Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
Le 4 Avril 2002 17:28, Albert Henderson a écrit : on 4/3/2002 Jean-Claude Guédon jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Private research universities do not dominate research. They only play an important role in research, and this mainly in the US, not elsewhere. In Europe, this is completely untrue. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Johns Hopkins etc. have played the major role in policy ever since the days of Vannever Bush. While private universities are clearly outnumbered and outspent by public schools, they appear to me to dominate what goes on in research. Where are the non-US schools in this list? Do these schools determine policy in Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Russia, etc... Please, read before answering. What has Vannevar Bush got to do with this? Did the Endless Frontier mark such a change in US universities? I doubt it. And it certainly did not do anything for Europe or for the Soviet Union. Moreover, even US private universities depend heavily on public money to carry on their research. NSF, DoD and the like feed MIT, Harvard , Stanford et tutti quanti. More so the outrage at promising excellence while delivering mediocrity. Why do the science agencies reponsible for performance permit it. The words 'dissemination' and 'libraries' no longer exist in the vocabulary of Federal science bureaucrats even though communication is the essence of science. Do the best US schools deliver mediocrity? Can you prove that? As for the Federal science bureaucrats, as you call them, do they have responsibility for the state of the libraries where grantees work? I doubt it. But it might be an interesting proposition to have the library budgets defined by the research granting agencies in the US. Research administrators and researchers might find it a bit more difficult to unload this documentation problem onto librarians. Finally, private US research universities are not for profit organizations. Yet they report to the IRS and in the pages of THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION surplus revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars. [See the issues Oct 23, 1998; Nov 26, 1999, Nov 9, 2001.] Even if the institutions do not distribute their profits to shareholders, they support priviliged lives of the financial officers who manage billions of dollars of assets. Reporting to the IRS has nothing to do with profit-making status, and, once again, with an obstinacy that cannot bring but a smile on my lips, you stubbornly refuse to look beyond US borders. Have you ever considered that something more than folkloric activities take place outside the US? The decline of library spending was not forced by financial neediness. It has never been publicly justified. In many cases and countries, the decline of library spending has been justified by financial neediness. And I am not even referring to Third World countries. Ask the Japanese libraries how they feel these days, when the Yen has lost over 25% of its dollar value in a couple of years. As for the US private schools, one would have to examine how various costs have been evolving to consider how libraries have been treated. And, once again, even if the universities had all the money in the world, why should they buy back the research results that they themselves have contributed to creating from commercial publishers and at outrageous prices? They may wisely decide to focus on other tasks, since universities are not purely research institutions (and many are not research institutions at all). I would also like to point out that the hoarding rhetoric is out of bound... Soap boxes are confined to Hyde Park! Facts speak for themselves. Check out endowments at record levels, redundent financial cushions far beyond any need. Hoarding is the only accurate descriptive word. I am sorry but the word hoarding is rhetoric. You must first demonstrate that the financial cushions of the private universities are redundant, and do not do so only by illustrating the fact with some well chosen examples. For example, the ethos of science is not threatened by the occasional cheating of a minority of scientists - a point well made by R. K. Merton ; neither is the prudential attitude of universities faulted by a few examples that would seem to point in a different direction. It might be possible to criticize universities for attitudes that are too cautious, too conservative, or whatever, but even that would have to be measured against some benchmark. Where is that benchmark? Where is the hard statistical work that justifies your judgments? I do not see any and, therefore, must conclude that you use rhetoric and little else. For what reason? I do not know. But you grind that axe with such repetitious energy that it
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
on 2 Apr 2002 jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Let me respond in the body of the text below. Le 1 Avril 2002 09:58, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Richard Poynder wrote: interview... with Elsevier Science chairman Derk Haank... in April's Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm richard.poyn...@dsl.pipex.com http://www.richardpoynder.com The interview is interesting and shows the Elsevier chairman to be very reasonable, open and well-intentioned. I would rather say that he is clever and tries to avoid direct confrontation. I think that this confirms yet again that it is and always has been a waste of time and energy to demonize and vilify publishers like Elsevier, who really are not any better or worse than any other company, but just happen to find themselves in an anomalous business, with large profits but an unusual confluence of interests, including conflicts of interest, in a radically changing technological setting. It seems to me that a company that is intent on maintaining as high a profit rate as it can in the context of social transactions (information largely produced by public money, given away by their authors, reviewed freely by peers, and bought by libraries or research labs with largely public money) has to face the fact that its legitimacy will be hotly contested. I do believe that the intensense barrage if criticisms levelled at Elsevier and other similar companies has something to do with the Elsevier Chairman and his apparent reasonable stance... The 'profit motive' argument might have some standing if the private research universities that dominate sponsored research did not sport profits double those reported by Elsevier and other publishers. These universities have cut library spending by half in order to inflate their financial hoards. Moreover, universities have $1 billion in patent revenue now (which they did not have in 1980), resulting from sponsored research. They deprive library users of information generated by the rest of the world only because they have become skilled at academic 3-card Monte. Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 a...@chessnic.com
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 02:27:05PM -0500, Albert Henderson wrote: The 'profit motive' argument might have some standing if the private research universities that dominate sponsored research did not sport profits double those reported by Elsevier and other publishers. These universities have cut library spending by half in order to inflate their financial hoards. Moreover, universities have $1 billion in patent revenue now (which they did not have in 1980), resulting from sponsored research. They deprive library users of information generated by the rest of the world only because they have become skilled at academic 3-card Monte. Let's burn them all. They rob the people and Elsevier. They do not deserve to live. Let's also burn all African universities who hoard their profits to keep their countrymen in misery and ignorance. Thanks Albert. Now I see the light. bernard.l...@inria.fr Tel +33 1 3963 5644 http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/ Fax +33 1 3963 5469 INRIA / B.P. 105 / 78153 Le Chesnay CEDEX / France Je n'exprime que mon opinion - I express only my opinion CAGED BEHIND WINDOWS or FREE WITH LINUX Non aux Brevets Logiciels - No to Software Patents SIGNEZhttp://petition.eurolinux.org/SIGN
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
At 15:14 01/04/02 -0600, Thomas Krichel writes: Bernard Lang writes: The one important point I read there is: DH You can put your paper on your own Web site if you want. The only DH thing we insist on is that if we publish your article you don't DH publish it in a Springer or Wiley journal, too. In fact, I believe we DH have the most liberal copyright policy available. Is that what the Elsevier copyright form says ? Yes, at least one that was common for economics journals a few years ago. However, as far as I am aware off, that policy is not posted on any Elsevier web site. Furthermore, he did not say anything about putting it on another web site. On an open archive managed by someone else ? The concept of own web site is a fuzzy one. I have in my drawer a copy of copyright signed with Elsevier about 8 months ago by a researcher of my lab. Below, part of Rights of authors : Posting of a preprint version of this work on an electronic public server is permitted. Posting of the published article on a secure network (not accessible to the public) within the author's institution is permitted. However, posting of the published article on an electronic public server can only be done with Elsevier's written permission. This seems more precise than is the interview. What is your feeling? Helene Bosc Bibliotheque Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction et des Comportements UMR 6073 INRA-CNRS-Universite F. Rabelais 37380 Nouzilly France http://www.tours.inra.fr/ TEL : 02 47 42 78 00 FAX : 02 47 42 77 43 e-mail: hb...@tours.inra.fr
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
At 11:44 03/04/2002 +0100, you wrote: At 15:14 01/04/02 -0600, Thomas Krichel writes: Bernard Lang writes: The one important point I read there is: DH You can put your paper on your own Web site if you want. The only DH thing we insist on is that if we publish your article you don't DH publish it in a Springer or Wiley journal, too. In fact, I believe we DH have the most liberal copyright policy available. Is that what the Elsevier copyright form says ? Yes, at least one that was common for economics journals a few years ago. However, as far as I am aware off, that policy is not posted on any Elsevier web site. Furthermore, he did not say anything about putting it on another web site. On an open archive managed by someone else ? The concept of own web site is a fuzzy one. I have in my drawer a copy of copyright signed with Elsevier about 8 months ago by a researcher of my lab. Below, part of Rights of authors : Posting of a preprint version of this work on an electronic public server is permitted. Posting of the published article on a secure network (not accessible to the public) within the author's institution is permitted. However, posting of the published article on an electronic public server can only be done with Elsevier's written permission. This seems more precise than is the interview. What is your feeling? Helene Bosc Bibliotheque Unite Physiologie de la Reproduction et des Comportements UMR 6073 INRA-CNRS-Universite F. Rabelais 37380 Nouzilly France Below is some text from the interview that didn't make it into the final version due to length constraints. It may or may not help to clarify things, but here it is anyway. Richard Poynder: If an academic went to an Elsevier journal and said I want to retain the copyright on my paper for self-archiving purposes the editors would accept that? Derk Haank: We can't have individual negotiations with every individual author. People transfer copyright, but at the same time we grant them usage for anything else other than in a commercial or society journal, so you can put it in your reader, you can put it on your own web site, and you can put it on the university web site etc., but for official publishing uses we expect exclusivity. Richard Poynder: And that is stated in the copyright form they sign? Derk Haank: Yes. Copyright has proved a very well understood way to make clear that that is what is happening, but I am open for discussions with regard to the author retaining the copyright if that serves anybody better.
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
Private research universities do not dominate research. They only play an important role in research, and this mainly in the US, not elsewhere. In Europe, this is completely untrue. Moreover, even US private universities depend heavily on public money to carry on their research. NSF, DoD and the like feed MIT, Harvard , Stanford et tutti quanti. Finally, private US research universities are not for profit organizations. I would also like to point out that the hoarding rhetoric is out of bound... Soap boxes are confined to Hyde Park! Whether universities have more revenue than before is totally beside the point as I do not see why this extra revenue should be automatically allocated to buying over-priced journals from the Elseviers of the world. I would rather see universities spend their money on research or scholarships. Finally, where did you ever get the fact that universities have cut their library spending in half? The problem, Mr. Henderson, is that you come back and back with the same faulty arguments over and over again, as if you were a soldier obeying some kind of orders to stonewall whatever is stated on e-publishing lists that does not conform to the business logic of large commercial publishers. Haven't you noticed that this attitude has already discredited you in the eyes of most of the readers of this list? This is perhaps the reason why you responded to me personally and not to the whole list. As you can see, I am responding to you with the whole list in attendance. Jean-Claude Guédon Le 2 Avril 2002 14:27, Albert Henderson a écrit : on 2 Apr 2002 jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote: Let me respond in the body of the text below. Le 1 Avril 2002 09:58, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Richard Poynder wrote: interview... with Elsevier Science chairman Derk Haank... in April's Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm richard.poyn...@dsl.pipex.com http://www.richardpoynder.com The interview is interesting and shows the Elsevier chairman to be very reasonable, open and well-intentioned. I would rather say that he is clever and tries to avoid direct confrontation. I think that this confirms yet again that it is and always has been a waste of time and energy to demonize and vilify publishers like Elsevier, who really are not any better or worse than any other company, but just happen to find themselves in an anomalous business, with large profits but an unusual confluence of interests, including conflicts of interest, in a radically changing technological setting. It seems to me that a company that is intent on maintaining as high a profit rate as it can in the context of social transactions (information largely produced by public money, given away by their authors, reviewed freely by peers, and bought by libraries or research labs with largely public money) has to face the fact that its legitimacy will be hotly contested. I do believe that the intensense barrage if criticisms levelled at Elsevier and other similar companies has something to do with the Elsevier Chairman and his apparent reasonable stance... The 'profit motive' argument might have some standing if the private research universities that dominate sponsored research did not sport profits double those reported by Elsevier and other publishers. These universities have cut library spending by half in order to inflate their financial hoards. Moreover, universities have $1 billion in patent revenue now (which they did not have in 1980), resulting from sponsored research. They deprive library users of information generated by the rest of the world only because they have become skilled at academic 3-card Monte. Albert Henderson Pres., Chess Combination Inc. POB 2423 Bridgeport CT 06608-0423 a...@chessnic.com
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
Bernard Lang writes The one important point I read there is: « You can put your paper on your own Web site if you want. The only thing we insist on is that if we publish your article you don't publish it in a Springer or Wiley journal, too. In fact, I believe we have the most liberal copyright policy available. » Is that what the Elsevier copyright form says ? Yes, at least one that was common for economics journals a few years ago. However, as far as I am aware off, that policy is not posted on any Elsevier web site. Furthermore, he did not say anything about putting it on another web site. On an open archive managed by someone else ? The concept of own web site is a fuzzy one. Salut, Thomas Krichel mailto:kric...@openlib.org http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
Let me respond in the body of the text below. Le 1 Avril 2002 09:58, Stevan Harnad a écrit : On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Richard Poynder wrote: interview... with Elsevier Science chairman Derk Haank... in April's Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm richard.poyn...@dsl.pipex.com http://www.richardpoynder.com The interview is interesting and shows the Elsevier chairman to be very reasonable, open and well-intentioned. I would rather say that he is clever and tries to avoid direct confrontation. I think that this confirms yet again that it is and always has been a waste of time and energy to demonize and vilify publishers like Elsevier, who really are not any better or worse than any other company, but just happen to find themselves in an anomalous business, with large profits but an unusual confluence of interests, including conflicts of interest, in a radically changing technological setting. It seems to me that a company that is intent on maintaining as high a profit rate as it can in the context of social transactions (information largely produced by public money, given away by their authors, reviewed freely by peers, and bought by libraries or research labs with largely public money) has to face the fact that its legitimacy will be hotly contested. I do believe that the intensense barrage if criticisms levelled at Elsevier and other similar companies has something to do with the Elsevier Chairman and his apparent reasonable stance... Instead of misdirecting more time and energy into trying to portray Elsevier as venal, it would be infinitely more constructive -- and more likely to help resolve the large and growing conflict of interest between what is best for research and researchers and what is best for research journal publishers in the online era -- to focus instead on the empirical points Derk Haank makes in the interview. Two of these are the most relevant ones: I believe the two are not mutually exclusive and the former remains useful to keep the pressure on these companies so as to encourage them to behave a little better. (1) What are the products and services that research and researchers want and need from research journal publishers in the online era, and what are their true costs? I would rephrase this as: Are there any products and services ... in the online era that could not be provided by a suitably organized network of libraries, and what are their true costs? (2) Will researcher/institution self-archiving, in providing free online access to the full texts of all existing 20,000 research journals (over half science/tech/medicine, and 1500 of them Elsevier journals) eventually alter the current system (its products, services and costs), or will it simply exist in parallel to it? If the two systems exist in parallel, it will essentially mean that a new division of labour will have occurred: on the one hand, scientific information will have been freed; on the other hand, the evaluation through labelling will remain safely in the hands of publishers who will make public institutions pay dearly for the logo (not even the service as it is provided free by peers). Once the question of open archives is solved, the question will become : do we need the logos, i.e. must we delegate our evaluation needs to these commercial publishers? Must we also delegate to these commercial publisher the right to promote some researchersto the level of gatekeepers through their being invited to be editors of new journals constantly being created as part of an investment strategy. Incidentally, Elsevier will put out 1,700 journals by year's end, thanks to Academic Press being absorbed into Science Direct, and this figure must not be compared to the 20,000 journal figure (incidentally, where does this figure come from?) that Stevan quotes, but to thenumbe rof core journals. This is more of the order of 6,000 titles if one relies on SCI. Even with a few more global indices added, I doubt one reaches 20,000 titles. This is a very reasonable question. It is clear that Elsevier is not trying or intending to block the freeing of access to the entire research journal literature through self-archiving. Elsevier is simply assuming that either self-archiving will not take place on any significant scale, or, if it does, it will have no appreciable effects on the overall structure of research journal publishing. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do I think Elsevier is counting its options and, as I suggested in my Oldenburg paper (http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html), Ibelieve publisher ssuch as Elsevier are now focusing on economic prospects that can be derived from archiving (see the projects at Yale with Ann Okerson), evaluating, and intelligence gathering from real-time usage of a significant fraction of the world literature. It is interesting, in this latter regard, to read
Re: Interview with Derk Haank, CEO, Elsevier
On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Richard Poynder wrote: interview... with Elsevier Science chairman Derk Haank... in April's Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr02/poynder.htm richard.poyn...@dsl.pipex.com http://www.richardpoynder.com The interview is interesting and shows the Elsevier chairman to be very reasonable, open and well-intentioned. I think that this confirms yet again that it is and always has been a waste of time and energy to demonize and vilify publishers like Elsevier, who really are not any better or worse than any other company, but just happen to find themselves in an anomalous business, with large profits but an unusual confluence of interests, including conflicts of interest, in a radically changing technological setting. Instead of misdirecting more time and energy into trying to portray Elsevier as venal, it would be infinitely more constructive -- and more likely to help resolve the large and growing conflict of interest between what is best for research and researchers and what is best for research journal publishers in the online era -- to focus instead on the empirical points Derk Haank makes in the interview. Two of these are the most relevant ones: (1) What are the products and services that research and researchers want and need from research journal publishers in the online era, and what are their true costs? (2) Will researcher/institution self-archiving, in providing free online access to the full texts of all existing 20,000 research journals (over half science/tech/medicine, and 1500 of them Elsevier journals) eventually alter the current system (its products, services and costs), or will it simply exist in parallel to it? This is a very reasonable question. It is clear that Elsevier is not trying or intending to block the freeing of access to the entire research journal literature through self-archiving. Elsevier is simply assuming that either self-archiving will not take place on any significant scale, or, if it does, it will have no appreciable effects on the overall structure of research journal publishing. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do And this is all very reasonable and welcome! It confirms that the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ should proceed with vigor in reaching its goal of Open Access. As soon as BOAI succeeds the goal of open access is (by definition) attained: it is no longer true that any researcher, anywhere, fails to have online access to the full corpus of 20,000 research journals because his institution cannot afford the access tolls. The further question of whether or not the research journal system will remain more or less as it is now under these new open-access conditions is an empirical question -- and one on which [NB!] nothing urgent or important for research and researchers worldwide depends! Once online access to it all is free for all, any continuing journal price rises will become an irrelevant side-show for research and researchers, for they will have free access to it all. The conflict of interest will be resolved. Regarding BOAI Strategy 2 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals (the establishment of alternative, open-access journals -- self-archiving is BOAI Strategy 1), it is quite understandable that established journal publishers like Elsevier should hope that there will be no success: To hope otherwise it to wish success onto one's competitors! But here too it is an empirical question whether the research/researcher side of the PostGutenberg conflict-of-interest -- the side that is increasingly pressing to have, at long last, the lost research impact that access-denying toll-barriers have cost them for 350 years, now that access-barriers are no longer necessary -- will resolve the conflict of interest not only by self-archiving its refereed research online, but also by creating new open-access journals (and converting established ones) for that research, and preferring those journals to the established toll-based ones for submitting to and publishing in. The way to answer such empirical questions is not for researchers to continue to sit and deprecate Elsevier and the status quo, but to go ahead and implement BOAI Strategies 1 and 2. At the very least, the outcome will be Open Access at last. The rest remains to be seen (but is far less urgent or consequential). Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess
