> Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 20:13:45 +0200 (MET DST) > From: Mauro Scanu <[email protected]> > > (1) You have written that the self-archiving of papers by authors will > allow S/L/P [Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View] costs to be saved > and that those savings will cover QC/C [Quality-Control/Certification] > costs. What do you mean? Is QC/C not done for free by scientists? > Peer reviewing will still be done by editorial boards for journals or > voluntarily by scientists for on-line archives?
The refereeing itself is and always has been done free. But the IMPLEMENTATION of it (the processing and coordination of submissions and referee reports and editorial dispositions, and eventually also some copyediting) still has to be done and paid for. The cost is not high, but it is nonzero just the same, and always will be (unless it is subsidized). These essential QC/C functions do not perform themselves. But QC/C costs are much lower than S/L/P costs, so they can easily be paid out of the annual S/L/P savings (see the "70/30" thread in the Archives of the American Scientist Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html > (2) The Los Alamos Physics Archive <http://arxiv.org/> was born > in 1991 but is still an isolated case with respect to the whole of > scientific production. Don't you think that the success of > self-archiving depends on the peculiarities of certain disciplines > (physics, mathematics, cognitive sciences, computer science) that may > be fitter for this kind of publishing than others? No, I don't think optimality for some disciplines and not others is the reason self-archiving has not yet proliferated significantly beyond physics and mathematics; but I do think that some of the characteristics peculiar to physics and mathematics explain why self-archiving STARTED there: To put it simplistically, physicists/mathematicians just seem to be smarter and more serious than the rest of us. They consider their research itself to be the most important thing. And it was simply obvious to them at once that a freely accessible online research literature was what was best for research and researchers. NB: Not just for physicists and mathematicians: for ALL researchers. What area of research would NOT benefit from having its research literature (which is in ALL cases freely donated by the researchers anyway) freely accessible to all researchers? So the benefits of open online archiving are in no way peculiar to any discipline; only the rapidity with which disciplines realize and act upon its possibility varies. Let us hope that the availability and promotion of interoperable Open Archive software (http://eprints.org/) that can be easily installed at every university, and then filled by all its researchers, will help the rest of the disciplines come to their senses at last. Harnad, S. (1999) Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals. D-Lib Magazine 5(12) December 1999 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.htm By the way, historically speaking, the cognitive sciences will NOT get credit for having responded promptly to their wake-up call. At the moment, the Physics Archive has nearly 130,000 papers since 1991, whereas CogPrints has not yet hit 1,000 since 1998: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk (Again, there is reason to hope that interoperability, which will make the world's refereed literature in all disciplines searchable and accessible, regardless of where it is archived -- as if it were in one global journal collection, freely accessible to all -- will at last fast-forward us all to the optimal and the inevitable.) > (3) I have interviewed some Italian scientists. Some of them argued that > self-archiving would benefit more those individuals who have a very low > impact-factor (because of high specialisation in their field or an > inability to publish in prestigious journals). I think the truth is closer to the reverse of this: Free world-wide accessibility to everyone's research findings will eventually increase the potential impact of every researcher in every field, across all current impact levels. Initially, however, the benefits of free access will be the greatest for authors and for work that ALREADY has a high profile and impact: That will be the work that is in the greatest demand as soon as it is freely available to everyone everywhere. Then, as free online access becomes universal, and researchers learn how to make use of it, how to search and navigate it (e.g., through citation links: http://opcit.eprints.org), the increased impact made possible by this increased access should be felt at all impact levels. No doubt the producers of lower quality scholarship and science will attempt to promote their work through self-archiving, but the researchers actually using the research literature will quite naturally continue to rely on the higher-quality work, certified by the higher-quality journals, as they always did, with QC/C as their guide. (NB: We are not talking about changing the quality hierarchy here, just about freeing the access to it.) The Physics Archive never became dominated by the lower end of the quality spectrum; if anything, the truth was the reverse, because the higher-impact researchers were the most motivated to make their important findings available as soon and as widely as possible (see below). By the way, there seems to be a latent misunderstanding in the reply you cite, or perhaps in the options you presented to your interviewees: There is no EITHER/OR relationship between archiving online and publishing in prestigious journals: The relationship is BOTH/AND; that is the gist of the subversive proposal: Researchers give up nothing. They continue to publish their papers in the established peer-reviewed journals, with their known and proven quality and impact factors; IN ADDITION, they self-archive both their unrefereed preprints and their refereed final drafts online, free for all. Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ Perhaps you are confusing the self-archiving strategy for freeing the refereed literature that I am advocating <http://eprints.org> with another strategy for freeing the refereed literature <http://www.biomedcentral.com>, one that DOES involve making an EITHER/OR choice between submitting one's research to the established journals and submitting them instead to new, free online journals. This second strategy is not the one I am myself advocating, although, if it were to succeed, the outcome, a free refereed research literature, would be equally welcome. There will be a meeting this Thursday (July 6) in New York focused in part on this alternative strategy. And questions regarding any sort of choice or change in either submission policy or peer review need to be addressed to the advocates of this alternative strategy rather than to me. http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/conference.asp > I know that you are against a "hybrid" system. Don't you think, > however, that for scientists who already have great visibility, the > Faustian bargain is a bit less "Faustian"? On the one hand, they do > give their articles to publishers, but at the same time they derive a > great reward in terms of impact-factor and diffusion of their ideas: It is every bit as Faustian in all cases, because, I must repeat, this is not an EITHER/OR option: It is not a choice one must make between self-archiving versus publishing in a high-impact journal. There is no trade-off between publication-impact and archiving-impact: they add (or maybe even multiply, on the high end) rather than dividing. Self-archiving is for all research, at all impact levels. ALL RESEARCHERS lose impact as a result of the needless access barriers of paper-era S/L/P. What you probably mean is not that the bargain is less Faustian for high-impact researchers, but that they can afford the needless impact-loss more. A priori, perhaps. But that does not appear to have been the actual the experience of the Physics archive. It was not the low-impact authors who flocked to self-archiving, but the motivated, productive, high-impact authors. (I am speculating without data now, but my colleague Les Carr is currently doing analyses of the correlations between initial citation impact factor, self-archiving, user-hit-rate, and subsequent impact factor in the Physics Archive. My prediction is that he will find it was the medium- and high-impact authors who came to self-archiving first, not the low-impact authors, and that it increased their impact.) Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Hall, W. & Harnad, S. (2000) A usage based analysis of CoRR [A commentary on "CoRR: a Computing Research Repository" by Joseph Y. Halpern] ACM SIGDOC Journal of Computer Documentation. May 2000. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.halpern.htm On the other hand, there will no doubt have been a negative correlation with age; so, a fortiori, the more senior high-impact authors were probably not part of the vanguard in Physics. But they are there now. And they will be in all disciplines. For as free online access becomes the norm, the work of those who do not self-archive will in fact be at a growing disadvantage, in terms of impact. (A generation of Web-reared undergraduates is already coming of age who refuse to read anything that is not available online...) By the way, the "hybrid" solution I oppose -- as a "Trojan Horse" designed to lock libraries into S/L/P access-barriers indefinitely -- is the one where journal publishers make their on-paper journals available on-line too, for a fee, so institutions can subscribe to the on-paper version, or the on-line version, or both: always via S/L/P. But it is the S/L/P access barrier itself that must go! And it is subversive competition from the free self-archived on-line version that will probably ensure that it does: But note that there is no need for that last economic step. Libraries are free to continue spending their budgets on S/L/P if they wish -- as long as the self-archived incarnation of that same literature is accessible online, free for all. The objective of the subversive proposal is to free the research literature from its needless access barriers for researchers; liberating library budgets would merely be a side-effect. (Once the literature is available online for free for all, my own mission is over, and I can return to research to join in reaping the benefits of free access along with everyone else. What libraries choose to do is their own affair. It is also a foregone conclusion that, whereas I will evangelize tirelessly for self-archiving, I will not, once that is accomplished, evangelize for USING the free online archive: there I am content to let nature take its course, leaving it to researchers to reap what they have sown.) > This is the starting point of a continuing cycle of credit (as > suggested by Bruno Latour in "Laboratory Life"). I think that even if > scientists admit the illegitimacy of publishers' excessive gains, they > prefer to turn a blind eye on them and to carry on with this system. Unfortunately, anyone who reflects on the logic of this must immediately see it for the nonsense it is: The only factors militating in favour of the status quo are habit, inertia, and perhaps a bit of superstition (about the causality underlying the correlations). Fortunately, the young and the active are less in the grip of such things, in all disciplines. Universal self-archiving is a trivial step that will have instant enormous benefits. We must stop passively contemplating (Zeno-like) whether or not to take that step, and just go ahead and take it (as the Physicists have already done)! > (4) Don't you reckon that the scientific community would be too > conservative, especially in some disciplines, to create this revolution > spontaneously? (I'm referring to scientific communities like the Italian > one.) The scholarly and scientific community (like all big established populations) is sluggish, superstitious, and loath to change its ways, even for the better. As I said, it is a foregone conclusion that the next generation will have no patience for any of that; but I'm still optimistic that our own generation will soon wake up, in all disciplines. The conjecture was made by a participant in the recent 2nd meeting of the Open Archives initiative in San Antonio on June 3 <http://www.openarchives.org> that open-archiving will only really get off the ground when any institution can retrieve a piece of open source software from the web, type "MAKE ARCHIVE," and instantly create an institutional Santa-Fe compliant, interoperable Open Archive, ready for instant self-archiving by its researchers in all disciplines. Well, that software begins beta testing this week <http://eprints.org>; while the wrinkles in it are being ironed out during the next few weeks of beta testing, institutions would be well-advised to set in place the next critical element for getting us all to the optimal and inevitable: Institutions should some (very modest) start-up funds available to pay a team of library assistants or even students to DO THE SELF-ARCHIVING FOR THE FIRST WAVE OF RESEARCHERS. Many researchers will be willing and able to do their self-archiving for themselves, but it is critical not to lose those who are willing but feel they are not able: Their digital texts are already in their word-processors, but they feel they can't get them into the archive. Have everything in place to do it for them! It will cost a pittance per paper, and it will only have to be done once, for once self-archiving gathers momentum, everyone will realize how trivial (but essential) it is to do it with all of their papers. (Web-savvy students, greedy to have everything for free on the Web, could be mobilized to do the uploads by the researchers themselves in the later phases of self-archiving.) (By the way, Italy has one of the first, and certainly the highest impact-factor online-only journal free of S/L/P: The Journal of High-Energy Physics, published by CERN and SISSA in Trieste: http://jhep.sissa.it) > 5) You launched the subversive proposal in 1994. What are the reasons > that have hindered this change in science? Do you think that these > depend on economic interests or the mentality of scientists who don't > consider electronic media as a proper vehicle for their credibility? There are indeed economic interests that are opposed to freeing the refereed research literature online, but they are not what is holding us back, for those economic interests are not the interests of the researchers! Indeed, they are contrary to the interests of the researchers, who neither make nor seek either fees or royalties from their refereed publications; researchers seek (to put it simplistically) "impact" (on research and researchers), and the access barriers are also barriers to that impact. No, it is definitely what you have called the "mentality" of researchers that is delaying us on the road to the optimal and inevitable, and that mentality amounts mainly to a superstitious cleavage to unexamined habits. The subversive proposal was posted in 1994, and I certainly hoped that it would be acted upon sooner. The means were already available then. The original proposal was to self-archive via anonymous FTP, but that was in fact already obsolescent at the time the proposal was made, as the much more useable and transparent hyperworld of the Web and HTTP were already taking over. But perhaps the crucial inducement that was still missing from both FTP and HTTP archiving alone was interoperability: the prospect that no matter where a paper was archived, it could all be harvested together into a global archive consisting EXCLUSIVELY of the world's refereed research, with universal tags such as "author" and "journal" making it all seamlessly navigable. With the Santa Fe Convention and the Open Archives initiative, this is now available too: http://www.openarchives.org/ Will it happen now? I will close with a quote from the D-Lib article cited earlier: "I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind as to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked virtual library (see <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html>), and its QC/C expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the S/L/P savings. "The only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posterity's face by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!" -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: [email protected]
