On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Arthur Smith wrote: > Obviously a service fee to authors or their institutions would help with > our "gentle persuasion" process, but the service fee may not be small...
Service fee for what? I am advocating an eventual service fee for peer review, but only if/when revenue from other optional products and services is no longer enough to pay for it, because of preference for the free (self-archived) online version. (Then the service can be paid for out of the savings.) > and is it actually advantageous to science to put in economic incentives > that effectively discourage publication of clearly readable research? Do > we really want "lower quality"? Is this an unfulfilled need? I can't follow this. Who is discouraging what? Publishers continue to produce and sell the enhanced, value-added product; authors self-archive and thereby free up access to the refereed final draft. As long as the paid version has a market and pays the bills, nothing changes. If/when the market decides (with its dollar-vote) that the refereed final draft is enough, some of the resulting savings from no longer paying for the optional add-ons can be used to pay for the one remaining essential service: peer review. But it will be paid as a service fee on outgoing papers, not an access fee for incoming ones. > > This means that the only remaining per-article real costs are > > (1) dissemination on-paper, (2) any on-line enhancements by the > > publisher (special mark-up, linking), and (3) peer review. > > By (2) I assume Stevan is referring to the copy-editing process, which I > cited, with markup being one of the issues. Any publisher would like to > do this cheaper if they could be sure of the same level of "quality". > The real question, which needs to be answered not just by this group, > but by all those within the "audience" for science, whether other > researchers, other scholars, media, public, etc., is, what level of > copy-editing is actually justified, on grounds of the need for > accessibility of that scientific research? Isn't this something the market can answer? The refereed final draft is freed by author/institution self-archiving. If there is something in the on-paper version, or the publisher's enhanced PDF, that is still deemed worth buying, it will keep paying its own way. If there isn't, then things will downsize to the essentials -- which may turn out to be just peer review. > Commercial companies may be more attuned to the economic justification > for copy-editing than we are, as a non-profit. So it would certainly be > of interest to see whether they are spending more, less, or about the > same as us per paper on copy-editing. As for-profit entities, it's > unlikely any company would spend much more than is absolutely necessary > to create a journal that meets the expectations of their market. Andrew > Odlyzko's argument suggests that they may be spending more than us - if > so, why is that? Good question. > Note that I'm not worrying about freeing the literature here; if > publishing free literature really involved no copy-editing, we would > likely never do it, as a publisher with a historical interest in certain > publication standards. Do you mean APS would then not do copy-editing, or that it would then not publish? I hope you mean the former, as peer review is still essential, and the real standard underlying the value of the refereed research literature. > Stevan's arguments for that are fine, and it'll > go however far it'll go pretty much whatever we do. It may have some > effect on the market for "quality", but we seem not to have experienced > too much of that effect yet. But we still would like to reduce the high > costs libraries (or institutions who may replace them in funding > publication) have to bear, and if "lowering quality" at copy-editing is > really acceptable, perhaps that will actually happen. I think APS has been terrific, most especially because they explicitly allow self-archiving even of the APS PDF... > So, the question again: what level of copy-editing is actually > justified, on grounds of the need for accessibility of that scientific > research? I think the market will be able to decide that once self-archiving has freed the vanilla refereed version. Stevan Harnad
