On Sun, 9 Jul 2000, Peter Singer wrote: SH> This Forum is about freeing the peer-reviewed literature, such as it SH> is, now. There is no reason to delay or side-track this immediate, SH> face-valid objective by coupling it in any way with untested hypotheses SH> about ways of improving or modifying or replacing peer review. > ps> There is a reason. You can create self-archives but their use by ps> researchers will be impeded by the fact that self-archiving will be ps> seen by researchers to limit future publication options (see below), ps> and therefore opportunities for promotion and other incentives.
You may be right that researchers have, among other unexamined rationales for not going ahead and self-archiving, the superstitious notion that it might somehow "limit future publication options," but what is their basis for believing this? If it is a fear that it might be illegal to self-archive, see the ongoing thread on "Legal ways around copyright for one's own giveaway texts" in this Forum. (Ditto if the concern is about journal embargo policies.) But note that you said above "[t]here IS a reason" (to delay or side-track this immediate, face-valid objective of freeing the peer-reviewed literature): What is that reason, then? If it is something different from what is being discussed in that other thread, please say what it is, so we can consider it explicitly. ps> I know the Los Alamos physics archive enjoyed tremendous growth, but i ps> am not aware the physics community faced a critical mass of prestigious ps> journals that would not publish papers that had been self-archived. Am ps> i wrong about this? This is of course an empirical question. It is indeed an empirical question, in fact, several questions: (1) Why is Los Alamos still growing only linearly rather than exponentially? [I think it has to do with the unsolved horse/water problem -- and interoperable open-archiving may prove to be the solution.] (2) Is there "a critical mass of prestigious journals" whose copyright and embargo policies oppose self-archiving in Physics? [I don't know the answer. I don't think there is a critical mass, and I think the question has to be subdivided into negative copyright policies and negative embargo policies. SCIENCE is negative on both, ELSEVIER is negative on copyright but not embargo, APS is positive on both. But there has been no evidence whatsoever of any "limit [on] future publication options" as a result of self-archiving.] (3) Is there "a critical mass of prestigious journals" whose copyright and embargo policies oppose self-archiving in Biomedicine? [I don't know the answer, but I don't think there is any "critical mass" here either, just a mixture of journals, with a mixture of copyright and embargo policies (most of them not explicitly formulated on the online self-archiving question). Again, SCIENCE and NEJM seem to be negative on both, NATURE and BMJ in the middle, and JAMA on the side of the angels.] http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.scinejm.htm ps> We can find some empirical evidence in BMJ netprints -- the growth ps> there has not to date parallelled the situation with the Los Alamos ps> server. Why not? BMJ netprints is just for unrefereed preprints; we are talking about freeing the refereed literature. But it is certainly true that the horse/water problem is not yet solved, either in physics or in biomedicine. Let us hope that the availability and proliferation of Santa-Fe-compliant open archives will at last persuade the research cavalry that it is safe to drink! ps> Self-archiving is not a both/and decision because many prestigious ps> journals will not accept papers that have been posted to the web. ps> Although some journals do accept previously posted articles, the author ps> limits her options by self-archiving. We may agree that such ps> restrictions are not a good thing, but they exist. Self-archiving embargoes on pre-refereeing pre-prints are not only not a good policy, they are not an enforceable policy: Even if journals were to dispatch software agents all over the web trawling for "look-alikes" before refereeing any submission, drafts of a paper are on a continuum: Author-agents making pre-emptive cosmetic changes to outwit embargo-agents could keep one another endlessly busy while researchers went about their business. The absurdity of such "spy vs. spy antics" is patent, and in turn highlights the futility of trying to resolve this fundamental conflict between the interests of research/researchers and the interests of current publication revenue-streams in this heavy-handed way. Nor do I believe that journal editors and referees (who, after all, are us) would knowingly collaborate in such entirely needless and counterproductive cyber-sleuthing; they too would go about their business. So such sci-fi scenarios are mere figments of the imagination, and not realistic reasons for fearing to self-archive one's pre-refereeing preprints, or for feeling obliged to submit them only to journals that explicitly allow self-archiving. Embargoes, I repeat, unlike copyright agreements, are not legal matters, but mere journal policy matters -- and arbitrary and self-serving ones, in this case. ps> On the matter of self-archiving vs. Biomedcentral, after attending the ps> interesting conference in New York, I am not sure the distinction ps> between self-archiving and Biomedcentral with respect to subsequent ps> publication is as striking as Stevan implies. In both cases the author ps> retains copyright. Why would another journal -- say a specialty journal ps> serving a particular audience -- publish [a modified or customized ps> version of] only self- archived papers but not papers from ps> Biomedcentral if they feel the material is of interest to their ps> readers? This unfortunately seems to conflate a number of distinct and even mutually exclusive factors into an impossible composite picture: (1) Self-archiving pre-refereeing preprints (2) Self-archiving post-refereeing postprints (revised final drafts, refereed and accepted by a peer-reviewed journal) (3) Submitting papers to Biomed Central for refereeing (and subsequent archiving in PubMed Central) (4) Re-publication of an already-published paper (5) Copyright retention or assignment (all or part) Let us forget about re-publication for now (the concern here is about freeing the refereed literature, not about publishing it over and over again). The fundamental difference between the self-archiving model and the BiomedCentral model for freeing the refereed literature is: SA: In the self-archiving model, the author submits the paper to an established journal for refereeing AND self-archives [i] the pre-refereeing preprint and then later self-archives either [ii] the refereed postprint, if the journal copyright agreement allows self-archiving, or [iii] a file of corrigenda, indicating what needs to be done to turn [i] into [ii], if the journal copyright agreement does not allow self-archiving. BC: In the BiomedCentral model, the author submits the paper to BiomedCentral for refereeing. BiomedCentral then archives (optionally first the unrefereed preprint) and then the refereed postprint in PubmedCentral. Copyright is a bit of a red herring here, because freeing the online refereed draft is the objective, not re-publishing or re-selling the paper: In the SA model, the authors either get a copyright agreement that allows them to self-archive the refereed postprint [ii] or they self-archive the corrigenda [iii] to supplement the already-archived preprint [i]. (Less convenient, but only a temporary measure, to get us all over the hump.) In the BC model, archives retain copyright, and their postprint is archived in PubMedCentral (but they have been unable to publish it in the established refereed journal of their choice. (Is this too a mere inconvenience, or a more serious sacrifice? This is the hub of the matter.) Republication by other journals is utterly irrelevant, once the refereed version is free for all online. ps> When you write Universities should reward researchers for ps> self-archiving, you are agreeing with my argument that incentives ps> matter. What sort of incentives did you have in mind here? Perhaps, but I am speaking about much simpler and less problematic incentive changes: not changing reward or evaluative structures or publication preferences, but merely mandating that, just as ones work needs to go into a CV for evaluation, its full texts need to go on the Web: and providing the Archives and the Archivers to make the first wave of (proxy) self -archiving as effortless as possible for researchers. No more radical an incentive change, really, than madating that CVs be submitted on a disk instead of on paper. And the real incentive is the enhanced potential impact for every paper by vouchsafing free access to it for everyone, everywhere, forever. PAS> The... university, granting agency, or award-giving body simply needs PAS> to state that the work itself, and not where it was published, should PAS> be the focus of attention of review committees > SH> And unfortunately the proponent of this expedient needs to state where SH> these review committees are to find the time, money, and peers to SH> peer-review all these already peer-reviewed papers afresh each time. > ps> The focus of review in the incentive system is not the paper but ps> usually the person (university promotion committee or career award or ps> prize). So it is a false proposition to say all the articles will need ps> to be re- reviewed. Rather, we need valid and efficient assessments of ps> the body of a person's work that treats fairly work published, for ps> example, in Biomedcentral rather than the brand name journals that will ps> not accept self-archived papers. I don't think you answered my question: What is this "valid and efficient assessment of the body of a person's work" if it is not peer review, done all over again? And what has BiomedCentral got to do with it? If it succeeds, BiomedCentral will just be another brand-name journal, or set of brand-name journals, whose peer review the committee can either trust, or must redo for itself. We already have a set of known brands, with at least a prior track record (and established impact factors) to go by, brands that authors may understandably be reluctant to abandon for new, untested brands -- and their promotion committees would have the same reason for concern about relying on them for assessment. I am afraid I cannot see your point at all. PAS> The current tools of number of articles, journal brand, journal impact PAS> factor, peer reviews can be improved. If we produce better tools, we PAS> will decrease reliance on the ones we have now -- especially journal PAS> brand -- and authors can be recognized appropriately for their work PAS> submitted to the new venues for e-"publishing". > SH> By all means produce better tools; test them; and once they have been SH> shown to do the job, they will no doubt be adopted. Meanwhile, we have SH> a job to do: freeing the current refereed literature online, now. -- SH> Once this is done, there will be a much bigger database for developing SH> those new kinds of tools: http://opcit.eprints.org > ps> I am not arguing that self-archives should not be established in ps> medicine and science. I also agree that the freed literature will ps> provide a much better database for citation analysis etc. > ps> The difference in our views is that Stevan sees the proper alignment of ps> incentives as a detour on the way to freeing the literature and I see ps> them as a necessary precondition. The problem is, to use Stevan's ps> metaphor, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. We ps> can create self- archives but researchers won't use them in large ps> numbers if the incentive system is not aligned with such use. Peter, we are on the same team. And I agree that it's a chore, getting the horses to drink. But you seem to be saying that to get them to drink, you need to get them to want a different beverage. The rat/cage/horse/water metaphor is getting more and more mixed up: It will not make sense until distinct and even antithetical things are kept clearly separate, rather than being jumbled up in a heap. Here are some of the critical distinctions to keep in mind: (1) give-away vs. non-give-away work (2) freeing work vs. improving it vs. improving how it is used to evaluate us (3) archiving unrefereed preprints vs. archiving refereed postprints (4) archiving papers vs. publishing papers (refereed) (5) publishing in an established journal vs. publishing in a new journal (6) tested and face-valid practises vs. untested, experimental practises -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
