Stevan continues to be hung up on the idea that
some academic authors still have visions of fame
and fortune they'd like to achieve through
publishing books in the traditional manner, so he
believes that the time for OA in book publishing
has not yet arrived. But perhaps a simple
terminological distinction may suffice to place
this problem in proper perspective. Academic
books may be divided into two types: monographs
and trade books. Monographs, by definition, are
works of scholarship written primarily to address
other scholars and are therefore unlikely to
attract many, if any, readers beyond the walls of
academe. Trade books encompass a large category
that includes, as one subset, nonfiction works
written by scholars but addressed not only to
fellow scholars but also to members of the
general public.
There is an easy practical way to distinguish the
two: commercial trade publishers (as distinct
from commercial scholarly publishers that do not
aim at a trade market) have certain requirements
for potential sales that guarantee that
monographs will never be accepted for
publication. It is true that the authors of
monographs, published by university presses and
commercial scholarly publishers, are sometimes
paid royalties. But these amounts seldom
accumulate to large sums (unless the monographs
happen to become widely adopted in classrooms as
course assignments--a phenomenon that happens
less these days when coursepacks and e-reserves
permit use of excerpts for classroom
assignments). Thus not much is sacrificed,
financially speaking, by publishing these books
OA. And, indeed, a scholar may have more to gain,
in terms of increased reputation from wider
circulation that may translate into tenure and
promotion, which are vastly more financially
rewarding over the long term than royalties are
ever likely to be from monograph sales.
Also, of course, financial opportunities do not
need to be sacrificed completely by OA if the
CC-BY-NC-ND license is used for monographs,
preserving some money-generating rights to
authors even under OA.
It also needs to be said that even trade authors
can benefit from OA, as the successes of such
authors as Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Jonathan
Zittrain, and others have demonstrated, with the
free online versions of their books serving to
stimulate print sales.
Thus I believe Stevan is not being quite
pragmatic enough in recognizing that the time has
arrived for OA monograph publishing also, not
just OA article publishing.
Sandy Thatcher
At 12:44 PM -0500 11/19/13, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Ann Okerson (as
<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.html>interviewed
by Richard Poynder) is committed to licensing. I
am not sure whether the commitment is
ideological or pragmatic, but it's clearly a
lifelong ("asymptotic") commitment by now.
I was surprised to see the direction Ann
ultimately took because -- as I have admitted
many times -- it was Ann who first opened my
eyes to (what eventually came to be called)
"Open Access."
In the mid and late 80's I was still just in the
thrall of the scholarly and scientific potential
of the revolutionarily new online medium itself
(<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/sky-writing-or-when-man-first-met-troll/239420/>"Scholarly
Skywriting"), eager to get everything to be put
online. It was Ann's work on the serials crisis
that made me realize that it was not enough just
to get it all online: it also had to be made
accessible (online) to all of its potential
users, toll-free -- not just to those whose
institutions could afford the access-tolls
(licenses).
And even that much I came to understand,
sluggishly, only after I had first realized that
what set apart the writings in question was not
that they were (as I had first naively dubbed
them)
"<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal>esoteric"
(i.e., they had few users) but that they were
peer-reviewed research journal articles, written
by researchers solely
<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1>for
impact, not for income.
But I don't think the differences between Ann
and me can be set down to ideology vs.
pragmatics. I too am far too often busy trying
to free the growth of open access from the
ideologues (publishing reformers, rights
reformers (Ann's "open use" zealots), peer
review reformers, freedom of information
reformers) who are slowing the progress of
access to peer-reviewed journal articles (from
"now" to "better") by insisting only and
immediately on what they believe is the "best."
Like Ann, I, too, am all pragmatics (repository
software, analyses of the OA impact advantage,
mandates, analyses of mandate effeciveness).
So Ann just seems to have a different sense of
what can (hence should) be done, now, to
maximize access, and how (as well as how fast).
And after her initial, infectious inclination
toward toll-free access (which I and others
caught from her) she has apparently concluded
that what is needed is to modify the terms of
the tolls (i.e., licensing).
This is well-illustrated by Ann's view on
SCOAP3: "All it takes is for libraries to agree
that what they've now paid as subscription fees
for those journals will be paid instead to CERN,
who will in turn pay to the publishers as
subsidy for APCs."
I must alas disagree with this view, on entirely
<'"https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=scoap+OR+scoap3+blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.epr>pragmatic
-- indeed logical -- grounds: the transition
from annual institutional subscription fees to
annual consortial OA publication fees is an
incoherent, unscalable, unsustainable Escherian
scheme that contains the seeds of its own
dissolution, rather than a pragmatic means of
reaching a stable "asymptote": Worldwide, across
all disciplines, there are P institutions, Q
journals, and R authors, publishing S articles
per year. The only relevant item is the article.
The annual consortial licensing model --
reminiscent of the Big Deal -- is tantamount to
a global oligopoly and does not scale (beyond
CERN!).
So if SCOAP3 is the pragmatic basis for Ann's
"predict[ion that] we'll see such journals
evolve into something more like 'full
traditional OA' before too much longer" then one
has some practical basis for scepticism -- a
scepticism Ann shares when it comes to "hybrid
Gold" OA journals -- unless of course such a
transition to Fool's Gold is both mandated and
funded by governments, as the UK and Netherlands
governments have
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1073-The-Journal-Publisher-Lobby-in-the-UK-Netherlands-Part-I.html>lately
proposed, under the influence of their
publishing lobbies! But the globalization of
such profligate folly seems unlikely on the most
pragmatic grounds of all: affordability. (The
scope for remedying world hunger, disease or
injustice that way are marginally better -- and
McDonalds would no doubt be interested in such a
<https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=oI6LUpG8LPLCyAHT5IHQDg#q=McNopoly+harnad>yearly
global consortial pre-payment deal for their Big
Macs too)
I also disagree (pragmatically) with Ann's
apparent conflation of the access problem for
journal articles with the access problem for
books. (It's the inadequacy of the "esoteric"
criterion again. Many book authors -- hardly
pragmatists -- still dream of sales & riches,
and fear that free online access would thwart
these dreams, driving away the prestigious
publishers whose imprimaturs distinguish their
work from vanity press.)
Pragmatically speaking, OA to articles has
already proved slow enough in coming, and has
turned out to require mandates to induce and
embolden authors to make their articles OA. But
for articles, at least, there is author
consensus that OA is desirable, hence there is
the motivation to comply with OA mandates from
authors' institutions and funders. Books, still
a mixed bag, will have to wait. Meanwhile, no
one is stopping those book authors who want to
make their books free online from picking
publishers who agree
And there are plenty of pragmatic reasons why
the librarian-obsession -- perhaps not
ideological, but something along the same lines
-- with the Version-of-Record is misplaced when
it comes to access to journal articles: The
author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft
means the difference between night and day for
would-be users whose institutions cannot afford
toll-access to the publisher's proprietary VoR.
And for the time being the toll-access VoR is
safe [modulo the general digital-preservation
problem, which is not an OA problem], while
subscription licenses are being paid by those
who can afford them. CHORUS and SHARE have
plenty of pragmatic advantages for publishers
(and ideological ones for librarians), but they
are vastly outweighed by their practical
disadvantages for research and researchers -- of
which the biggest is that they leave
access-provision in the hands of publishers (and
their licensing conditions).
About the Marie-Antoinette option for the
developing world -- R4L -- the less said, the
better. The pragmatics really boil down to time:
the access needs of both the developing and the
developed world are pressing. Partial and
makeshift solutions are better than nothing,
now. But it's been "now" for an awfully long
time; and time is not an ideological but a
pragmatic matter; so is lost research usage and
impact.
Ann says: "Here's the fondest hope of the
pragmatic OA advocate: that we settle on a
series of business practices that truly make the
greatest possible collection of high-value
material accessible to the broadest possible
audience at the lowest possible cost - not just
lowest cost to end users, but lowest cost to all
of us."
Here's a slight variant, by another pragmatic OA
advocate: "that we settle on a series of
research community policies that truly make the
greatest possible collection of peer-reviewed
journal articles accessible online free for all
users, to the practical benefit of all of us."
The online medium has made this practically
possible. The publishing industry -- pragmatists
rather than ideologists -- will adapt to this
new practical reality. Necessity is the Mother
of Invention.
Let me close by suggesting that perhaps
something Richard Poynder wrote is not quite
correct either: He wrote "It was [the]
affordability problem that created the
accessibility problem that OA was intended to
solve."
No, it was the creation of the online medium
that made OA not only practically feasible (and
optimal) for research and researchers, but
inevitable.
Stevan Harnad
--
Sanford G. Thatcher
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX 75034-5514
e-mail: [email protected]
Phone: (214) 705-1939
Website: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html
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"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John Ruskin (1865)
"The reason why so few good books are written is
that so few people who can write know
anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)
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