The following is my response to Stevan Harnad's "ELSSS proposal" posting of the 10th of March.
From: Stevan Harnad <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: ELSSS project (ELectronic Society for the Social Sciences) List-Post: [email protected] List-Post: [email protected] Date: 10 March 2001 12:27 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 ELSSS 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 ***MLM's comment: I cannot generalize to other disciplines, but the Harnad's proposal is fundamentally flawed as far as economics is concerned. This is why. As far as I understand him, Harnad appears to have no qualms with the refereed journal system, his main concern being that after the article has been quality-certified by the refereeing and editing system of refereed journals, it should be made available for free to all researchers. What Harnad does not seem to appreciate fully is the difference between free access to unrefereed and refereed material. Whereas, of course, there is no reason why unrefereed material should not be freely accessible (and this is largely already the case in economics - see the large number of archives with working papers, etc.), refereed articles are another kettle of fish altogether. It is not obvious to me why, in the current state of affairs, authors ought to have the automatic right to give away some else's work (the referees' and editors'). Of course, there may be disciplines where reciprocal refereeing may be the norm, but in the case of economics, the pool of (able and prompt) referees is both small and overfished. If this is accepted as a true description of the state of refereeing in economics, then it becomes obvious why, at least in economics, the Harnad proposal has no prospect of ever succeeding (nor it ought to). Why should journals, associations, editors, and referees effectively allow researchers to free-ride on their efforts. Turning raw research material into quality-controlled quality-graded output involves a cost, and someone has to be bear it. There are no free lunches in academic publishing. The real question, that the Harnad proposal not only does not address but, worse, provides a serious obstacle to overcoming, is whether commercial publishers should continue to earn stratospheric rents on the reputation that journals written, refereed and edited by academics have acquired over the years. In the long run, i.e., when thanks to initiatives like ELSSS and SPARC, journal subscriptions merely cover the cost of quality-control and therefore are much more widely diffused than now, the issue of free access to refereed material will become largely irrelevant.*** (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. ***MLM's comment: as far as economics is concerned, most, if not all, of Harnad's assumptions are either incorrect or, at best, untested. Can Harnad cite a case when a large proportion of leading researchers in any discipline have committed themselves to submitting and refereeing papers in a yet-to-be-launched journal? Can he not see that ELSSS provides a mechanism for both creating "instant reputation" for new journals and for diluting the (abused) reputation of high-price ones? Does he know of any other case where a yet-to-be-launched journal, in addition to advertising a world-class list of editorial board members, has produced a list of top referees, in advance of publication?*** 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. ***MLM's comment: Again, most of Harnad's statements are either untested or contradicted by the evidence. Can he point to any previous attempt to target a range of high-priced journals by providing credible alternatives? Even one-journal attempt can be successful, as Theory and Practice of Logic Programming and Evolutionary Ecology Research have proved conclusively.*** 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 ***MLM's comment: in addition to the misunderstandings already explained above, here Harnad makes another statement that, again for the case of economics, is patently incorrect: economists do want to give up high-price journals . They just need a credible alternative to enable them to do so. *** 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. ***MLM's comments: it may be that other researchers are not as familiar as economists are with the concept of multiple equilibria in a coordination game and with mechanisms that facilitate the transition from sub-optimal to superior equilibria. ELSSS can already count on hundreds of highly respected researchers committed to both submitting to and refereeing for ELSSS journals. As to the effect of ELSSS journals on the pricing policies of monopolistic publishers, this is going to be uncharted territory, as the latter have never been exposed before to a sustained attack. Judging from existing one-journal challenges, my prediction is that the inevitable dilution in quality in high-priced journals will eventually lead to price reductions. *** 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!) ***MLM's comments: again, Harnad's points may be valid for some disciplines, but definitely not for economics. In economics, referee payment is not a new development at all. To mention two examples (and I could cite many more) on either side of the Atlantic: the American Economic Review, the economics journal with the highest citation impact and published on a not-for-profit basis by the American Economic Association has paid referees a nominal fee for quite some time, as has the Economic Journal, the highly respected publication of the Royal Economic Society. So much for "untested modification of peer review" As to author payment, there is an ongoing debate amongst ELSSS supporters and the consensus there is that, given the level of support already achieved by ELSSS, rewarding authors is probably unnecessary (even though, prizes for best articles can play a role here). Not a single respondent mentioned vanity-publishing, for the good reason that the whole emphasis of the ELSSS project is on publishing highest-quality material, under the most stringent quality controls.*** > 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. ***MLM's comments: A clarification for the anonymous questioner. The subscription cost estimates given on the ELSSS website are very conservative, perhaps to the extent of being misleading. The key issue here is the principle that the real cost of refereeing, editing, and distributing high-quality research ought to be spread as widely as possible. ELSSS will implement pricing policies (details of which are too commercially sensitive to be revealed in advance) that will achieve precisely this - as well as making all ELSSS journals available at no cost to all developing and transition economies. Perhaps the scenarios where thousands of libraries share the costs of quality control instead of bleeding themselves dry by paying the sort of subscriptions charged by the likes of Reed Elsevier may not please Harnad fully but I am pretty sure it will make most librarians and researchers very happy indeed.*** 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. ***MLM's comments: I am not sure that the Harnad's world would be optimal and I am definitely certain that it is by no means inevitable. The simple fact is that self/institution self-archiving of refereed material is either inherently self-contradictory in so far as it would lead to the collapse of the refereed journal system (without providing any viable alternative to it) or doomed to failure in those disciplines that do not regard the collapse of the refereed journal system as an optimal, or even desirable state of affairs. > What do you think of ELSSS' decision to pay authors and referees? 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. ***MLM's comments: see above.*** 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? ***MLM's comments: in addition to my previous comments, perhaps I can share with the list the debate amongst ELSSS supporters on the issue of paying referees. Again, I do not wish to fall into the trap of generalising about all academic disciplines, so please remember that I am talking about ECONOMICS (where, for example, lags between submission and first referees' reports can be anything between 4 to 12 months - a lag that researchers in other disciplines would regard as totally unacceptable). The consensus among ELSSS supporters is that, whereas most economists will referee out of academic duty, a payment contingent on prompt return of a full report will be beneficial to the profession. Is it not strange that the Harnad proposal has nothing to say about the current practice of referees working for free (or for derisory fees) for commercial publishers who charge extortionate subscription prices? Again not a single ELSSS respondent has mentioned the possibility that paying referees may bias the reviewing, for the simple reason that double-blind refereeing and the payment being contingent on speed of response (and not on the outcome of the refereeing) provide sufficient safeguard against any bias. Moreover, and this is another crucial point not grasped by Harnad, paying referees for prompt and full reports is also an indirect means for weakening the stranglehold of high-priced journals on the market. As he may (or may not) be aware, in economics some leading economists have attempted to organize a "refereeing boycott" of high-priced journals, which has not been terribly successful because so far there has been no credible alternative to the high-priced specialist journals. ELSSS provides such an alternative: on receiving two papers to review, most economists would referee first the paper submitted to ELSSS and only later, if at all, the one submitted to a high-price journal.*** > 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 ***MLM's comment: Then, how would Harnad explain the fact that a large proportion of ELSSS supporters are junior faculty?*** 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). ***MLM's comment: The key feature of ELSSS journals is not so much that they will be significantly cheaper than the commercially-produced journals they will be competing with (which only shows how extortionately priced the latter are), but that the revenues generated will be shared by the academic community. Or to put it differently, that the real cost of refereeing and editing will be shared more equitably. So referring to ELSSS journals as "lower-priced" is irrelevant in this context. Referring to them as "journals of unestablished or lower quality" is downright inaccurate. Perhaps Harnad can ask the opinion of his colleagues in the Economics department at Southampton (some of whom are ELSSS supporters, btw) on the quality of the ELSSS supporters as publicised on the ELSSS website (http://www.elsss.org.uk/supporters.html). They include current or past editors of the most prestigious journals, presidents and eminent members of leading learned societies, etc. So much for "lower quality". The questioner is absolutely right in pointing out that there may be too many journals already. The aim of the ELSSS initiative is to weaken and eventually dislodge the high-priced journals.*** But there IS an alternative, one calling 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? (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 ***MLM's comments: (I am sure that other people will have expressed comments similar to what follows. I apologise for duplicating them here unacknowledged, but, because of time constraints, I have decided not to invest too much time into investigating a route to better scholarly communication that seems to me to be so obviously flawed - at least as far as economics is concerned.) The reason why the route described by Harnad will never be followed by economists in any significant number is that the suggested alternative is totally self-defeating. Who would ever be willing to subscribe to material that is freely available? Answer: nobody, certainly not budget-constrained libraries. Therefore, contrary to Harnad's belief, "refereed journals will" not (negation and emphasis added) "continue to provide the essential service [of] implementing peer review"". Economists, and perhaps others as well, can solve games by backward induction: if a strategy leads to an undesirable outcome (the collapse of the refereed journal system), then it will not be adopted. Harnad is absolutely correct when he states that "If the institutional S/L/P demand, hence expenditure, shrinks drastically, this means the institutional S/L/P savings grow drastically." Indeed. They can "save" 100% of the subscription price of refereed journals. The minor snag is that, as a result of this "saving", there will be no refereed journals.*** > 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). ***MLM's comment. I believe that Harnad is seriously damaging his credibility with statements like the above or when he states that "There is no need to single out any particular publishers, because even if the higher ones lowered their prices to the level of the lower ones, all refereed research would still not be accessible to all researchers, everywhere. Only some to some. As long as this entire give-away literature is not free to everyone everywhere, online, research-impact is being lost". His proposal, by refusing to face the fact that the cost of quality control (and enhancement) has to be borne by someone, not only is not helping the fight for fairer academic publishing but is contributing indirectly to the perpetuation of a system where a handful of commercial publishers exploit the entire academic community.*** 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. ***MLM's final comment. At long last something that Harnad and I agree on: the long-term aim of any initiative for the improvement of scholarly communication is to drive its cost to the barest minimum - the cost of quality control and enhancement. The substantial difference between his approach and ELSSS' is that whereas the former, if "successful" would lead to the collapse of the refereed journal system without offering any alternative and therefore unwittingly bolsters the totally unsatisfactory status quo, the latter, by challenging directly the practices of monopolistic publishers and offering a credible alternative, makes the long-term objective of minimum-cost scholarly communication achievable and realistic. One final observation: Elsevier has felt sufficiently threatened by the ELSSS initiative to be moved into the unusual move of sending an unsolicited email to ELSSS supporters trying (not very successfully) to defend its practices. Is this not a sign that ELSSS is attacking monopolistic publishers where it hurts?*** Concluding remark: I believe that much faster progress will be made towards fairer academic publishing when contributors to the debate realise that there is no one model that fits all disciplines. The quest for a grand solution may at best be illusory and at worst hamper the efforts of people trying to change things for the better in a gradual and decentralised fashion. Manfredi La Manna
