If universities find it difficult to cooperate, it is because, like researchers
themselves, they are caught in increasingly intense competition systems. The
recent and silly world-rankings of universities are a symptom of this situation.
Before accusing academics and universities, one should examine the kind of
system in which they are caught. The quest for "excellence" which is found all
over the place really amounts to generalized competition. It also amounts to
managing quality through competition. The problem with this management strategy
is that it works only for the very top. My favourite example is the US health
system. It is intensely competitive at all levels, technical as well as
economic, and it does lead to some of the very best centres of medicine in the
world. The global result, however, is that the US ranks very low in the world
when it comes to something as simple as life expectancy (beyond 30th, if I
recall correctly). Competition favours those who organize it, those at the top,
and it increases inequalities. Does global science work better if inequalities
in working conditions increase?
Publishers find it very convenient to build, maintain and intensify a
competitive game based on a two-tier system separating core science from the
rest. Core science, in turn, is the key to building inelastic markets around
journal titles. Once this is in place, from a publisher's perspective, Bob's
your uncle!
Big deals constitute a brilliant twist on this strategy since they allow to
maintain the core science system with its inelastic markets in place, *and* sell
some of the rest as well. Bob's your uncle's uncle!
We have to revert to a science system based on a continuous graduation, and not
to a two-tier system. We have to create new forms of intellectual value beyond
journal title prestige (especially when the latter is evaluated through impact
factors). We have to restore the importance of quality, defined as the ability
to meet clear and transparent benchmarks, and locate competition at the very top
of quality, rather than everywhere. Open Access is the best vision to achieve
all of this.
In conclusion, the progress of science is undoubtedly due to giants, but the
foundations of science are armies of very useful midgets. Actually, the formula
"building on the shoulders of giants" runs backward: a few giants, occasionally,
manage to assemble, synthesize, conceptualize, interpret and invent on the
shoulders of myriads of midgets. Without the armies of midgets, the giants would
rarely, if ever, occur. With a two-tier system of scientific dissemination, the
giants can benefit only from a fraction of the available midgets and science, as
a result, does not grow as efficiently as it could if we could really pool the
distributed intellectual power of humanity.
Jean-Claude Guédon
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Le mardi 15 mai 2012 à 21:09 +0100, Jan Velterop a écrit :
On 15 May 2012, at 19:57, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
Universities will never collaborate (third law)
So there you have it, the Third Law of Acadynamics. Anybody
surprised that private enterprise has stepped into the breach?
Another reason why I think that gold CC-BY will win out. PLoS-like,
eLife-like, BMC-like, PeerJ-like outfits will prevail, and deliver,
with the help of funding bodies, what the scientific community
needs.
A bit of historical information: the BigDeal, as started in the UK,
was originally conceived as a nation-wide deal, top-sliced, with
every university and every institution having access to everything
that was published. It worked like that for 4 years in the UK, in
partnership with HEFCE and covering the material that Academic Press
published, and then it fell apart, because universities didn't like
the top-slicing, in spite of the fact that a national deal came out
cheaper in the aggregate, was easier to contain in terms of price
increases (negotiating clout), gave access to every scholar and
student, could easily evolve into nation-wide access for which no
institutional affiliation was needed at all, and could be rolled out
to encompass the material of other publishers. Â However, it was
thwarted by the Third Law of Acadynamics. With all the consequences
we have to live with now.
The fight for OA is not really one against publishers at all; it is
chiefly one against academic inertia. Open access will write
libraries out of the equation (what's the point of 'library
collections' in an OA web world?), and also institutions. It will be
funders who will make OA reality. Funders private and public, who
finance the whole scientific enterprise and who realise that OA
publishing is part and parcel of doing science itself and therefore
of the cost of science.
At that point universities don't need to collaborate any longer, and
the Third Law of Acadynamics will have lost validity in matters
relating to scientific literature.
Jan
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