On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, [Anonymous] wrote: > What do you think of the Electronic Society for Social Scientists' > efforts to challenge the dominance of commercial publishers? Do you > think that the online venture will succeed in forcing leading > publishers to lower subscription costs?
I of course favor anything that will help make refereed journal articles accessible to more users, but I am skeptical about the ELSSS project, which has been discussed in the American Scientist Forum: http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind01&L=september98-forum&D=0&F=l&P=8488 as well as in the CHE: http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2001/03/journal/ Here is a summary of the problems with the ESSS efforts: (1) They are aimed only at LOWERING journal prices, which is better than nothing, but not nearly enough. There is no price that is low enough so that all refereed research can be accessed by all researchers worldwide, as it should be. Yet this refereed research is all GIVEN AWAY by its authors, and always has been; they seek and receive no royalty or fee for it: All they want is research impact, hence readers. So there is no longer any justification for any impact/access-blocking price-barrier whatsoever, no matter how low, in the PostGutenberg era of online Eprint-archiving that makes it no longer necessary. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm (2) But even as an attempt to lower prices, I do not believe the ELSSS efforts will succeed (although I hope they will). The reason is that the efforts are predicated on authors giving up their current established journals and submitting their work instead to new, unestablished journals. New journals are always a risk for an author (and reader): They have no track record, they have no citation impact factor, the rigor of their peer review, hence the level of quality that they certify, has not been established; their future is uncertain. Hence submitting to a new journal instead of an established journal risks that one's work will not be adequately quality-controlled and will not be read (because readers are as uncertain of the quality of new journals as are authors). This can all be remedied, journal by journal, across years of establishing a track record. But it cannot be done en masse, it takes time, and it is not guaranteed of success. New journals tend to succeed only if there is a vacant subject-matter niche that they manage to fill. Here, we have the established journals of quality already filling all the niches. So at worst, the process of successfully taking over the niche would be a long and hard one, and at worst, it would never succeed. I don't think it will succeed, for the simple reason that sacrificing the practise of submitting to the highest quality/impact established journals in favor of new untested ones simply for the sake of making one's work available at a lower cost does not pose a strong enough incentive -- but especially when there is ALREADY a prominent way to achieve the same goal, and still more, namely, to make one's refereed research available to everyone for free, and not just at a lower price, without having to give up one's established journals at all! All that is needed is to self-archive the refereed final drafts in OAI-compliant Eprint Archives. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm So just as ELSSS is unlikely to be able to entice authors away from their established journals, it is unlikely to induce other publishers to lower their prices in competition. Nor do I believe that paying authors and paying referees will hasten these new journals along the long, hard, and uncertain path toward becoming successfully established journals of high quality. Author payment will rather act as a deterrent, raising the spectre of vanity-press publishing in authors and readers' minds, to add to the uncertainty of the nonexistent track record. Referee payment, an untested modification of peer review, might even bias the refereeing system. (Nor is it at all clear how these extra expenses, over and above those of established journals, can help LOWER their prices!) > Do you think that ELSSS' efforts go far enough? Why or why not? Do you > think that ELSSS subscription costs are still too high? I think ANY subscription (or site-license, or pay-per-view S/L/P) price is too high as long as it is the ONLY way to access the refereed literature. Once this literature has been freed online, the S/L/P version can continue to be sold as an option for as long as there is a market for it, but to continue to hold this author-giveaway literature hostage to these for-fee add-ons now that the day has come when it can all be given away by its authors online for-free has no justification (or future) whatsoever. The only substantive question is how to accelerate the online liberation of the entire refereed corpus. Lowering prices is merely a partial holding pattern, to try to tide libraries over in the mounting serials crisis. Much more fundamental steps have to be taken in order to reach the optimal and inevitable, and these can be taken, easily and immediately, through author/institution self-archiving. > What do you think of ELSSS' decision to pay authors and referrees? See above. Authors don't want pennies for their papers, they want IMPACT. That means readers, citations, researchers building on their work. That's what gets them the real rewards (promotion, tenure, grants, prizes). Paying authors just adds to the cost of the journals. Adding to the cost of the journals adds to the access-barriers, hence to the income-barriers. So it would be a foolish author who was tempted by receiving some pennies for his paper at the cost of access and impact down the line. ELSSS is proposing this as a way of hastening the build-up of their new journals' reputations; I think it will be seen as having a vanity-press flavor and will actually act as a deterrent to submission, especially to authors of quality and to junior faculty anxious for certification by an established criterion. Paying referees is even more problematic. Referees steal time from their research to do refereeing for various reasons (civic duty, golden rule, superstition). How much would they have to be paid to make it worth their while? Who has that kind of money? And might it not bias their reviewing? (Would this not have to be carefully tested in advance?) And how could spending more money on that lower journal access prices? > Do you think ELSSS will present a viable alternative for non-tenured > faculty who might publish their work in established commercial > journals? Are there already too many competing journals for ELSSS to > have a significant impact? No I don't. It is critically important for the careers of junior faculty to publish in journals of known high quality and impact. That is how their work is weighed, not only by prospective readers, but by promotion and tenure committees. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm Now, if there were no alternative, a (weak, not very promising) case could be made for trying to persuade junior faculty that as it is IMPACT on which their careers, and their performance indicators, depend, and since journal prices are access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers, they should submit to lower-priced journals. But this would be a hollow appeal to researchers whose career time is NOW (whereas submitting to new lower-priced journals of unestablished or lower quality would be a risky investment in some remote and uncertain future). But there IS an alternative, one aclling for no sacrifice whatsoever from junior faculty, and that is to continue to publish in the established journals AND to self-archive the refereed final drafts online in institutional Eprint Archives. That way, junior faculty can have their cake and eat it too. > Do you think that subscriptions could be abolished altogether if > authors self-archive their research online under the Open Archives > Initiative? Is this a more viable alternative? Yes, but it is not quite as simple as you describe. There are some successive stages to go through, and some branch points, depending on which way the demand and the market will go: I have spelled this out elsewhere. See http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm for the full story, but it is easy to summarize the relevant bits: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm (1) Authors continue submitting all research to refereed journals. (2) But, they also self-archive it online in their Institutional Eprint Archives, thereby removing all the access and impact barriers (online). (3) It is then an empirical question whether there will continue to be a market for the S/L/P (Subscription/License/Pay-Per-View) version of the journal, paid for by enough institutions and individuals, so that things can continue exactly as they do now (with S/L/P paying the piper, but all the refereed research freely accessible online) -- OR the S/L/P demand shrinks drastically. (4) If the institutional S/L/P demand, hence expenditure, shrinks drastically, this means the institutional S/L/P savings grow drastically. (5) The true cost of implementing peer review -- the essential service that refereed journals will always continue to provide, even if it turns out to be their ONLY remaining service -- has been variously estimated as accounting for about 10% of the total amount that the institutions of the world are currently paying through S/L/P, per paper. (Referees of course referee for free.) See the Odlyzko references in "For Whom the Gate Tolls?a. (6) The arithmetic then is very simple: The annual 10% peer-review costs PER PAPER (which are not really "publication charges," but quality-control/certification charges) will be paid for at the AUTHOR-INSTITUTION end out of the 100% annual institutional S/L/P savings (at the READER-INSTITUTION end). In other words, if ever the day comes when other sources of revenue for funding peer review shrink and vanish, journal peer review can always continue to be paid for out of a fraction of the savings. The rest of what journals used to provide (paper version, PDF, enhancements) will merely be optional add-ons that individuals and institutions can also continue to pay for, as long as they wish, if they do not find the self-archived refereed drafts sufficient. But meanwhile, the whole refereed corpus can be freed immediately, through author/institution self-archiving in OAI-compliant Eprint Archives http://www.eprints.org > Some leading publishers defend their practices by saying that they are > already lowering prices and that electronic publishing is already driving > down costs of academic journals. How would you respond to this? There are 20K refereed journals on the planet. That means at least 2,000,000 refereed papers annually. Most of the papers, in most of those journals cannot be accessed by most of the researchers on the planet today, and that would continue to be true NO MATTER HOW LOW THE PRICE WENT! ZERO is the only price most researchers and research institutions can afford, if they are to be able to surf this give-away literature with no access/impact barriers at all (to the eternal benefit of research itself). So there is something very disingenuous about publishers speaking of lowering prices, and "opening" this literature when what they are actually trying to do is to continue to hold these author give-aways hostage to price-barriers, however low! The only fair playing field for this very special, anomalous (because author give-away) literature is one in which the publishers' essential service -- the implementation of peer review -- is paid for, and the rest (the paper, the PDF, any further "added values") are merely options, that those institutions and individuals can purchase (if they can afford it) for whom the free self-archived online version is not enough. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): 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]
