[Excerpts forwarded, with permission, from the BOAI list] On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Bob Parks wrote:
>bp> The fact that RePEc is not self archiving of postprints offers no >bp> evidence about the inevitable world 10 or 100 years from now just >bp> as the fact that one economist (Ray Fair) has self archived all >bp> of his printed works offers no evidence of the inevitable world. I agree with this. And add that waiting another 10 years for open access would be a great and needless loss of research usage, impact and productivity. But the only thing one should not try to do is second-guess human nature. That open access to refereed research is optimal is, I think, uncontestable. That it is attainable, and attainable immmediately (via self-archiving) has also, I think, been demonstrated by those who have self-archived; those who have not self-archived have demonstrated only that one cannot second-guess human nature. That open access is inevitable -- given that it is optimal and feasible -- is perhaps my optimistic inference that optimality + attainability = inevitability, sooner or later (modulo human nature). I also continue to believe that what is holding back human nature in this sphere is spectacular under-informedness, demonstrated daily, in conferences, discussion lists (including opinion polls, such as the one recently posted from Bath) and writings on the subject of open access, its feasibility and its benefits. Optimism continues to suggest that the best remedy for under-informedness is information, so we proceed apace. >bp> I am not sure what the argument is. If it is about the optimality >bp> of self archiving the postprint literature (without any charge, >bp> either in tolls or time), that I think is an open question since >bp> optimality has to be defined in terms of the complete structure >bp> of refereed literature. No, it is and always has been about the optimality of open access to all refereed research output. Self-archiving is a means of attaining that optimal end immediately, and has been shown to be viable by the increasing number of researchers who have taken it. But it is not the only means. And there is still human nature... And since the optimal end-state is open-access, and self-archiving is a means, and the initial state (toll-access) is still very far from the optimum, what will eventually be needed is an economic model for recovering the essential costs of the end-state (open-access). Such models can be proposed -- e.g., http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm -- but they are certainly not needed now, and it would be a mistake to refrain from self-archiving one's own work now simply because one is not yet sure about the economic model for the end-state. But there is no second-guessing human nature... >bp> One can construct an argument that the final result of open >bp> archiving of all refereed literature will bring its demise. The demise of what? Of refereeing? But we peers do the refereeing (almost all of us for free). Open access is likely to bring about the demise of toll-access, and will probably also force peer-reviewed journal publishing to cut inessential costs and products/services and downsize only to the essentials. My own prediction (only one among many other possible outcomes) is that those essentials will prove to be just the implementation of peer-review itself, which will cost no more than $500 per paper (whether per submitted paper or per accepted paper remians to be estimated) and will be paid for by the author-institutions out of a small portion of their annual windfall toll-access savings. The rest of what publishers used to do will be accomplished by distributed, interoperable institutional self-archiving, where the costs per paper are next to nothing. >bp> I am happy to present the argument but its gist is the 'business' >bp> model. In that, someone must PAY for the resources used to produce >bp> refereed literature. Today, most of that cost is paid internally >bp> (referees are either uncompensated or compensated at rates lower >bp> than workers at minimum wage). The rest of the cost is obtained via >bp> subscription/submission fees (subscription/submission fees pay for >bp> more than the resource cost of producing the refereed literature, in >bp> many cases at least). If the cost of producing refereed literature >bp> is not obtained some way, then it will not be produced. Holding >bp> the literature hostage to a fee is one way to recover its cost, >bp> albeit non-optimally. I believe I have described at least one alternative scenario for funding the essential cost (refereeing) in the link above. >bp> If there are no charges, so that all of the cost is born by the >bp> producers (editors, referees, web site administrators, etc. who >bp> do in fact get benefits), that will not be optimal either (because >bp> producers are subsidizing consumers). I think this is based on the wrong conception of who is doing the producing here, of what product, for whom, and why. The producer is the researcher (and his institution and research funder). The product is the refereed research. The refereeing is a service referees perform for free, but the costs of its implementation -- which must be done by an independent 3rd party, neither the producer nor the consumer, with editorial expertise to which the outcome is answerable -- must be recovered ($500 per paper). The service is performed for the research-producer, because the research is produced by the producer not in order to be sold, but in order to be accessed, read, used, cited -- in order to make a measurable research *impact*. And it is that research impact that generates income and other rewards for the research-producer (promotion, tenure, awards) and for the research-producer's institution (grant-funding, attraction of other researchers, prestige). It is a mistake, in other words, to assume that the product is a text, to be sold for tolls, as with the rest of the written literature. Refereed research is an anomalous literature, and always has been. It is an author give-away, written by researchers, for fellow-researchers worldwide, intended for uptake, rather like advertisements, so as to generate something else, which is the real objective: research impact, and the income and rewards that that in turn brings. There is no analogy for this in other products and services (except perhaps advertising). Hence I think it is getting the reward structure very wrong to describe this as "producers subsidizing consumers" as it would be with the rest of the (non-give-away) literature. It is more like advertising, where the give-away ads are being "subsidized" by their producer because they are not really the product! They are a means of increasing (shall we call it) "sales impact" for *another* product/service. In the case of research, the "other product/service" is the researcher's and research institution's research activities themselves, which are funded for their impact by the funders of research and of institutions of research. (I could supplement this with supplementary funding connections with education too, but I think they are secondary and would needlessly complicate the picture.) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.2 >bp> I will not belabor the point, but I can not see an OPTIMAL solution >bp> to this particular market. It's an understandable inference on the part of an economist, but in fact I was not speaking about a market optimum, in particular, when I said open access was optimal. (I'm not even sure what a market optimum is!). What I said (and here repeat, with undiminished confidence!) is that open access to the entire refereed research literature is optimal for researchers, their institutions, their research-funders, the tax-payers who fund the funders and the institutions and benefit from the research, and for the progress of research itself. Right now, that optimum is tied (needlessly) to a Gutenberg-era economic model for the sale of a product: a text. In the Gutenberg era there was no other option for this anomalous commodity (refereed research). In the PostGutenberg (online) era there is. And it is part of the much-needed information campaign to dispel under-informedness about the cause/effect connection from access to impact, in order to make these new options clear and explicit to the research community. In sum: It is an error, simply an error, to assume that, for economic reasons, bypassing the toll-system through self-archiving or peer-reviewed research will destroy the means of funding peer review. On the contrary, it will may elease the funds to do so at far lower cost -- but first having done something far, far more important, namely maximized (hence optimized) research access/impact. >bp> The cup is half full or half empty, but it is not full in either >bp> case. If the argument is about the inevitability of self archiving >bp> of all refereed literature, [no one] can >bp> factually point to what the resultant equilibrium will be in 10 >bp> or 100 years. See above about predicting human nature. But this I can predict: With toll-access the potential-impact cup is (needlessly) emptier than need be; with open access it will be full. (Quantitative estimates of how empty it is now, and how full it could be with open access, are beginning to appear and will increase, and will certainly be fully used in the information campaign to demonstrate to the research community the causal connection between research access and research impact.) >bp> My own thought has been that there will be preprint archiving but >bp> little change in the journals (as argued in The Faustian Grip of >bp> Academic Publishing http://econwpa.wustl.edu/ewp-mic/0202005.abs). You may be better at second-guessing human nature than I am, Bob. I will continue to be an optimist about optimality, and about doing what one can to hasten it! ---- [What follows below is the reply to a comment by another discussant, the comment omitted here because the discussant did not give permission to reproduce it.] If most or all authors self-archived it would have one certain direct effect -- open access to the research they archived -- and a secondary effect (whose probability and time-course no one can predict with certainty), namely, the downsizing of peer-reviewed journal publication to the essentials, funded some other way (I have described one such way above). But if the research community has been slow to realize and take advantage of the benefits of open access, it is likely that they and their library and administrative communities will also be slow in cancelling toll-access. So whereas the cause-effect connection between access and impact will be rapid with the transition to open acess, the cause-effect connection between open access and the termination of toll-access is unlikely to be very sudden. I have always said that my own transition scenario from funding of peer-reviewed journals as a toll-access product for user-institutions to the funding of a peer-review service for researcher-institutions is merely a hypothetical one (among many other possibilities). I don't know whether there is any economic precedent for any of this -- but there was never any economic precedent for the indirect rewards of research impact either; they just had to piggy-back (non-optimally, but with no other option) on the standard Gutenberg-era text-as-product model which works fine for all the rest of the (non-give-away) literature, both Gutenberg and PostGutenberg, but not for research impact. But the benefits (to *all* researchers) of open access are both certain and immediately attainable in the online-era. It would make no sense for researchers not to take advantage of them, immediately. If the co-existence of the toll-access product-based cost-recovery system is then put into an unstable equilibrium with open-access usage, there will be a shift. Maybe the shift I predict, maybe another. But uncertainty about what the new equilibrium will be is certainly no reason for researchers not to do what is optimal for their research impact right now. After all, it is not law-breaking that is being recommended, but simply the exercise of good sense, along exactly the same lines that the authors of 200,000 papers have done it since 1991 in Physics and the authors of perhaps 500,000 papers have done it in computer science. Economists have already gotten their feet wet wading in the seas of self-archiving (preprints); they will eventually find they can get where they want to go faster by swimming. Please let us separate the second-guessing human-nature question (which is, in a sense, moot for all disciplines!) -- i.e., whether/when people will go ahead and do something, whether or not it would be good for them -- from the question of whether or not it would be good for them (optimality). What we are discussing here is (1) whether or not the fact that economists self-archive preprints counts today as evidence that they are further ahead along the road to open access to the refereed research literature than disciplines that do not self-archive yet at all and about (2) whether or not it is true that economics differs from other disciplines in that open access to refereed economics research in *not* optimal for economist-researchers (and if not, why not?). On economic models and transition scenarios for the putative eventual effects of open access on toll access, I have no strong views, just one hypothesis among many other possible ones. Stevan Harnad
