome
> to go out
and search for the material they want on their own, spending time
> rather than
money. But if there are those that want to pay money to have
> the searching
and filtering done for them, why should you object?
You keep imagining,
basically, a refereed literature, paid by S/L/P,
plus a free
unrefereed literature, whereas what I am advocating is a
refereed literature
(first) FREED by self-archiving (of refereed
papers) and
then, when S/L/P revenue dwindles because users prefer the
free archive,
QC/C FUNDED up-front out of 1/3 of the S/L/P savings.
Your view is
simply reader-centred. You keep seeing the text as the
PRODUCT instead
of seeing it as like a free ad, with the
quality-control/certification
being the SERVICE to be paid for.
And as we saw,
the only dividend of continuing to see it your way is
that the very
same 1/3 expenditure, paid by the very same institution,
is, on your
model, paid for BLOCKING access to everyone outside the
author's institution
who cannot pay, whereas on my model, it is paid for
OPENING access
to everyone outside the author's institution who cannot
pay.
> My argument
is that you seem to think that you can take the existing
> refereed journal
literature, reverse the payment system, and have nothing
> else change.
> To a social
scientist, this is highly unlikely. The existing payment
> system influences
incentives, and changing the payment system will change
> the incentives.
That would certainly
be true if referees were paid, but they are not!
The payment
is just for implementing the refereeing system.
And the implementation
is ultimately answerable to objective quality
indicators constraining
QC/C such as impact factors; so we agree that
journals that
dropped standards (selected less rigorous referees, for
example) would
soon be caught out and would lose their place in the
quality hierarchy
to more rigorously refereed journals. (So much for the
vanity-press
argument.)
[I am conscious
that I come up for a drubbing below over what I said
about Learned
Inquiry and commercial factors, so let me say more
carefully here
that QC/C implementation is not ‘directly’ influenced by
‘1st order’
commercial factors -- such as maximizing the number of
author-institutions
paying the publication fees, or even of maximizing
the publication
fees themselves; it's more like a museum trying to
maintain its
standards by collecting only the very best art -- in a
system where
the best artists also want their art to go into the very
best museums.
-- Except that they GIVE it to them rather than SELLING it!]
But I am not
saying that there may not be some surprises in the
transition from
S/L/P to up-front QC/C. That's why I think it needs to
be planned in
advance. See the thread ‘The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable
Transition’
in the 1998 file of:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html
> > The way for
a reader to vote is not with his (institution's) S/L/P
> > dollars,
but with his eyes, his citations, his refereeing, and his
> > research!
This is not commerce we are talking about, but Learned
> > Inquiry.
>
> Hmm. I thought
we were talking about the economics of learned inquiry.
You got me on
that one. (I'm just a psychologist!)
> I'm not talking
about post-publication peer commentary; I'm talking
> about post-publication
peer review, just as you describe in the following
> excerpt:
But my point
in the prior excerpt was that post-publication ‘peer
review’ (which
I called, I think quite correctly, peer commentary,
because that's
what it is!) is not a viable substitute for
prepublication
peer review!
It's as if all
the food is put on the market and then people have
to listen to
the cacophony of consumers to decide what's safe to eat!
I'd rather sell
(and buy) my eggs already graded by reliable experts!
> Here, I think,
is a difference in our conceptions. You think of the ‘R’
> [Tag for ‘Refereed’]
and ‘U’ [Tag for ‘Unrefereed’] as being bound to
> the archive.
But that seems rather limited. Why not have different
> organizations
providing the ‘R’s and ‘U’s with pointers to the
> archive?
See the analogy
above. I'd rather have my eggs graded by reliable
experts, ONCE.
Otherwise who will grade the "experts"?
> This way you
get competition for rating services, with the appropriate
> incentives
for keeping quality up and price down. Some reviewing
> services may
charge for their services and some not; let the users
> decide what
they want.
But then who
will rate the services for me? And meanwhile, what do I do
about treating
my ailing grandmother, or just getting eggs for tonight's
omelette?
I think the current
QC/C, though it could stand some improvement, is
good enough
so I would be satisfied with freeing the current journal
literature SUCH
AS IT IS now. QC/C reform schemes can be tested
empirically,
but for now, I want to stick with the current egg-grading
methods ...
> Certainly figuring
out which institutions can afford journals
> involves looking
at how much they are paying now vs. how much they would
> have to pay
for online access.
Correct, but
we have already agreed provisionally on the 1/3 of current
S/L/P expenditure
figure and we know the bottom line: That SOME won't
be able to afford
it. But if those who can afford it pay it up-front,
instead of as
S/L/P, then all the have-nots will get the access anyway,
and everyone
will be better off.
> > You focus
on capturing the available money (via S/L/P), whereas I ask
> > ‘Why not
give it away for free for all, and pay the small remaining cost
> > -- quality
control -- out of the S/L/P SAVINGS?’
>
> This is misreading
of my claim. I don't have any quarrel with giving
> the writing
away for free, and having the authors pay for posting.
> ... The question
is who will pay for the filtering?
Posting WHAT?
I am talking about posting (self-archiving) the REFEREED
(= ‘filtered’)
papers. (And there is no cost to speak of for the
self-archiving,
just for the refereeing QC/C.)
> Just as the
authors benefit from being published,
> and will pay
to do so, the readers benefit from filtering and will pay
> for high quality
filtering.
(Let me first
us lay to rest the author ‘payment’ for self-archiving,
because there
isn't any. )
Now, self-archiving
WHAT? Unrefereed pre-prints? Fine. But why would I
want to stop
there? What do I want everyone, everywhere to see: just
the raw draft,
or the accepted, certified final draft? The latter, of
course.
Now it's true
that readers prefer the final draft too, and it's true
that the QC/C
will cost 1/3 of current S/L/P and will be paid by my
institution
either way. But if it is paid up-front, I, the author (and
my institution),
get the further benefit of infinite reach for my work.
Whereas the
only advantage to keeping payment on the S/L/P end is some
hypothetical
one that I can't even quite articulate! (Again, it sounds
like no contest
to me!)
> Of course,
if the authors are willing to pay for the filtering (as you
> assume), there
is no need for the readers to pay. But the incentives
> are poor in
that system---I think that it would tend to degenerate into
> the vanity
press you correctly deride.
I think that
is as far as we will get with this one, I'm afraid. We
agree on the
amount. We agree on who pays (the author's institution
either way).
But if it is paid up front I claim that it frees the
literature for
all without loss of quality, whereas you claim that it
will compromise
quality.
I think this
can only be settled empirically. I will continue to try to
promote self-archiving
(of both unrefereed pre-prints AND refereed
reprints). I
expect you will want to be cautioning against the
latter...
> In your system,
the authors pay the journals to have their papers published.
> The analogy
is that the drug companies would pay the FDA to have their
> drugs approved.
Do you see a problem with the latter business model?
I actually have
no idea how the FDA works; perhaps I shouldn't have
mentioned it.
It was just meant to be an example of a (reliable?)
quality controller.
But I do know how peer review works, and I know
referees are
not paid, and as long as they are not, they are
incorruptible
(incorruptible by how the implementation of peer review
is funded: I
am not claiming peer review is perfect, or could not be
improved).
Peer review is
what it says: Specialised work is reviewed by qualified
fellow specialists
with no financial incentive. I would have hoped that
was how drugs
were reviewed too, but of course there is a critical
difference there:
Drugs (like books, and unlike journal articles) are
produced to
be SOLD not to be given away. If you want to look to a
source of corruption,
look there!
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Mon, 12 Jul 1999
From:
Hal Varian
On Mon, 12 Jul
1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> I think that
is as far as we will get with this one, I'm afraid. We
> agree on the
amount. We agree on who pays (the author's institution
> either way).
But if it is paid up front I claim that it frees the
> literature
for all without loss of quality, whereas you claim that it
> will compromise
quality.
> I think this
can only be settled empirically.
I agree that
this is the fundamental difference, though I would prefer
to say the ‘authors/readers
institution, either way’. But, as you say
the question
can only be settled empirically. The issue is whether the
(possible) diminution
in quality is outweighed by the increased access.
Clearly this
depends on the magnitude of the effects and the relative
weight attached
to the evaluation of them.
Hal Varian
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Tue, 13 Jul 1999
From:
Bob Parks
SH> and
HV>> have written:
>An intrinsically
interesting side-issue is emerging from the exchanges
>with Hal Varian.
Nothing substantive hinges on it for the purposes
>of the strategy
and outcome I happen to advocate -- what I have taken to
>calling the
‘optimal and inevitable’ one for the refereed journal
>literature:
>
>
freeing the literature online for everyone, everywhere, forever,
>
through (1) universal public self-archiving of all refereed journal
>
papers, and, when the time comes, (2) a downsizing of journals to
>
providers of the service of quality control and certification, paid
>
for on the author-institution out of S/L/P savings rather than at
>
the reader-institution end via access-blocking S/L/P.
>
>Our disagreement
is only about whether I am exaggerating the difference
>between the
motivations of refereed-journal papers-authors (regarding
>THOSE papers)
and authors in general -- of books, magazine articles,
>etc. -- in
suggesting that the former are, and have always been,
>interested
ONLY in giving those papers away, whereas other authors (as
>well as themselves,
when wearing other hats) have at least the hope of
>some direct
revenue from the sale of their texts.
I don't know
of any study that has formally determined why we academics
do what we do,
and how much of it we do. What I think is relevant is
whether 'free
access archiving' of scientific literature will reduce
the quality
of that literature, whatever the goals are of those who
write it.
1. xxx.lanl.gov
has about 100,000 papers and that archive does not seem
to have reduced
the number of journals in physics, nor the quality of
the scientific
literature. Hence we have at least one strong piece of
evidence that
'free access archiving' will not lower the quality. I
don't know of
any evidence showing that quality has been lowered in
physics or elsewhere.
2. 'free
access archiving' allows the largest audience for scientific
work - the most
readers can see the most articles. This then means
that a) the
wheel will not be invented quite as often as it is now; b)
the possibility
of citation is increased. How that affects the quality
of scientific
literature is unknown (to me at least).
3. xxx.lanl.gov
seems to have conditioned its audience to 'filter'
relevant articles
from the large number of submissions. I would guess
that works much
like the usual filtering process that any academics use
for 'hard copy
working papers'. I would guess that Harnad and Varian
get a very large
number of hard copy working papers and each has some
way of filtering
through them - that filter might depend on reputation
of the author,
but those reputations are not solely determined from
journals.
4. When we have
citation-linking for all scientific literature
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/citation.html it will be natural
and easy to
'value' writing - namely by the number of citations (and
possibly the
'quality' of citations). Such citation criteria are
already used
in promotions and salary (at least in my small biased
sample).
One can argue whether quality is better determined from
citations than
from knowing that two or three referees and an associate
editor have
passed judgement.
5. As an
economist, I would have to argue that the resources devoted
to refereeing
are misallocated because they are not compensated
directly.
In the current journal model, there may be too much
refereeing (or
there may be too little). If 'free access archiving'
means the end
of journal refereeing as we know it, I am not sure
whether I (at
least) could argue that there is a social gain or loss.
Referees might
spend their time writing/reading rather than refereeing,
which could
result in better scientific literature than what exists
with their time
spent refereeing. I am not arguing that refereeing has
no value, only
that we do not know what that value is, and that
whatever that
value is, it is not compensated (directly at least).
>So I am taking
up the gauntlet here for one reason only: That if I
>should happen
to be right and Hal should happen to be wrong about the
>reality of
the fundamental motivational difference between
>refereed-journal
authors and (just about) all others, then it is
>important to
sort this out, because it is only too easy otherwise to
IMHO, the only
reason to sort it out is to determine, given the goals
of the esoteric
author (a term I like), whether 'free access archiving'
will lower or
raise the quality of scientific literature. (To wit, I
do not know
why I write these words.)
>On Sat, 10 Jul
1999, Hal Varian wrote:
>
>>sh> Yes, but
the question was whether they would trade it off for their
>>sh> refereed
journal articles, not for their books and other activities.
>>
>> But of course
they do---the time spent writing textbooks, consulting,
>> and so on
takes away from time spent writing and publishing academic
>> articles.
Again, the point
should be whether the quality of the scientific
literature is
harmed by 'free access archiving'. So we can argue about
whether academic
authors would write given that there were no
journals.
I suspect yes. We all start with the dissertation which is
mostly unpublished
and uncited. Then we turn to gaining fortune and
fame (read promotion
and tenure, text book contracts, consulting,
invited conferences
at attractive locations, etc.). We do this by
writing (in
part). In the NO-JOURNALS world of 'free access archiving'
we write to
attract others attention, and citation. Rather than
writing for
three people (two referees and an editor) we now have to
write for a
larger audience and have to write to attract a readership
(rather than
attract an editor/referee). I don't see that deters us
writing.
The goals of fortune and fame remain, its just the journals
no longer have
a Faustian GRIP on us.
>> > I said something
stronger, and I repeat it: The authors of refereed
>> > journal
articles are not interested in making money on THOSE texts at
>> > all.
>>
>> I submit
they would be happy to make money on those texts, as long as it
>> didn't dramatically
reduce the readership. You have implicitly assumed
>> that the
only way to ‘make money on those texts’ is to charge people to
>> read them,
thereby limiting access. I think this is a very narrow view,
>> and limits
the kinds of business models you might consider for information
>> industries.
The current business
'model' for scientific literature is, well,
absurd.
Editors are mostly not directly compensated, and those who are
are not compensated
at the market value of their time. Referees are
not compensated
($35 or $50 is not compensation). Authors are not
compensated
at all directly. So the university pays us to
author/edit/referee
and then buys our product back from a 'publisher'.
Resources must
be misallocated in that model. If our current world was
a 'free access
archiving' with citation valuations (rather than journal
valuations),
proposing such a business model would, well, be absurd.
We need to unshackle
ourselves from the current journal Faustian Grip,
from that mental
model of the world, and proceed ahead. Nor should we
consider that
scientific literature fits into other 'information'
products.
>>sh> The conclusion
is that in the case of the refereed journal literature
>>sh> only,
the author has an interest in there being NO INCOME (to anyone)
>>sh> from sale
of his texts, because income means access-blockage. This is
>>sh> also in
the interest of the author's institution, which likewise gains
>>sh> kudos
(and grant income) from the impact of his research (not to
>>sh> mention
their savings from S/L/P cancellations!)
>>
>> Here is where
your confusion lies. It is false (as an economic
>> proposition)
that there is a direct relationship between ‘no income’ and
>> ‘access blockage’.
Consider a field where there is an economic demand for
>> the research
(engineering, medicine, finance, etc.) It is common to see
>> research
produced in these fields where publication is delayed. It is
>> first made
available for a high price via consultancies, newsletters,
>> affiliates,
etc., and later made available to the academic world at large.
>> This way
the authors have their cake and eat it too---make money, and
>> still make
the research available to all. Obviously this practice can be
>> abused, but
that is beside the point. The point is that income can be
>> made even
while providing broad access.
>
>Good case in
point: The reply, insofar as my refereed journal papers are
>concerned,
is loud and clear: Forget about the pennies I could make from
>the gate by
denying or delaying access. Let everyone have it for free
>NOW. There
aren't pennies enough in the (realistic) world to make me
>change my mind.
Where there is
economic demand for the product (research), generally
the product
(research) does not get published directly into scientific
journals.
But this begs the issue of research-for-profit and
research-for-academics.
The 'free access archiving' does not mean that
Monsanto should
have its chemists do it.
Few of us 'publish'
our research in high price places, few of us ever
get any direct
compensation for our writing. For those pieces which we
do get compensation,
we don't 'free access archive' and for the rest,
we do 'free
access archive'. That seems to me is the point.
Much of the discussion
between Hal and Stevan side steps into business
models (ignoring
any further words on motivations of authors). So what
is the business
that requires a model? Production of (quality)
scientific literature.
Must that be tied to the elsevier et al (I use
elsevier in
lower case as a generic for profit and non-profit
presses)?
elsevier does not pay the authors, nor the referees nor the
editors which
is 95% to 99.9% of the real cost of producing the
literature.
In the 'free access archiving' world, we do not need to
worry about
whether elsevier survives. We do need to worry about the
quality of the
scientific literature, and elsevier itself does not
provide that
quality control. Editors and referees do. Citations do.
Whether universities
are willing to compensate us for editing and
refereeing without
the elsevier label is an open question (especially
if the citation
linking proposal becomes fact). In fact it is a
question which
should be asked - how much refereeing should be done?
If we have citations,
do we need refereeing and editing? It is not
that refereeing
and editing do not increase the value of an article, it
is whether the
correct amount of resources are devoted to that
activity, and
whether citations (or similar) would be a more cost
effective way
to discern the quality (for promotion, tenure, etc.).
Imagine a world
with 'free access archiving' without journals. How
does one get
promoted? Citations and review letters. Citation
analysis would
be free, and universities would have to compensate for
outside review
letters. Would that really change the quality of
scientific literature
- for the worse? Not in my mind.
Bob Parks
--------------------------------------------------
Date:
Tue, 13 Jul 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
On Tue, 13 Jul
1999, Bob Parks wrote:
> 1. xxx.lanl.gov
has about 100,000 papers and that archive does not seem
> to have reduced
the number of journals in physics, nor the quality of
> the scientific
literature. Hence we have at least one strong piece of
> evidence that
'free access archiving' will not lower the quality. I
> don't know
of any evidence showing that quality has been lowered in
> physics or
elsewhere.
>
> 3. xxx.lanl.gov
seems to have conditioned its audience to 'filter'
> relevent articles
from the large number of submissions. I would guess
> that works
much like the usual filtering process that any academics use
> for 'hard
copy working papers'.
The filter is
even simpler than that: ‘R’ (refereed journal, and perhaps
journal name
‘JX’) and ‘Author Name’.
The peer review
proficiency of the journals in question takes care of
the rest.
> 4. When we
have citation-linking for all scientific literature
>
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/citation.html it will be natural
> and easy to
'value' writing - namely by the number of citations (and
> possibly the
'quality' of citations). Such citation criteria are
> already used
in promotions and salary (at least in my small biased
> sample).
One can argue whether quality is better determined from
> citations
than from knowing that two or three referees and an associate
> editor have
passed judgement.
Fallacy: Apart
from the limitations of citation metrics, the validity
they do have
is COMPLETELY parasitic on the fact that the papers in
question are
published in peer reviewed journals. The invisible
hand of peer
review is behind them. Hence they would implode if that
hand were withdrawn.
Impact factors
(like peer commentary) are a SUPPLEMENT TO, not a
SUBSTITUTE FOR,
peer review. (And peer review is not a go/no-go filter;
it is an interactive,
iterative, corrective process of submission,
feedback, revision,
resubmission, etc. between author and peer
reviewers, adjudicated
by a competent, answerable peer Editor: This is
no passive numerical
filter or box score on any blind metric.)
Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature
[online] (5 Nov. 1998)
http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/nature2.html
> 5. As
an economist, I would have to argue that the resources devoted
> to refereeing
are misallocated because they are not compensated
> directly.
In the current journal model, there may be too much
> refereeing
(or there may be too little).
Peer review,
like democracy, is not without its imperfections. And no
doubt there
exist ways to improve it. But those ways must first be
found and tested
and demonstrated to improve it -- especially the most
radical one,
of abandoning it entirely, in favour of self-archiving of
unrefereed pre-prints
alone.
Note that I do
NOT advocate the latter: I have always aimed
(subversively)
at the self-archiving of the REFEREED paper, not just
the unrefereed
one. That will be tantamount to freeing the current
peer-reviewed
literature, SUCH AS IT IS (warts and all).
http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html
We can worry
about ways of fixing the warts independently; but the
powerful and
proven benefits of self-archiving should NOT be linked in
any way to speculative
and untested notions for improving peer review --
least of all
abandoning it altogether.
> If 'free access
archiving'
> means the
end of journal refereeing as we know it, I am not sure
> whether I
(at least) could argue that there is a social gain or loss.
There is every
reason to believe it would be an enormous loss, throwing
the baby (a
reliable research literature) out with the bathwater (access
barriers to
that very literature).
To put it another
way, it's READER-ACCESS barriers that have to go;
AUTHOR-ACCESS
barriers (into the certified refereed corpus) must stay.
> Referees might
spend their time writing/reading rather than refereeing,
> which could
result in better scientific literature than what exists
> with their
time spent refereeing. I am not arguing that refereeing has
> no value,
only that we do not know what that value is, and that
> whatever that
value is, it is not compensated (directly at least).
We know the value
of the refereed literature, such as it is; every
editor knows
what raw submitted manuscripts look like (90% of which will
be rejected,
if it is a high quality journal; and most of the 10% that are
finally accepted
will look nothing like their initial drafts, for they
will have gone
through the iterative corrective feedback cycle of peer
review mentioned
above).
It is the difference
between these two literatures that is at issue (and
the difference
is even greater than that, because even those raw
submissions
are prepared with the PRESUMPTION of answerability to peer
review -- yet
another manifestation of its ‘invisible hand’).
No, human nature
being what it is, without answerability it quickly
regresses toward
the anarchic levels of the chat-groups NetNews, that
Global Graffiti
Board for Trivial Pursuit. (And neither the Pandemonium
of post hoc
‘peer’ commentary nor the still poster-hoc feedback from
‘citations’
can provide that answerability. Pity the reader who has to
navigate a chaotic
corpus like that.)
> IMHO, the only
reason to sort it out is to determine, given the goals
> of the esoteric
author (a term I like), whether 'free access archiving'
> will lower
or raise the quality of scientific literature.
IMHO, it would
not be good empirical practise to test whether the FDA is
really protecting
our healths by scrapping it and seeing what happens!
The goal of self-archiving
is to free the refereed literature from
access barriers,
not to free it from refereeing!
The way to test
variants on or alternatives to peer review is locally,
not globally:
Do you know of any local experiments? I do, and as far as
I know, it is
not yet faring too well!
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/shtml/misc/peer/index.shtml
> Again, the
point should be whether the quality of the scientific
> literature
is harmed by 'free access archiving'....
> In the NO-JOURNALS
world of 'free access archiving'
> we write to
attract others attention, and citation. Rather than
> writing for
three people (two referees and an editor) we now have to
> write for
a larger audience and have to write to attract a readership
> (rather than
attract an editor/referee). I don't see that deters us
> writing.
The goals of fortune and fame remain, its just the journals
> no longer
have a Faustian GRIP on us.
And it all becomes
a vanity press, with no sign-posts for the poor
reader and user
as to what, in all this unregulated soup, is fit for
consumption!
> The current
business 'model' for scientific literature is, well,
> absurd.
Editors are mostly not directly compensated, and those who are
> are not compensated
at the market value of their time. Referees are
> not compensated
($35 or $50 is not compensation). Authors are not
> compensated
at all directly.
Correct. But
it is also what vouchsafes us our current refereed
literature,
such as it is. Let us free THAT before toying with any
notional improvements
-- INCLUDING referee payment, which is
potentially
corruptive: They referee for free now, and that's just part
of the system,
such as it is.
The system, with
its authors giving their papers away free, and its
referees giving
away their services for free, is best described as
ANOMALOUS, not
ABSURD. What is absurd is to continue treating it
according to
the access-blocking trade-model, instead of freeing it
(from S/L/P)
for the reader as well.
Here is an argument
that could be invoked against me, but I don't think
it's valid:
‘Fine, I take you at your word. "Don't tamper with the system, just
free it." Now I will show that that admonition is
self-contradictory: I agree that altering or abandoning refereeing
would be tampering, and would put quality at risk. I agree that
paying referees would be tampering, and would put quality at risk.
But then, isn't author self-archiving tampering too, and putting
quality at risk? Might it not bring down the entire system,
destroying the revenue base on which the quality control is built?
Is it, therefore, not one of those untested "reforms" of peer
review against which you always inveigh? Q.E.D.’
My reply is simple:
Authors have always given away reprints of their
papers for free.
Self-archiving simply increases the scale of this. And
the waters HAVE
been tested, for close to a decade now, by Los Alamos,
and no sign
of diminished quality has emerged (as Bob notes above).
http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions
So the free waters
are safe for peer review. (And if and when another
revenue source
must be found for continuing to fund it, the up-front
redirection
of 1/3 of S/L/P savings to institutional publication costs
is ready as
a natural source for it.)
Hal Varian's
worries about possible knock-on effects elsewhere in the
quality control
system are not entirely without basis, but there doesn't
seem any compelling
reason for alarm either. Let self-archiving proceed
apace.
> So the university
pays us to
> author/edit/referee
and then buys our product back from a 'publisher'.
> Resources
must be misallocated in that model. If our current world was
> a 'free access
archiving' with citation valuations (rather than journal
> valuations),
proposing such a business model would, well, be absurd.
> We need to
unshackle ourselves from the current journal Faustian Grip,
> from that
mental model of the world, and proceed ahead. Nor should we
> consider that
scientific literature fits into other 'information'
> products.
This seems a
bit garbled to me, because it conflates freeing the
refereed literature
form S/L/P with freeing the literature from
refereeing.
> Much of the
discussion between Hal and Stevan side steps into business
> models (ignoring
any further words on motivations of authors). So what
> is the business
that requires a model? Production of (quality)
> scientific
literature.
Actually, the
‘business’ is making an impact on research with one's
research. The
literature is just a means, not an end. Hence my analogy
with ads.
> Must that be
tied to the elsevier et al (I use
> elsevier in
lower case as a generic for profit and non-profit
> presses)?
elsevier does not pay the authors, nor the referees nor the
> editors which
is 95% to 99.9% of the real cost of producing the
> literature.
In the 'free access archiving' world, we do not need to
> worry about
whether elsevier survives. We do need to worry about the
> quality of
the scientific literature, and elsevier itself does not
> provide that
quality control. Editors and referees do. Citations do.
Peer review does;
citations do not! Elsevier (and others) implement
peer review.
That will always cost something -- but nothing like what
the whole papyrocentric,
S/L/P-based system costs now.
> Whether universities
are willing to compensate us for editing and
> refereeing
without the elsevier label is an open question (especially
> if the citation
linking proposal becomes fact). In fact it is a
> question which
should be asked - how much refereeing should be done?
> If we have
citations, do we need refereeing and editing? It is not
> that refereeing
and editing do not increase the value of an article, it
> is whether
the correct amount of resources are devoted to that
> activity,
and whether citations (or similar) would be a more cost
> effective
way to discern the quality (for promotion, tenure, etc.).
Vide supra. It
seems to me naive in the extreme to imagine that delayed
post-hoc citations
can substitute for the substantive, interactive,
quality-control
process of peer review.
> Imagine a world
with 'free access archiving' without journals. How
> does one get
promoted? Citations and review letters. Citation
> analysis would
be free, and universities would have to compensate for
> outside review
letters. Would that really change the quality of
> scientific
literature - for the worse? Not in my mind.
Have a peek at
Usenet/Netnews for a glimpse of where things would head,
human nature
being what it is ...
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
Tue, 23 Nov 1999
From:
Stevan Harnad
sh> Note that
we are not talking about ‘the publishing of articles’ in the
sh> Open Archive:
It is the self-archiving of (published and unpublished)
sh> articles
...
>
> Yes.. I know.
What I am interested in ADDITION to the
> self-archiving,
is the idea of ‘publishing’ in the sense that we have
> lecturers
here who have written text books, had them published, then
> got into trouble
with the publishers for distributing electronic copies
> of their own
work to their students of the work ... So if the information
> was ‘published’
electronically locally, then they would be able to make
> it available
to their own students for no cost other than the cost of
> printing etc..
This is something else that we are working on here.. ie.
> the idea of
print on demand. I am working on a prototype system ... to
> allow ‘information
providers’ to place information on, ‘information
> consumers’
to retrieve information and will tie together the various
> resources
such as Prospero (Ariel Documents), web pages, documents
> the idea of
print on demand. I am working on a prototype system to
> place online,
electronic articles etc. etc. so that a ‘publication’ can
> be created
and then downloaded as a PDF file (generated on the fly) or
> printed and
bound at the local on-campus book-shop at a cost less than
> Photostatting.
>
> I would of
course like the Archive to be a resource that would tie
> into this
system..
Be careful because
you may needlessly be running afoul of some natural
and potentially
helpful fault-lines here:
The monograph
and textbook literature is FUNDAMENTALLY different from
the refereed
journal literature. In the case of the former, authors are
SELLING their
words; in the latter, they are GIVING them away.
Book authors
want royalties, and that's why they sign over copyright.
They do not
want their work pirated by others, because that steals from
their potential
revenue. This is not true of journal-article authors.
Hence journal-article
authors want to give their papers away free for
all; book authors
do not.
The special case
of using one's own books to teach one's own course can
be handled by
placing the book in a hidden, password-protected local,
closed-archive,
and providing the URL and password only to the students
on one's course;
this is exactly the same as Xeroxing it for one's own
students --
a practise that falls within an author's ‘fair use’
guidelines for
his own work.
But such a book
could not and should not be put in an Open Archive, of
the kind we
are discussing for pre-prints and journal reprints. For if it
were, it would
not only violate copyright but it would undercut sales of
the book.
On the other
hand, Open Archives are perfectly fine as a place to
publish (sic)
a book openly (INSTEAD of conventional publication):
that is, without
a publisher, without royalties.
The updated CogPrints
Archive and its genericized Eprints Archive
counterpart
(and indeed the present CogPrints Archive) are all capable
of publishing
monographs in this way, if that's what their authors wish
to do.
Moreover, I don't
doubt that once the Open Archives become the mainstay,
there will be
(non-vanity) publisher ‘overlays’ for monographs that are of
high enough
quality to merit a prestigious publisher's imprimatur (after
formal peer
review and acceptance by the publisher), but are unlikely to
have enough
of a market to warrant trying to sell it, either on paper or
online.
These book accreditation
‘overlays’ will work much as the
refereed-journal
accreditation overlays will work (once refereed
journals have
down-sized to becoming quality-controller/certifiers only,
and not distributors).
Stevan Harnad
------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE:
A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of ‘Freeing the
Refereed Journal
Literature Through Online Self-Archiving’ is available
at the American
Scientist September Forum (98 & 99):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
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