What I find striking about Adam Tickell's comments in the THE article is
his suggestion that funds for publishing will have to be "managed" and
that "Quite a large number of people publish a huge volume of papers. If
they were to reduce that, it may not make any significant difference to
the integrity of the science base."
It reminds me that when I spoke to David Sweeney, HEFCE's directorof
research, innovation,and skills,
(http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/big-deal-not-price-but-cost.html
<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/big-deal-not-price-but-cost.html>) last
year he said that it was not obvious to HEFCE "that a constraint on the
volume of material published through the current scholarly system would
be a bad thing and that is why, in our research assessment system, we
only look at up to four outputs per academic."
He added, "The amount of research deserving publication 'for the record'
is much less than the amount deserving publication 'for immediate debate
within the community' and whereas print journals have met both needs in
the past the internet offers the prospect of decoupling the two, leading
to a drop in the amount of material requiring/meriting the full peer
review and professional editing service."
This suggests to me a scenario in which universities and research
funders follow the Finch Committee's advice: opt for Gold OA and agree
to pay to publish papers, but then severely restrict the number of
papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Researchers who want to
publish more than, say, one paper a year might be told to either pay the
publication fees themselves, or to use services like arXiv (or perhaps
their institutional repository, or even a blog) for any they wish to
publish beyond their ration.
As Sweeney put it, "[T]here is a question about the point of publishing
material using the full panoply of quality-assured journal publication.
Our view is that we should look at research quality as an issue of
excellence rather than an issue of volume of publications. I can't speak
for the [UK] Research Councils on this but, for us, one publication
which is ground-breaking and world-leading is worth more than any number
of publications which would be recognised internationally but not as
excellent or as world-leading."
And indeed, that is what the title of the THE article implies: "Open
access may require funds to be rationed."
Richard Poynder
Stevan Harnad writes:
These are comments on Paul Jump's article in today's Times Higher Ed.,
quoting Adam Tickel on the Finch Report, Green OA and Peer Review Costs
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1
<http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1>
<http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1 <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1>>
THE COST OF PEER REVIEW: PRE-EMPTIVE GOLD VS. POST-GREEN-OA GOLD
Professor Tickell is quite right that peer review has a cost that must be
paid. But what he seems to have forgotten is that that price is already
being paid *in full* today, handsomely, by institutional subscriptions,
worldwide.
The Green Open Access self-archiving mandates in which the UK leads
worldwide (a lead which the Finch Report, if heeded, would squander)
require the author's peer-reviewed final draft to be made freely accessible
online so that the peer-reviewed research findings are accessible not only
to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in
which they were published, but to all would-be users.
The Finch Report instead proposes to pay publishers even more money than
they are already paid today. This is obviously not because the peer review
is not being paid for already today, but in order to ensure that Green OA
itself does not make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering
the costs of publication.
To repeat: the Finch Report (at the behest of the publishing lobby) is
proposing to continue denying access-denied users access to paid-up,
peer-reviewed research, conducted with public funding, and instead pay
publishers 50-60 million pounds a year more, gradually, to make that
research Gold OA. The Finch Report proposes doing this instead of extending
the Green OA mandates that already make twice as much UK research OA (40%)
accessible as the worldwide average (20%) at no extra cost, because of the
UK's worldwide lead in mandating Green OA.
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