Here is my attempt at summarizing the discussion, and my attempt at getting to
where we need to go faster.
If Open Access is the only goal then all we need to do is follow Stevan's
advice. However, the goal of Open Access itself is to change the scholarly
information system into a system suitable for the 21st century. In this sense,
Green Open Access is an incremental change, which is expected to lead to more
fundamental changes over time. It is disheartening to witness how hard it is to
implement this incremental change.
However, it does not matter. Major disruption will come. When it comes, it will
be sudden and chaotic. We have witnessed it before. It has been documented
extensively. Most people in technology have read Clayton Christensen's seminal
work The Innovator's Dilemma, and whoever has not should do as soon as possible.
We are right in the run-up to a classical disruption where a
low-margin/low-overhead business replaces a high-margin/high-overhead business.
Initially, the low-margin business is sneered at because it offers low quality.
By the time the high-margin business realizes it is in trouble it is too late.
The high-margin/high-overhead business in scholarly communication is the
publisher-library combination. Alicia's comment is indicative of this:
This upward pressure on prices is of course offset by efficiency
gains, and personally I think site licenses have been helpful in
making the system more efficient. Libraries and their consortia are
on the whole very professional negotiators.
This year's system may be more efficient that last year's, but that is not
relevant. What matters is what is on the horizon and how you will compete with
that. For a window into what is going on at Amazon, read Eric
Hellman'sblog:Â http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2012/04/publishings-amazon-powered-futu
re.html
I do not doubt the professionalism of libraries and consortia as negotiators.
However, through no fault of their own, they have been miserable failures in
getting to reasonable results appropriate for the new digital era. Libraries
enter the negotiations knowing they have to have a deal, and publishers know
this. Moreover, the negotiations are about trivial concessions on the edges. The
starting point is last year's price of the site license plus inflation plus
increase in volume of content. No other publisher has gotten through this
disruptive era with that kind of luxury. Ask newspapers, magazines, etc.
The real disruption will happen when universities realize that this whole
business model belongs in the last century. Universities pay for all of the
professional negotiators and negotiations on both sides. They pay for libraries
to run collection-development meetings, inter-departmental meetings, consortia
meetings. They pay (through the cost of site licenses) for the publisher's
negotiators. Why? To help students and faculty buy digital content? Obviously,
these present and future intelligentsia need help with this, because every day
they come to the library for their iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, etc. accounts...
The idea of library-mediated digital lending seems reasonable only because we
are conditioned by the paper era. Site licenses make sense only if the total
cost of the site license, including the associated administrative costs and the
technical maintenance, is less than that what individual researchers/scholars
would be able to obtain. I sincerely doubt that. Moreover, once the purchase
decision is in the hands of individuals, they will make price/value judgments.
Libraries are much more limited to make such judgements, because they have to
make them on behalf of a community. (In my blog, I detail what libraries should
do instead. The end of lending is NOT the end of libraries.)
This disruption (or one similar to it) is inevitable. The only question is when
it will happen, and the precise path it will take.
(BTW, I agree with both Jean-Claude and Jan regarding my positive points.
Publishers have stepped in where academics did not. When publishers stepped in,
they did a decent job on the points that I highlighted.)
--Eric.
http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com
Google Voice: (626) 898-5415Telephone: Â Â Â (626) 376-5415
Skype chat, voice, or web-video: efvandevelde
E-mail: [email protected]
On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Peter Morgan <[email protected]> wrote:
Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
Â
"For searchability, remember what Clifford Lynch declared years ago
in the OA book edited by Neil Jacobs: no real open access without
open computationâ¦"
Â
Here's the (self-archived) link:
http://old.cni.org/staff/cliffpubs/opencomputation.htm
Â
Â
--
Peter Morgan
Head of Medical and Science Libraries
Medical Library
Cambridge University Library
Addenbrooke's Hospital
Hills Road
Cambridge
CB2 0SP
UK
Â
email: [email protected]
tel: +44 (0)1223 336757
fax: +44 (0)1223 331918
Â
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Jean-Claude Guédon
Sent: 15 May 2012 17:13
To: [email protected]
Subject: [GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things
from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"
Â
With due respect to Eric, I will disagree with at least the devolution of
the first two tasks
1. The selection of editors should come from scientific communities
themselves, not from commercial publishers. This is a good instance where
commercial concerns (maximizing profits, etc.) can pollute research
concerns. There is also something weird in having commercial publishers
holding the key to what may amount to the ultimate academic promotion:
being part of an editorial board means power over colleagues; being
editor-in-chief even more so. At least, when journals were in the hands of
scientific associations, the editorial choice remained inside the
community of researchers. What criteria, beyond scientific competence and
prestige, may enter into the calculations of a commercial publisher while
choosing an editor-in-chief, God knows...
2. Effective peer review should be organized by peers themselves, by
scholars and scientists, not by publishers. Tools to organize this process
should ideally be based on free software and available to all in a way
that allows disciplinary or speciality tweaking. The Open Journal System,
for example, is a good, free, tool to organize peer review and manuscript
handling in the editorial phase. Such a tool should be favoured over
proprietary tools offered to editors as a way to convince them to join a
particular journal stable, and as a way to make them dependent on that
tool - yet another way to ensure growing stables of journals.
Professional "looks" can indeed be given away to commercial publishers.
Layout, spelling, perhaps some syntaxic and stylistic help would be nice.
But I would stop there.
As for the "archivable" historic record, I would have to see more details
to give my personal blessing to this. Remember how Elsevier pitted Yale
against the Royal Dutch Library when the issue of digital preservation
began to emerge a dozen or so years ago. I am not sure about the
distinction between archived and archivable.
For searchability, remember what Clifford Lynch declared years ago in the
OA book edited by Neil Jacobs: no real open access without open
computation. Elsevier and other publishers do code their articles in XML,
but provide only impoverished, eye-ball limited, pdf or html files. When
one uses Science Direct, all kinds of links pop up to guide us toward
other articles, presumably from Elsevier journals. This is part of driving
a competition based on impact factors. That is not the kind of
searchability we want, even though it is of some value.
The quest for "alternative comprehensive systems" is exactly what Elsevier
attempts to build with Scopus. In so doing, Elsevier picks up on the
vision of Robert Maxwell when the latter did everything he could, from
cajoling to suing, to get the Science Citation Index away from Garfield's
hands. Is this really what we want? If it were open, and open access,
Eric's idea would make sense; otherwise, it becomes a formidable source of
economic power that will do much harm to scientific communication. In
effect, with a universal indexing index and more than 2,000 titles in its
stable, Elsevier could become judge and party of scientific value.
Finally, I am not blaming companies for trying to make money, except when
they pollute their environment. Most do so in the physical environment,
and they are regulated, or should be. The commercial publishers do it in
their virtual environment by driving research competition through tools
that also favour their commercial goals. The intense competition around
publishing in "prestigious journals" - prestige being defined here as
impact factors, although impact factors are a crazy way to measure or
compare almost anything - leads to all kinds of practices that go against
the grain of scientific research. The rise in retracted papers in the most
prestigious journals - prestige being again measured here by IF - is a
symptom of this "pollution.
The rise in journal prices was tentatively explained in my old article,
"In Oldenburg's Long Shadow" that came out eleven years ago. It tries at
least to account for the artificial creation of an inelastic market around
"core journals", the latter being the consequence of the methods used to
design the Science Citation Index. Incidentally, the invention of the
"core journal" myth - myth because it arbitrarily transforms an
operational truncation needed for the practical handling of large numbers
of citations into an elite-building club of journals - has been one of the
most grievous obstacle to the healthy globalization of science publishing
in the whole world. Speak to Brazilians like Abel Packer about this, and
he will tell you tons of stories related to this situation. Scientific
quality grows along a continuous gradient, not according to a two-tier
division between core science, so-called, and the rest.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Â
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Le lundi 14 mai 2012 à 11:38 -0700, Eric F. Van de Velde a écrit :
To Alicia:
Here are what I consider the positive contributions by
commercial publishers. For any of the positive qualities I
mention, it is easy find counterexamples. What matters is
that, on the average, the major publishers have done a good
job on the following:
Â
- Select good editorial boards of leading scholars.
- Develop effective systems for organizing peer review.
- Produce articles/journals that look professional
commensurate with the importance of the scholarship.
- Produce an archivable historical record of scholarship.
Â
Publishers only receive a marginally passing grade for
producing searchable databases of the scholarly record and
journals. In the age of iTunes, Netflix, etc., it is
inexcusable that to search through scholarship one must buy
separate products like the Web of Knowledge in addition to the
journal subscriptions. Publishers need to work together to
produce alternative comprehensive systems.
Â
Most commercial publishers and some society publishers (like
ACS) receive failing grades on cost containment. Because of
their importance to academia, scholarly publishers have been
blessed with the opportunity to reinvent themselves for the
future without the devastating disruption other kinds of
publishers faced (newspapers, magazines, etc.). However,
instead of taking advantage of this opportunity, scholarly
publishers are squandering it for temporary financial gain.
Every price increase brings severe disruption closer. On the
current path, your CEOs are betting the existence of the
company every year.
Â
About the only company who understands the current information
market is Amazon, and everything they do is geared towards
driving down costs of the infrastructure. Your competition
will not come from Amazon directly, but from every single
academic who will be able to produce a high-quality electronic
journal from his/her office. There may be only one success for
every hundred failed journals in this system, but suppose it
is so easy 100,000 try... Â Your brand/prestige/etc. will carry
you only so far. (Amazon is focusing on e-books production
now, but it is only a matter of time when they come out with a
journal system.)
Â
To Jean-Claude:
Blaming commercial enterprises for making too much money is
like blaming scholars for having too many good ideas. Making
money is their purpose. They will stop raising prices if doing
so is in their self-interest.
Â
The real question is why the scholarly information market is
so screwed up that publishers are in a position to keep
raising prices. I am blaming site
licenses(http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-if-libraries-were-problem.html
and
http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/publishers-dilemma.html),
but I am open to alternative explanations.
Â
--Eric.
http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com
Google Voice: (626) 898-5415
Telephone: Â Â Â (626) 376-5415
Skype chat, voice, or web-video: efvandevelde
E-mail: [email protected]
On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Peter Murray-Rust
<[email protected]> wrote:
Jean-Claude,
This is a great analysis and says almost exactly some of what
I was planning to say.
We cannot de facto trust the publishers to work in our
interests. There was a time when this was posssible - but no
longer.
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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Â
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[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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