Manfredi La Manna (MLM) -- whose efforts with ELSSS I wish every success -- has not understood the points I made. I will quote/comment below. The misunderstanding is easily summarised:
MLM thinks that if authors self-archived their refereed papers this would lead to the "collapse of the refereed journal system." This is pure speculation on MLM's part, and not only does all the existing evidence go against this speculation, but so does the logic of the explicit transition scenario I have many times described. MLM has missed that logic and completely skipped over the transition scenario. I will try to make it even more explicit for him below. On Tue, 13 Mar 2001, Manfredi M.A. La Manna wrote: sh> Here is a summary of the problems with the ELSSS efforts: sh> (1) They are aimed only at LOWERING journal prices, which sh> is better than nothing, but not nearly enough. There is no sh> price that is low enough so that all refereed research can sh> be accessed by all researchers worldwide, as it should be. sh> Yet this refereed research is all GIVEN AWAY by its sh> authors, and always has been; they seek and receive no sh> royalty or fee for it: All they want is research impact, sh> hence readers. So there is no longer any justification for sh> any impact/access-blocking price-barrier whatsoever, no sh> matter how low, in the PostGutenberg era of online sh> Eprint-archiving that makes it no longer necessary. sh> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm mlm> ***MLM's comment: I cannot generalise to other disciplines, but mlm> Harnad's proposal is fundamentally flawed as far as economics is mlm> concerned. This is why. As far as I understand him, Harnad appears mlm> to have no qualms with the refereed journal system, his main mlm> concern being that after the article has been quality-certified by mlm> the refereeing and editing system of refereed journals, it should mlm> be made available for free to all researchers. What Harnad does not mlm> seem to appreciate fully is the difference between free access to mlm> unrefereed and refereed material. Whereas, of course, there is no mlm> reason why unrefereed material should not be freely accessible (and mlm> this is largely already the case in economics - see the large mlm> number of archives with working papers, etc.), refereed articles mlm> are another kettle of fish altogether. It is not obvious to me why, mlm> in the current state of affairs, authors ought to have the mlm> automatic right to give away some else's work (the referees' and mlm> editors'). They are not giving away someone else's work; they are giving away their own work. In most disciplines referees are not paid at all, and in economics, as MLM concedes below, they are paid a "nominal" amount. The only cost and service to speak about here is the true cost of implementing quality-control, the peer-review process. Let us call the true cost of that service to the author, QC cost. At the present time the QC cost amounts to about 10% of what the planet (by which I mean all institutions and individuals who are paying subscription, site-license, or pay-per-view [S/L/P] access-tolls) is paying for whatever access currently exists (on-paper or on-line) to any given paper. The Self-Archiving Initiative has always been predicated on the necessity of QC, hence the necessity of paying the true cost of QC. Currently, QC costs are bundled into S/L/P costs and paid for at the reader-institution end. (I will speak only of institutional S/L/P because those are what refereed journal economics are based on; for most refereed journals the individual subscriber base is negligible.) All current self-archiving (including its most substantial instance, the Physics Archive, which self-archives over 30K papers annually) is parasitic on the payment of QC costs via S/L/P. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with this. As long as S/L/P does pay for the QC, there is no reason authors should not free their final draft online. (I pause for a reply: IS there any reason not to do so, as long as S/L/P is paying for the QC?) But what if the availability of the free version begins to take a toll on S/L/P revenues? It has not begun to do so at all yet, in Physics, for example, but let us suppose it eventually does begin to do so. What happens then? As S/L/P revenues shrink, institutional S/L/P savings grow. Now note that the only essential commodity at issue here is QC, which is a SERVICE, to the author-institution, not a PRODUCT. The product, in contrast, is the on-paper version, the on-line PDF page-images, and any further enhancements the publisher provides for the QC draft. Now note that these products are all ADD-ONS. Often they are described using the rhetoric of "value-added", but the only ESSENTIAL value is the QC. All the rest is just options, and can and should be treated and marketed as such. At the moment, the essential QC draft is effectively being held hostage to these optional add-ons! So what happens when S/L/P revenues shrink and institutional S/L/P savings grow? Remember that the only thing worth keeping an eye on is the essential and indispensable QC service, and the 10% needed to pay for it. While it is being paid for out of S/L/P, it is wrapped into a reader/institution-end product (the on-paper and PDF version), even though QC is really an author/institution-end service. But as publisher S/L/P revenues shrink and institutional S/L/P savings grow, institutions are growing an annual windfall pot of savings, 90% of which they can disburse as they like (buy books, for example), but 10% of which needs to be directed into a pot to defray the annual institutional QC costs, for each paper published in a refereed journal by a researcher at that institution. This is the logic of the transition scenario. But there is no reason whatsoever for authors to occupy themselves in any way with these speculative future-contingencies. Like the 100,000+ physicists who have done so already, they should just go ahead and self-archive, and let the future contingencies take care of themselves. nlm> Of course, there may be disciplines where reciprocal mlm> refereeing may be the norm, but in the case of economics, the pool mlm> of (able and prompt) referees is both small and overfished. If this mlm> is accepted as a true description of the state of refereeing in mlm> economics, then it becomes obvious why, at least in economics, the mlm> Harnad proposal has no prospect of ever succeeding (nor it ought mlm> to). Why should journals, associations, editors, and referees mlm> effectively allow researchers to free-ride on their efforts. mlm> Turning raw research material into quality-controlled mlm> quality-graded output involves a cost, and someone has to be bear mlm> it. There are no free lunches in academic publishing. I hope it is clear by now what an utter non sequitur the above comment is. The free ride for QC is anything but free. It is painfully paid for many times over by the institutions of the world that can afford the S/L/P. Self-archiving will not only start to give those institutions some relief, but it will put realistic pressure on journal publishers to scale down to providing only the essentials (QC), and treating the rest (paper, PDF) as the options they are, rather than trying to hold it all hostage to them. Not only is the self-archiving of the final refereed draft morally justified (why should the author, who, unlike all other authors, gets and seeks no royalties from the sale of his work, be denied even one reader-eye-ball's worth of potential research impact by S/L/P access-barriers?), but it can also be done 100% legally, using the ludicrously simple Harnad/Oppenheim strategy: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#Harnad/Oppenheim So what is all this about "free lunch"? mlm> The real mlm> question, that the Harnad proposal not only does not address but, mlm> worse, provides a serious obstacle to overcoming, is whether mlm> commercial publishers should continue to earn stratospheric rents mlm> on the reputation that journals written, refereed and edited by mlm> academics have acquired over the years. In the long run, i.e., mlm> when thanks to initiatives like ELSSS and SPARC, journal mlm> subscriptions merely cover the cost of quality-control and mlm> therefore are much more widely diffused than now, the issue of free mlm> access to refereed material will become largely irrelevant.*** First, let us not balkanise. Both of our approaches aim to scale down refereed journals publishing to the essentials, QC, and their true costs. The difference is that SPARC/ELSSS is trying to pay for QC on a continuation of the reader-institution-end PRODUCT model that is the current status quo, whereas Self-Archiving is more likely to transform it into a author-institution QC SERVICE model. I suggest that not only does the logic of an author/institution-end service model fit this anomalous, give-away literature far better than the standard reader-product model that applies so well to all the rest of the literature, which is uniformly NON-give-away (i.e., it is author royalty/fee-based: books, magazine articles), but it has much more likelihood of actually forcing a downsizing to the essentials. As long as would-be give-away refereed research is held hostage to a product, there will always be inessentials wrapped into that product. Moreover -- and this is by far the most important point of all in any of this -- there is no reason whatsoever why this author-give-away literature should have ANY fee-based access barriers online. As long as QC is funded on the reader/institution-end, it continues to be toll-gated, and there continues to be access denial. This simply is not that kind of literature. It's not what its author/researchers want. They don't want tolls, they want impact: http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm This makes them unlike all other authors, and there is no longer any reason at all why they (and research, and hence society) should not at last have exactly what they want for this anomalous literature. MLM is an economist. He should try to rethink this anomalous, give-away literature on the QC service model, instead of continuing to force it into the Procrustean S/L/P product model that applies to all the rest of the literature. No matter how low the S/L/P tolls, toll-based access means access denial, which in turn means impact denial, which is a very bad thing for the progress of research (and the careers of researchers). sh> (2) But even as an attempt to lower prices, I do not sh> believe the ELSSS efforts will succeed (although I hope sh> they will). The reason is that the efforts are predicated sh> on authors giving up their current established journals and sh> submitting their work instead to new, unestablished sh> journals. New journals are always a risk for an author sh> (and reader): They have no track record, they have no sh> citation impact factor, the rigor of their peer review, sh> hence the level of quality that they certify, has not been sh> established; their future is uncertain. mlm> ***MLM's comment: as far as economics is concerned, most, if not mlm> all, of Harnad's assumptions are either incorrect or, at best, mlm> untested. Can Harnad cite a case when a large proportion of leading mlm> researchers in any discipline have committed themselves to mlm> submitting and refereeing papers in a yet-to-be-launched journal? Untested. mlm> Can he not see that ELSSS provides a mechanism for both creating mlm> "instant reputation" for new journals and for diluting the (abused) mlm> reputation of high-price ones? Untested. mlm> Does he know of any other case where mlm> a yet-to-be-launched journal, in addition to advertising a mlm> world-class list of editorial board members, has produced a list of mlm> top referees, in advance of publication?*** Untested. (This is all hype. All well and good, but we will have to await the results -- which I am more than ready to applaud if they are successful. But the problem of freeing refereed research of access- and impact-barriers online is a profound and urgent one, and cannot wait to see whether this hype proves to be justified. Self-archiving now is a sure solution to freeing the refereed literature now. No hype, no hypothesis, no speculation, no wait-and-see. As soon as we do it, it is done. If we sit waiting to see whether switching to new journals brings down prices low enough, we may have a very long wait. Whereas the optimal and inevitable is within reach, through self-archiving, and could be attained virtually overnight if we just go ahead and Do it!) sh> Hence submitting to a new journal instead of an established sh> journal risks that one's work will not be adequately sh> quality-controlled and will not be read (because readers sh> are as uncertain of the quality of new journals as are sh> authors). This can all be remedied, journal by journal, sh> across years of establishing a track record. But it cannot sh> be done en masse, it takes time, and it is not guaranteed sh> of success. New journals tend to succeed only if there is a sh> vacant subject-matter niche that they manage to fill. Here, sh> we have the established journals of quality already filling sh> all the niches. So at best, the process of successfully sh> taking over the niche would be a long and hard one, and at sh> worst, it would never succeed. mlm> ***MLM's comment: Again, most of Harnad's statements are either mlm> untested or contradicted by the evidence. Can he point to any mlm> previous attempt to target a range of high-priced journals by mlm> providing credible alternatives? Even one-journal attempt can be mlm> successful, as Theory and Practice of Logic Programming and mlm> Evolutionary Ecology Research have proved conclusively.*** MLM's predictions are as untested as my counterpredictions are. The rest is just hype. It might be a good idea to weigh the reasoning, pro and con, too. sh> I don't think it will succeed, for the simple reason that sh> sacrificing the practise of submitting to the highest sh> quality/impact established journals in favor of new sh> untested ones simply for the sake of making one's work sh> available at a lower cost does not pose a strong enough sh> incentive -- but especially when there is ALREADY a sh> prominent way to achieve the same goal, and still more, sh> namely, to make one's refereed research available to sh> everyone for free, and not just at a lower price, without sh> having to give up one's established journals at all! All sh> that is needed is to self-archive the refereed final drafts sh> in OAI-compliant Eprint Archives. sh> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm mlm> ***MLM's comment: in addition to the misunderstandings already mlm> explained above, here Harnad makes another statement that, again mlm> for the case of economics, is patently incorrect: economists do mlm> want to give up high-price journals . They just need a credible mlm> alternative to enable them to do so. *** Wrong way to frame the question. Everyone (authors, readers) wants lower-priced journals. (Does anyone NOT want zero-priced journals, with QC paid for as a service, out of the 10% of the savings?) Besides, MLM is mixing up authors' wishes and readers' wishes. Do authors want lower-priced journals badly enough to give up SUBMITTING to their established high-quality journals in favour or new journals? (Please don't reply "yes" until you have the evidence. The evidence requires several years and volumes, not start-ups with impressive editorial boards and promising initial author-commitments. There is still a long road ahead. To treat it as if it had already been successfully traversed is just hype.) sh> So just as ELSSS is unlikely to be able to entice authors sh> away from their established journals, it is unlikely to sh> induce other publishers to lower their prices in sh> competition. mlm> ***MLM's comments: it may be that other researchers are not as mlm> familiar as economists are with the concept of multiple equilibria mlm> in a coordination game and with mechanisms that facilitate the mlm> transition from sub-optimal to superior equilibria. ELSSS can mlm> already count on hundreds of highly respected researchers committed mlm> to both submitting to and refereeing for ELSSS journals. As to the mlm> effect of ELSSS journals on the pricing policies of monopolistic mlm> publishers, this is going to be uncharted territory, as the latter mlm> have never been exposed before to a sustained attack. Judging from mlm> existing one-journal challenges, my prediction is that the mlm> inevitable dilution in quality in high-priced journals will mlm> eventually lead to price reductions. *** But now we must wait and see whether you are right. I would rather not wait. I'd rather researchers in all disciplines self-archived all their refereed papers now. There would be no need to wait to see whether THAT succeeded in lowering the access barriers! And they (unlike your authors) would not need to sacrifice anything to do so, with the outcome ensured. sh> Nor do I believe that paying authors and paying referees sh> will hasten these new journals along the long, hard, and sh> uncertain path toward becoming successfully established sh> journals of high quality. Author payment will rather act sh> as a deterrent, raising the spectre of vanity-press sh> publishing in authors and readers' minds, to add to the sh> uncertainty of the nonexistent track record. Referee sh> payment, an untested modification of peer review, might sh> even bias the refereeing system. (Nor is it at all clear sh> how these extra expenses, over and above those of sh> established journals, can help LOWER their prices!) mlm> ***MLM's comments: again, Harnad's points may be valid for some mlm> disciplines, but definitely not for economics. In economics, mlm> referee payment is not a new development at all. To mention two mlm> examples (and I could cite many more) on either side of the mlm> Atlantic: the American Economic Review, the economics journal with mlm> the highest citation impact and published on a not-for-profit basis mlm> by the American Economic Association has paid referees a nominal mlm> fee for quite some time, as has the Economic Journal, the highly mlm> respected publication of the Royal Economic Society. So much for mlm> "untested modification of peer review" Having conceded that the amount is nominal, MLM has conceded that nothing is at issue here. mlm> As to author payment, there mlm> is an ongoing debate amongst ELSSS supporters and the consensus mlm> there is that, given the level of support already achieved by mlm> ELSSS, rewarding authors is probably unnecessary (even though, mlm> prizes for best articles can play a role here). Not a single mlm> respondent mentioned vanity-publishing, for the good reason that mlm> the whole emphasis of the ELSSS project is on publishing mlm> highest-quality material, under the most stringent quality mlm> controls.*** The issue is moot if there is to be no author payment after all. (I think referee payment and author payment are just red herrings here. They were floated as a way to lure authors away from their established journals. Let's move on to matters of substance.) anon> Do you think that ELSSS' efforts go far enough? Why or why not? anon> Do you think that ELSSS subscription costs are still too high? sh> I think ANY subscription (or site-license, or pay-per-view sh> S/L/P) price is too high as long as it is the ONLY way to sh> access the refereed literature. Once this literature has sh> been freed online, the S/L/P version can continue to be sh> sold as an option for as long as there is a market for it, sh> but to continue to hold this author-giveaway literature sh> hostage to these for-fee add-ons now that the day has come sh> when it can all be given away by its authors online sh> for-free has no justification (or future) whatsoever. mlm> ***MLM's comments: A clarification for the anonymous questioner. mlm> The subscription cost estimates given on the ELSSS website are very mlm> conservative, perhaps to the extent of being misleading. The key mlm> issue here is the principle that the real cost of refereeing, mlm> editing, and distributing high-quality research ought to be spread mlm> as widely as possible. ELSSS will implement pricing policies mlm> (details of which are too commercially sensitive to be revealed in mlm> advance) that will achieve precisely this - as well as making all mlm> ELSSS journals available at no cost to all developing and mlm> transition economies. Perhaps the scenarios where thousands of mlm> libraries share the costs of quality control instead of bleeding mlm> themselves dry by paying the sort of subscriptions charged by the mlm> likes of Reed Elsevier may not please Harnad fully but I am pretty mlm> sure it will make most librarians and researchers very happy mlm> indeed.*** Cost-sharing for a give-away literature is not adequate. The product, the refereed draft, needs to be freed of all cost-barriers. Only the QC service needs to be paid for, and that is a service to the author/institution, for which it will have ample resources to pay out of its annual S/L/P savings. It makes no sense to keep wrapping that charge into a reader-end product, at the cost of access-barriers. (And subsidies to "all developing and transition economies" are a laudable goal, but don't sound like an autonomous economic model; there are, by the way, plenty of have-not institutions in the US and the developed world too. See http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupstats ) sh> The only substantive question is how to accelerate the sh> online liberation of the entire refereed corpus. Lowering sh> prices is merely a partial holding pattern, to try to tide sh> libraries over in the mounting serials crisis. Much more sh> fundamental steps have to be taken in order to reach the sh> optimal and inevitable, and these can be taken, easily and sh> immediately, through author/institution self-archiving. mlm> ***MLM's comments: I am not sure that Harnad's world would be mlm> optimal and I am definitely certain that it is by no means mlm> inevitable. The simple fact is that self/institution self-archiving mlm> of refereed material is either inherently self-contradictory in so mlm> far as it would lead to the collapse of the refereed journal system mlm> (without providing any viable alternative to it) or doomed to mlm> failure in those disciplines that do not regard the collapse of the mlm> refereed journal system as an optimal, or even desirable state of mlm> affairs. MLM concludes from this exactly what he has put into it: "the collapse of the refereed journal system." Self-archiving is an actuality (30-40% advanced already in Physics) and there are no signs of "collapse." Moreover, downsizing to providing only the essential QC service does not sound like a doomsday scenario either, but rather the natural evolution of this anomalous, give-away literature, now that the PostGutenberg (online) medium has at last made it possible. Freeing the literature is indeed optimal (and inevitable); "collapse" is hypothetical (and eminently evitable). anon> What do you think of ELSSS' decision to pay authors and anon> referees? sh> See above. Authors don't want pennies for their papers, sh> they want IMPACT. That means readers, citations, sh> researchers building on their work. That's what gets them sh> the real rewards (promotion, tenure, grants, prizes). sh> Paying authors just adds to the cost of the journals. sh> Adding to the cost of the journals adds to the sh> access-barriers, hence to the income-barriers. So it would sh> be a foolish author who was tempted by receiving some sh> pennies for his paper at the cost of access and impact down sh> the line. ELSSS is proposing this as a way of hastening the sh> build-up of their new journals' reputations; I think it sh> will be seen as having a vanity-press flavor and will sh> actually act as a deterrent to submission, especially to sh> authors of quality and to junior faculty anxious for sh> certification by an established criterion. mlm> ***MLM's comments: see above.*** Moot, given ELSSS's subsequent concessions on this score. sh> Paying referees is even more problematic. Referees steal sh> time from their research to do refereeing for various sh> reasons (civic duty, golden rule, superstition). How much sh> would they have to be paid to make it worth their while? sh> Who has that kind of money? And might it not bias their sh> reviewing? (Would this not have to be carefully tested in sh> advance?) And how could spending more money on that lower sh> journal access prices? mlm> ***MLM's comments: in addition to my previous comments, perhaps I mlm> can share with the list the debate amongst ELSSS supporters on the mlm> issue of paying referees. Again, I do not wish to fall into the mlm> trap of generalising about all academic disciplines, so please mlm> remember that I am talking about ECONOMICS (where, for example, mlm> lags between submission and first referees' reports can be anything mlm> between 4 to 12 months - a lag that researchers in other mlm> disciplines would regard as totally unacceptable). The consensus mlm> among ELSSS supporters is that, whereas most economists will mlm> referee out of academic duty, a payment contingent on prompt return mlm> of a full report will be beneficial to the profession. Moot, as the referee payment scheme has apparently been dropped. mlm> Is it not mlm> strange that the Harnad proposal has nothing to say about the mlm> current practice of referees working for free (or for derisory mlm> fees) for commercial publishers who charge extortionate mlm> subscription prices? But self-archiving does indeed have something to say about that. It is appalling. So let us free this literature and make it worthwhile. mlm> Again not a single ELSSS respondent has mlm> mentioned the possibility that paying referees may bias the mlm> reviewing, for the simple reason that double-blind refereeing and mlm> the payment being contingent on speed of response (and not on the mlm> outcome of the refereeing) provide sufficient safeguard against any mlm> bias. Moreover, and this is another crucial point not grasped by mlm> Harnad, paying referees for prompt and full reports is also an mlm> indirect means for weakening the stranglehold of high-priced mlm> journals on the market. As he may (or may not) be aware, in mlm> economics some leading economists have attempted to organize a mlm> "refereeing boycott" of high-priced journals, which has not been mlm> terribly successful because so far there has been no credible mlm> alternative to the high-priced specialist journals. ELSSS provides mlm> such an alternative: on receiving two papers to review, most mlm> economists would referee first the paper submitted to ELSSS and mlm> only later, if at all, the one submitted to a high-price mlm> journal.*** Moot, as referee payment has been abandoned. anon> Do you think ELSSS will present a viable alternative for anon> non-tenured faculty who might publish their work in established anon> commercial journals? Are there already too many competing anon> journals for ELSSS to have a significant impact? sh> No I don't. It is critically important for the careers of sh> junior faculty to publish in journals of known high quality sh> and impact. That is how their work is weighed, not only by sh> prospective readers, but by promotion and tenure sh> committees. sh> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/science.htm mlm> ***MLM's comment: Then, how would Harnad explain the fact that a mlm> large proportion of ELSSS supporters are junior faculty?*** It is easy to get SOME a priori commitment to a new journal (some junior faculty see new journals as an easy, high-profile outlet); it is another thing to sustain such a niche, as many new start-up journals discover, when they fail after a few years. sh> Now, if there were no alternative, a (weak, not very sh> promising) case could be made for trying to persuade junior sh> faculty that as it is IMPACT on which their careers, and sh> their performance indicators, depend, and since journal sh> prices are access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers, they sh> should submit to lower-priced journals. But this would be a sh> hollow appeal to researchers whose career time is NOW sh> (whereas submitting to new lower-priced journals of sh> unestablished or lower quality would be a risky investment sh> in some remote and uncertain future). mlm> ***MLM's comment: The key feature of ELSSS journals is not so much mlm> that they will be significantly cheaper than the mlm> commercially-produced journals they will be competing with (which mlm> only shows how extortionately priced the latter are), but that the mlm> revenues generated will be shared by the academic community. Or to mlm> put it differently, that the real cost of refereeing and editing mlm> will be shared more equitably. This "shared revenue" rhetoric also strikes me, alas, as mere hype. In practice, what does it amount to (especially now that we've dropped referee payment and author payment)? Lower priced journals. So what else is new? mlm> So referring to ELSSS journals as mlm> "lower-priced" is irrelevant in this context. Referring to them as mlm> "journals of unestablished or lower quality" is downright mlm> inaccurate. Let us not quibble over this. We will know what their quality is once they have had a few years to establish themselves. mlm> Perhaps Harnad can ask the opinion of his colleagues mlm> in the Economics department at Southampton (some of whom are ELSSS mlm> supporters, btw) on the quality of the ELSSS supporters as mlm> publicised on the ELSSS website mlm> (http://www.elsss.org.uk/supporters.html). They include current or mlm> past editors of the most prestigious journals, presidents and mlm> eminent members of leading learned societies, etc. So much for mlm> "lower quality". The questioner is absolutely right in pointing out mlm> that there may be too many journals already. The aim of the ELSSS mlm> initiative is to weaken and eventually dislodge the high-priced mlm> journals.*** This is the standard brave face of start-up journals. All one knows now is what the editorial board and first few issues look like. No one can say more. What follows below is a long, detailed passage which MLM does not appear to have read, though it addresses most of his concerns about the "collapse of journals." sh> But there IS an alternative, one calling for no sacrifice sh> whatsoever from junior faculty, and that is to continue to sh> publish in the established journals AND to self-archive the sh> refereed final drafts online in institutional Eprint sh> Archives. That way, junior faculty can have their cake and sh> eat it too. anon> Do you think that subscriptions could be abolished altogether if anon> authors self-archive their research online under the Open anon> Archives Initiative? Is this a more viable alternative? sh> Yes, but it is not quite as simple as you describe. There sh> are some successive stages to go through, and some branch sh> points, depending on which way the demand and the market sh> will go: sh> I have spelled this out elsewhere. See sh> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm for sh> the full story, but it is easy to summarise the relevant sh> bits: sh>http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm sh> (1) Authors continue submitting all research to refereed sh> journals. sh> (2) But, they also self-archive it online in their sh> Institutional Eprint Archives, thereby removing all the sh> access and impact barriers (online). sh> (3) It is then an empirical question whether there will sh> continue to be a market for the S/L/P sh> (Subscription/License/Pay-Per-View) version of the journal, sh> paid for by enough institutions and individuals, so that sh> things can continue exactly as they do now (with S/L/P sh> paying the piper, but all the refereed research freely sh> accessible online) -- OR the S/L/P demand shrinks sh> drastically. sh> (4) If the institutional S/L/P demand, hence expenditure, sh> shrinks drastically, this means the institutional S/L/P sh> savings grow drastically. sh> (5) The true cost of implementing peer review -- the sh> essential service that refereed journals will always sh> continue to provide, even if it turns out to be their ONLY sh> remaining service -- has been variously estimated as sh> accounting for about 10% of the total amount that the sh> institutions of the world are currently paying through sh> S/L/P, per paper. (Referees of course referee for free.) sh> See the Odlyzko references in "For Whom the Gate Tolls? sh> (6) The arithmetic then is very simple: The annual 10% sh> peer-review costs PER PAPER (which are not really sh> "publication charges," but quality-control/certification sh> charges) will be paid for at the AUTHOR-INSTITUTION end out sh> of the 100% annual institutional S/L/P savings (at the sh> READER-INSTITUTION end). sh> In other words, if ever the day comes when other sources of sh> revenue for funding peer review shrink and vanish, journal sh> peer review can always continue to be paid for out of a sh> fraction of the savings. The rest of what journals used to sh> provide (paper version, PDF, enhancements) will merely be sh> optional add-ons that individuals and institutions can also sh> continue to pay for, as long as they wish, if they do not sh> find the self-archived refereed drafts sufficient. But sh> meanwhile, the whole refereed corpus can be freed sh> immediately, through author/institution self-archiving in sh> OAI-compliant Eprint Archives http://www.eprints.org mlm> ***MLM's comments: (I am sure that other people will have expressed mlm> comments similar to what follows. I apologise for duplicating them mlm> here unacknowledged, but, because of time constraints, I have mlm> decided not to invest too much time into investigating a route to mlm> better scholarly communication that seems to me to be so obviously mlm> flawed - at least as far as economics is concerned.) The reason why mlm> the route described by Harnad will never be followed by economists mlm> in any significant number is that the suggested alternative is mlm> totally self-defeating. Who would ever be willing to subscribe to mlm> material that is freely available? Answer: nobody, certainly not mlm> budget-constrained libraries. Correct. End of reader/institution-end model for paying for a paper product out of S/L/P. Enter author/institution-end model for paying for a QC service out of 10% of the S/L/P savings. mlm> Therefore, contrary to Harnad's mlm> belief, "refereed journals will" not (negation and emphasis added) mlm> "continue to provide the essential service [of] implementing peer mlm> review"". Economists, and perhaps others as well, can solve games mlm> by backward induction: if a strategy leads to an undesirable mlm> outcome (the collapse of the refereed journal system), then it will mlm> not be adopted. Economists are not being asked to solve anything. Authors are being asked to self-archive. Self-archiving frees the refereed literature. If one of the consequences is that some publishers do not wish to scale down to becoming just providers of the essential QC-service, there are plenty of other publishers and learned societies ready to take over their titles and do just that. (Unlike the start-up of a new journal, without an established editorial board, referee stable, content quality and authorship, an established journal can take all of this and migrate to another publisher without any loss -- proving that a refereed journal is and always has been a "virtual entity," not an on-paper entity or even a page-image.) mlm> Harnad is absolutely correct when he states that mlm> "If the institutional S/L/P demand, hence expenditure, shrinks mlm> drastically, this means the institutional S/L/P savings grow mlm> drastically." Indeed. They can "save" 100% of the subscription mlm> price of refereed journals. The minor snag is that, as a result of mlm> this "saving", there will be no refereed journals.*** And the minor omission on MLM's part is to address the rest of the scenario: Using the 10% to pay for the QC service-provision. MLM writes as if S/L/P for a text-product were the only way to have a QC literature, whereas it is not only not the only way, it is the worst way, when the literature in question is, and always has been, an anomalous author give-away, profoundly unlike all the rest of the literature. anon> Some leading publishers defend their practices by saying that anon> they are already lowering prices and that electronic publishing anon> is already driving down costs of academic journals. How would anon> you respond to this? sh> There are 20K refereed journals on the planet. That means sh> at least 2,000,000 refereed papers annually. Most of the sh> papers, in most of those journals cannot be accessed by sh> most of the researchers on the planet today, and that would sh> continue to be true NO MATTER HOW LOW THE PRICE WENT! ZERO sh> is the only price most researchers and research sh> institutions can afford, if they are to be able to surf sh> this give-away literature with no access/impact barriers at sh> all (to the eternal benefit of research itself). mlm> ***MLM's comment. I believe that Harnad is seriously damaging his mlm> credibility with statements like the above or when he states that mlm> "There is no need to single out any particular publishers, because mlm> even if the higher ones lowered their prices to the level of the mlm> lower ones, all refereed research would still not be accessible to mlm> all researchers, everywhere. Only some to some. As long as this mlm> entire give-away literature is not free to everyone everywhere, mlm> online, research-impact is being lost". His proposal, by refusing mlm> to face the fact that the cost of quality control (and enhancement) mlm> has to be borne by someone, not only is not helping the fight for mlm> fairer academic publishing but is contributing indirectly to the mlm> perpetuation of a system where a handful of commercial publishers mlm> exploit the entire academic community.*** I hope that by now MLM realizes that, far from ignoring the cost of QC, the approach anticipates a rational redirection of it, from reader-institution/product-end to author-institution/service-end. But "anticipates" is the right word, because all of this is hypothetical. The only immediate, actual step is one to be taken by researchers (not economists solving backward-induction games), which is to free their refereed papers by self-archiving them now, as the Physicists have done. The future will take care of itself. sh> So there is something very disingenuous about publishers sh> speaking of lowering prices, and "opening" this literature sh> when what they are actually trying to do is to continue to sh> hold these author give-aways hostage to price-barriers, sh> however low! The only fair playing field for this very sh> special, anomalous (because author give-away) literature is sh> one in which the publishers' essential service -- the sh> implementation of peer review -- is paid for, and the rest sh> (the paper, the PDF, any further "added values") are merely sh> options, that those institutions and individuals can sh> purchase (if they can afford it) for whom the free sh> self-archived online version is not enough. mlm> ***MLM's final comment. At long last something that Harnad and I mlm> agree on: the long-term aim of any initiative for the improvement mlm> of scholarly communication is to drive its cost to the barest mlm> minimum - the cost of quality control and enhancement. The mlm> substantial difference between his approach and ELSSS' is that mlm> whereas the former, if "successful" would lead to the collapse of mlm> the refereed journal system without offering any alternative and mlm> therefore unwittingly bolsters the totally unsatisfactory status mlm> quo, the latter, by challenging directly the practices of mlm> monopolistic publishers and offering a credible alternative, makes mlm> the long-term objective of minimum-cost scholarly communication mlm> achievable and realistic. I hope my reply is obvious by now. Creating and switching to new, lower-priced journals calls for unlikely and unnecessary sacrifices from researchers in exchange for partial benefits that are by no means swift or sure. Self-archiving now will completely and surely free this literature immediately, with a clear transition scenario for paying the minimal essential QC costs out of the savings. mlm> One final observation: Elsevier has felt mlm> sufficiently threatened by the ELSSS initiative to be moved into mlm> the unusual move of sending an unsolicited email to ELSSS mlm> supporters trying (not very successfully) to defend its practices. mlm> Is this not a sign that ELSSS is attacking monopolistic publishers mlm> where it hurts?*** The objective is not to bait Elsevier but to free this give-away literature at long last. mlm> Concluding remark: I believe that much faster progress will be made mlm> towards fairer academic publishing when contributors to the debate mlm> realise that there is no one model that fits all disciplines. The mlm> quest for a grand solution may at best be illusory and at worst mlm> hamper the efforts of people trying to change things for the better mlm> in a gradual and decentralised fashion. The question of discipline differences is interesting. It is now a historic fact that physicists took the road to the optimal and inevitable first. The only relevant question about discipline differences, however, is this: Is there any discipline that would not benefit from having its refereed literature available free online, now? For the views of another economist of the For-Free/For-Fee issue, see: Harnad, S., Varian, H. & Parks, R. (2000) Academic publishing in the online era: What Will Be For-Fee And What Will Be For-Free? Culture Machine 2 (Online Journal) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Varian/new1.htm http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j002/Articles/art_harn.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
