Hey, Stevan, come off it. Read the article. Once again you pick a
fight when I mostly agree with you.
Joe Esposito
On 11/15/07, Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> ** Cross-Posted: For fully hyperlinked version of this posting, see:
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/329-guid.html
>
> "Open Access Is Research Spam"
>
> SUMMARY: Joseph Esposito, a management consultant, says Open
> Access (OA) is "research spam":
> http://www.the-scientist.com/podcast/theweek/audio/2007/11/07/normal.mp3
>
> But OA's explicit target content is the 2.5 million peer-reviewed
> articles published annually in all the world's 25,000
> peer-reviewed research journals. (So either all research is spam
> or OA is not spam after all!).
>
> Esposito says researchers' problem isn't access to journal
> articles (they already have that): rather, it's not having the
> time to read them. This will come as news to the countless
> researchers worldwide who are denied access daily to the articles
> in the journals their institution cannot afford, and to the
> authors of those articles, who are losing all that potential
> research impact.
>
> Search engines find it all, tantalizingly, but access depends on
> being able to afford the subscription tolls. Esposito also says
> OA is just for a small circle of peers: How big does he imagine
> the actual usership of most journal articles is?
>
> Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives'
> bonuses for publishing profit, even though ACS is supposed to be
> a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage
> and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit
> from restricting research access only to those who can afford to
> pay them for it (and for their bonuses).
>
> Esposito describes the efforts of researchers to inform their
> institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as
> lobbying, but he does not attach a name to what anti-OA
> publishers are doing when they hire expensive pit-bull
> consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort to
> prevent OA self-archiving from being mandated. (Another surcharge
> for researchers, in addition to paying for their bonuses?)
>
> Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors
> would comply with OA mandates, but he omits to mention that over
> 80% of those researchers report that they would self-archive
> willingly if mandated. (And where does Esposito think publishers
> would be without existing publish-or-perish mandates?)
>
> Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not
> reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the
> research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed
> research output is the time it takes to do the few keystrokes per
> article it takes to provide OA. That is what the mandates (and
> the metrics that reward them) are meant to accomplish at long
> last.
>
> --------
>
> Joseph Esposito is an independent management consultant (the
> "portable CEO") with a long history in publishing, specializing
> in "interim management and strategy work at the intersection of
> content and digital technology."
>
> In an interview by The Scientist (a follow-up to his article,
> "The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work"),
> Esposito says Open Access (OA) is "research spam" -- making
> unrefereed or low quality research available to researchers whose
> real problem is not insufficient access but insufficient time.
>
> In arguing for his "model," which he calls the "nautilus model,"
> Esposito manages to fall into many of the longstanding fallacies
> that have been painstakingly exposed and corrected for years in
> the self-archiving FAQ. (See especially Peer Review, Sitting
> Pretty, and Info-Glut.)
>
> Like so many others, with and without conflicting interests,
> Esposito does the double conflation (1) of OA publishing (Gold
> OA) with OA self-archiving (of non-OA journal articles) (Green
> OA), and (2) of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles
> with unpublished preprints. It would be very difficult to call OA
> research "spam" if Esposito were to state forthrightly that Green
> OA self-archiving means making all articles published in all
> peer-reviewed journals OA. (Hence either all research is spam or
> OA is not spam after all!).
>
> Instead, Esposito implies that OA is only or mainly for
> unrefereed or low quality research, which is simply false: OA's
> explicit target is the peer-reviewed, published postprints of all
> the 2.5 million articles published annually in all the planet's
> 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, from the very best to the very
> worst, without exception. (The self-archiving of pre-refereeing
> preprints is merely an optional supplement, a bonus; it is not
> what OA is about, or for.)
>
> Esposito says researchers' problem is not access to journal
> articles: They already have that via their institution's journal
> subscriptions; their real problem is not having the time to read
> those articles, and not having the search engines that pick out
> the best ones.
>
> Tell that to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied
> access daily to the specific articles they need in the journals
> to which their institution cannot afford to subscribe. (No
> institution comes anywhere near being able to subscribe to all
> 25,000, and many are closer to 250.)
>
> And tell it also to the authors of all those articles to which
> all those would-be users are being denied access; their articles
> are being denied all that research impact. Ask users and authors
> alike whether they are happy with affordability being the
> "filter" determining what can and cannot be accessed. Search
> engines find it all for them, tantalizingly, but whether they can
> access it depends on whether their institutions can afford a
> subscription.
>
> Esposito says OA is just for a small circle of peers ("6? 60?
> 600? but not 6000"): How big does he imagine the actual usership
> of most of the individual 2.5 million annual journal articles to
> be? Peer-reviewed research is an esoteric, peer-to-peer process,
> for the contents of all 25,000 journals: research is conducted
> and published, not for royalty income, but so that it can be
> used, applied and built upon by all interested peer specialists
> and practitioners; the size of the specialties varies, but none
> are big, because research itself is not big (compared to trade,
> and trade publication).
>
> Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives'
> bonuses for publishing profit, oblivious to the fact that the ACS
> is supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing
> research access, usage and progress, not a commercial company
> devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access to
> those who can afford to pay them for it.
>
> Esposito also refers (perhaps correctly) to researchers'
> amateurish efforts to inform their institutions and funders of
> the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying -- passing in silence
> over the fact that the real pro lobbyists are the wealthy anti-OA
> publishers who hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread
> disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent Green OA from
> being mandated.
>
> Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors
> would comply with OA mandates ("it's not news that people would
> comply with a requirement"), but he omits to mention that most
> researchers surveyed recognised the benefits of OA, and over 80%
> reported they would self-archive willingly if it was mandated,
> only 15% stating they would do so unwillingly. One wonders
> whether Esposito also finds the existing and virtually universal
> publish-or-perish mandates of research institutions and funders
> tautological -- and where he thinks the publishers for whom he
> consults would be without those mandates.
>
> Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not
> reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the
> research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed
> research output is the time it takes to do a few keystrokes per
> article. That, and only that, is what the mandates are all about,
> for busy, overloaded researchers: Giving those few keystrokes the
> priority they deserve, so they can at last start reaping the
> benefits -- in terms of research access and impact -- that they
> desire. The outcome is optimal and inevitable for the research
> community; it is only because this was not immediately obvious
> that the outcome has been so long overdue.
>
> But the delay has been in no small part also because of the
> conflicting interests of the journal publishing industry for
> which Esposito consults. So it is perhaps not surprising that he
> should see it otherwise, and wish to see it continue at a
> (nautilus) snail's crawl for as long as possible...
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
--
Joe Esposito
Received on Fri Nov 16 2007 - 03:19:24 GMT