Greetings, > From: [email protected] > Date: 2000-07-11 09:57:23 -0400
> I think you did not quite get the point I was trying to make. Just to set the > record straight for those who did not attend: Hmmm, in reading your e-mail here, I don't think I missed the point at all :^). > 1. I made it very clear in the beginning of my talk that I was speaking 'a > titre > personnel', and not on behalf of any organisation. I don't think I implied anything else. Michael Jacobson may have implied such a thing though (and it was certainly how you came across despite your disclaiimer - after all, you closed with an invitation for PMC "to join us [CrossRef]".) > 2. My main point in comparing CrossRef and PubMedCentral was in terms of how > to > reach the, what I believe(d) to be, common objectives of both intiatives: a. > "Every research worker should have access to the refereed scientific (journal) > literature of his/her choice/level' b. "All facilities of the Internet should > be > available to him/her, so as to ensure maximal efficiency and effectiveness of > his/her research efforts". There is no way that a) is fullfilled by CrossRef and I don't believe CrossRef addresses this issue at all. This is what I find disingenuous about your line of reasoning. [reordering your text....] > All CrossRef does is lead the end users to the Website of the article of their > choice: it is up to the publisher of the journal in which that article is > contained to determined the terms of access, i.e., for free or for fee. Exactly! And that is why CrossRef has nothing to say about a) while PubMedCentral is conceived precisely to address a). There can be no more complete access than if it were all free. > As the > core (biomedical) literature gets subscribed to (or licensed) by practically > all > academic libraries, access is for free for most academic end users. First of all, it was pretty clear that from Varmus's talk that not all researchers have access. But more importantly is at what cost does this access come? The reality of the serials crisis can't be denied. Every day librarians make choices about what access to cut off. You may say this doesn't happen to the core of the literature, but I would argue that then a very large percentage of the literature is non-core and it is truly extravagant to make the non-core material available in the traditional channels (perhaps as part of large consortia deals - with evey bottle of Glenlivet, you have to take a case of Mad Dog 20/20). I also believe that the core literature isn't being made available to all researchers who could benefit from the access. PubMedCentral is an attempt to make this entire problem go away by changing the model. The real question is whether this forces the baby out with the bath water. Can high quality QC and archiving be done outside of the subscription model? This is an experimental question and Varmus was very persuasive about arguing for the need for experimentation. > Those > biomedical publishers who choose to make their journal files available for > free, and who, as a result, would typically participate in the PubMedCentral > initiative, can do so within CrossRef as well. Moreover, their articles do not > only remain interlinked with those that are not free for all, they will, in > future, also be linked with the non-primary literature (such as textbooks, > (major) reference works, (numerical) databases etc.), a part of the literature > that nobody has (yet) suggested should be given away for free. This is conveniently ignoring the fact that a journal who wants to make their content available for free needs a channel to make it available. Without something like PubMedCentral they have to pay for the electronic infrastructure to distribute the journal. With PMC, they can focus just on providing QC. Certainly CrossRef isn't such a channel. > My argument was (and is), that it will be a long time (if ever) before the PMC > initiative reaches a critical size of , say, 20% of the biomedical articles > published. Probably true, but mostly because of entrenched publisher interests. But even the APS wouldn't be able to immediately comply with a request to put all of Phys. Rev. contents into something like PMC - we have no other model for paying for peer-review or for converting information to long-term archival formats. What the existence of PMC does, however, is allow one to explore how to move beyond the current subscription model to provide alternative ways to pay for these necessities. It is clear that the new electronic way of doing things enables one to decouple distribution from peer-review. Furthermore, such a decoupling means that the costs of distribution can be greatly reduced (cf. Ginsparg). The main distinction between the publisher-centric view and the Varmus/Ginspargian is precisely this decoupling. > Until that time, research workers are deprived of even the most > elementary 'facilities of the Internet' (such as reference linking) for a > critical part of their literature. Meanwhile, the CrossRef initiative, which > assumes that publishers keep their articles on their own Websites and only > requires them to make available their articles' metadata in a 'central > facility', has quickly reached more than such a critical size, thus allowing > reasearch workers access to a large (virtual) file within the next few months. I am not saying that CrossRef isn't needed (though I do think CrossRef's goals can be met in other ways without such heavy "mainframe" centralization, but that is another argument). I am saying that CrossRef in and of itself does nothing to address point a) and since a) is the raison d'etre for PubMedCentral, it isn't reasonable to compare the two as if one can substitute for the other (and this doesn't even talk about non-journal literature that PMC would like to include). To imply that PMC (or the length of the timescale for PMC achieving criticality) is "depriving" researchers of anything is really over the top. There is no doubt that CrossRef will help publishers link articles together and researchers will thus benefit. But this doesn't expand access or redistribute costs for granting access (the costs for distribution would also be greatly reduced in the centralized PMC model compared to the present system). Nor, at least for the biomed literature, does CrossRef come close to providing the kind of tool that PubMed itself is (and this does provide an alternative to CrossRef for linking together the biomed literature - the strength of CrossRef is that it extends beyond just the biomed fields). > The conclusion is, therefore, that the PubMedCentral solution (i.e. hosting > the > journals centrally) for reaching the above mentioned objectives IS CONTAINED > IN > the CrossRef solution, thus making PMC superfluous. I am sorry, but this just doesn't follow for the reasons stated above. CrossRef is a convenience - it does nothing to improve true access. > As an added thought (not > expressed at the meeting): PMC seems to competing more with Highwire than > anyone > else - a number of the PMC journals are on Highwire - why have them both > places? Good question. Highwire happens to be a rather expensive way to distribute journals. I'll leave it to the readers to draw the inference. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society
