SUMMARY: In two separate postings plus an article, Chris Armbruster [CA] has suggested that peer review provision should be unbundled from access provision and that authors (of journal articles) should not transfer exclusive copyright to publishers. The trouble is that although both desiderata are indeed desirable (and will no doubt prevail eventually), publishers are not particularly interested in unbundling today, and authors are not particularly interested in putting their accepted articles' publication at risk by haggling over copyright retention. Hence the immediate solution is, and remains, for authors to self-archive their accepted peer-reviewed drafts, and for their institutions and funders to mandate that they do so, for the good of research, researchers, and the public that funds them.
CA: "The technology and economics of the internet mean that the marginal costs of disseminating research articles are decreasing rapidly. By comparison, the digital doubling of research articles by way of institutional repositories is cumbersome, time consuming and expensive. It needs to be mandated. And then policed: Why bother?"
Because converting journals to OA publishing requires the willingness of the journals to convert, and that willingness is not there (with good reason, as the experiment puts their current revenue streams at risk, and it is not at all clear yet whether the cost-recovery model will scale, and is sustainable at this time).
And because OA is for the benefit of research, researchers, and the public that funds them. It is by and for researchers that research is provided. So mandating self-archiving, by and for researchers, can and is being done, and it has already been
demonstrated to work successfully. No "policing" necessary, just a formal mandate.
Sale, Arthur (2006) The Acquisition of Open Access Research Articles. First Monday 11(10) October.
Sale, Arthur (2006) Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia. First Monday 11(4) April
Nor is either self-archiving or the mandating of self-archiving cumbersome, time-consuming or
expensive.
Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
What is cumbersome and time-consuming is waiting and trying to convert journals to OA publishing, one by one, instead of researchers just providing OA by and for themselves, now. And what is expensive is for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders, and their funders funders (the tax-paying public) to keep
needlessly losing potential returns on their investment in research, in the form of research uptake, usage, applications, citations, productivity and progress.
And it is for the journals, not the researchers, that converting to OA publishing right now is risky and expensive. For if journals ever do eventually convert, then the institutional subscription cancellation savings will be more than enough to cover OA publication costs. It's just that journals will not take the risk of converting of their own accord right now, and they certainly cannot be mandated to do it. And as subscriptions are not yet being cancelled, there is no
extra cash available to pay OA publishing costs.
(A self-archiving mandate for researchers might possibly set the cancellation process into motion, but that is not the objective of OA: The objective of OA is OA, and self-archiving mandates will already have provided OA irrespective of whether they eventually go on to generate cancellation pressure.)
CA: "[Some] OA advocates... think that they must either archive all the peer-reviewed journals again in OA (in which case national licenses, implemented worldwide, would surely be cheaper and quicker in converting research articles into a public good) "
It is not
journals that are self-archived by authors, it is each author's own journal
articles, in their own institutional repositories. That is the obvious and optimal way to
supplement non-OA access with OA access for those would-be users who cannot afford the non-OA access. It is not a
substitute for journal publishing.
National licenses are a non-starter: Not only would they be encouraging
oligopoly, but they would be spending non-existent money (poached from research funds?) to pay for what is already being paid for via subscriptions today. What is needed now is OA, not a means of funding what is already funded. (If and when OA self-archiving should ever generate unsustainable cancellation pressure, then
that will be the time to talk about
redirecting funds from the windfall subscription savings to cover publication costs.)
CA: "or else clone the traditional journal online but charge the author"
The traditional journal is already cloned online (virtually all journals are hybrid today) and the only issue is, once again, conversion to OA publishing: Publishers cannot and need not be cloned or coerced into converting. If research, researchers, their institutions and their funders want and need OA so badly -- and they do -- then they need simply provide it for themselves, by mandating OA self-archiving.
CA: "Both solutions are neither creative nor adequate: they are fundamentally incompatible with the technology and economy of the internet. The WWW Galaxy means that dissemination is cheap and certification is expensive - a reversal of the premises of the Gutenberg Galaxy, in which peer review was cheap and printing costly."
Peers review for free and the cost of
peer review has gone down, not up, in the
PostGutenberg Galaxy (sic). But peer review is implemented by autonomous, answerable journals, with answerable track-records for quality. Apart from the Gutenberg-era function of text-generation and access-provision, now obsolescent, journals are merely peer-review service-providers and certifiers. But the demand for the journal's official paper and online editions has not yet subsided, so it is all
wrapped in one non-OA product, paid for by subscription/licenses.
Unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get journals to convert to OA publishing (at a rate faster than the glacially slow rate at which they are converting now), it is better to stand aside and let the self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe.
And unless you have a "creative and adequate" way to get researchers to self-archive voluntarily, it is likewise better to stand aside and let the self-archiving mandates generate 100% OA before the heat death of the universe. (Theorizing about the severing of peer review from access-provision certainly won't do it!)
CA: "Surely, it is important to think through the consequences for open access to research articles? It seems amazing that OA advocates would go about re-erecting price barriers by ignoring the possibility of providing publishing services that are free to readers and authors -- like ArXiv, SSRN, RePEc."
(1) Arxiv, SSRN and RePec (and CogPrints, and Citeseer, and OAIster and Google Scholar) are not publishing services. (2) They are access-provision mechanisms. (3) That is the very same thing what author self-archiving in Institutional Repositories -- and institutional and funder mandates to do so -- amounts to. (4) And all those articles continue to be submitted to and published in peer-reviewed journals. Those are all supplements to -- not substitutes for -- journal publishing.
OA
publishing is indeed a substitute for non-OA publishing, but not nearly enough publishers are doing it, and there's no way to mandate them to do it. And it would be absurd for the research community to wait until they decide to do it, since the research community can already mandate
itself to provide OA today, by supplementing non-OA access with self-archived OA access, immediately.
I agree that author charges today are premature.
CA: "Indeed, how do we justify author charges of USD 1000, 2000 or even 3000 per article when there is positive proof that open access to research articles may be had for USD 1, 2 or 3 per article?"
No one needs to justify them: Those authors who can pay them, and wish to, should go ahead and pay them. Those who cannot, should self-archive (and their institutions and funders should mandate they do it, extending their existing publish-or-perish mandate to publish-and-self-archive, for the good of the research, researchers, their institutions, their funders and the public that funds them, and for whose benefit the research is being performed).
CA: "The WWW Galaxy heavily favours the severance of the certification of knowledge claims from the dissemination of research papers."
Separating peer review provision from access provision in the
PostGutenberg Galaxy.
So far,
so good (though perhaps that should be from
exclusive access provision).
CA: "Underlying this shift is the emergence of an academic cyberinfrastructure based on open transmission protocols and open-source software that, in turn, favours open content and open access."
To the extent that "knowledge claims" refers to new research findings, reported in peer-reviewed journals, what's new is the Internet, and the possibility of supplementing the existing ways of providing access to peer-reviewed research (viz, journal subscriptions) with new ways (viz, making a version freely accessible online).
CA: "'Openness' is fundamentally compatible with the knowledge-based economy if market profits are made from nonexclusive rights."
This is a bit too general, but if you mean nonexclusive rights to provide access, then that sounds fine (for peer-reviewed research).
CA: "The present conflict between scholars and commercial publishers around "open access" is based on a misunderstanding,"
The conflict is not particularly with commercial publishers alone, if we are talking about the same conflict, because noncommercial (learned society) publishers have been as vocal in their attempts to oppose or minimize OA as commercial publishers have been.
Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration.
But the real obstacle is not publishers (of either kind) at all: The obstacle is and always has been the inertia of the research community itself. (And the remedy for that inertia will be to extend the publish-or-perish
mandate to: publish-and-provide-OA.)
CA: "for business models in scientific publishing that are based on the pursuit and enforcement of exclusive intellectual property rights will not persist because technological and economic conditions disfavour them strongly."
In "scientific publishing"? Does that include books, and textbooks? For if it's again just journal articles, then we are back to the one and the same special case (and it's not just science, but peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles too.).
CA: "The compatibility of open science and the knowledge-based economy may be enhanced if the dissemination of research articles is severed from their certification."
It is severed if it is the
certified research that is disseminated, but if it is uncertified research, then it is hanging by a
skyhook.
CA: "As the marginal cost of digital dissemination plummets, there is a case for the public funding of the electronic dissemination of research articles. Public funding could ensure effectively that dissemination is free to authors and readers - while reaping savings of several orders of magnitude as first copy costs in the WWW Galaxy fall to 1/10th or less of the cost in the Gutenberg Galaxy."
I couldn't quite follow: Certified (peer-reviewed) articles can be made available free on the web by their authors. Yes. But "
first copy costs" are a print-run issue, and hence they are publisher matters, not author matters.
CA: "This is, however, not true for the certification of knowledge, especially by peer review, which is likely to become more costly if it is to be of any service to readers and authors."
Why more costly? The peers review for free. The journals implement the peer review, and the cost of that is covered out of subscription revenue from selling the paper edition and the publisher's online edition. "Non-exclusivity" merely requires that authors be able to make their own peer-reviewed final drafts accessible free online for those who cannot afford the publisher's version.
And if ever the institutional subscription demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition should fall to unsustainable levels, the cost of peer review can be covered out of the very same
institutional windfall savings on subscription cancellations. And those costs are likely to be a lot lower than what is being spent on subscriptions now, because the hypothesis is that demand for the paper and publisher's online edition vanishes (and with it the associated costs).
CA: "On the assumption that the decoupling of certification and dissemination is desirable and likely, research articles should be disseminated with a nonexclusive copyright license. This does not require any changes in law, but merely a different contractual arrangement whereby certifiers (e.g. publishers, learned societies, institutional repositories and whatever new organisations might emerge) will not be able to claim an exclusive copyright."
Indeed. But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves, because the demand for the paper edition and the publisher's online edition have not only not vanished, but they are paying the costs of peer review too. Whereas what is missing is OA! So what is needed now is not decoupling of certification and dissemination, but the self-archiving of the authors' peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints"). Nor should this self-archiving wait for the successful renegotiation of rights by authors. The postprints should
immediately be deposited in their authors' Institutional Repositories (
IRs) in any event.
CA: "Presently publishers collect monopoly rents because authors transfer the copyright of their papers to the publisher. If copyright for the article is no longer transferred exclusively, but licensed non-exclusively, then a competitive and efficient market for knowledge services will emerge."
Sixty-nine percent of journals have already given their green light to immediate author self-archiving. For the remaining 31%, the
immediate-deposit/delayed-access mandate (plus the semi-automatic
email-eprint-request button) is the solution. Copyright retention and nonexclusive licensing are a good idea where the author is willing and able to negotiate them, but they are
not a prerequisite for providing free access today, and on no account should either self-archiving or self-archiving mandates wait for or be thought of or portrayed as being any way conditional upon the successful author negotiation of rights.
CA: "Economic modelling of the potential impact of the open access dissemination of research results is under way. In a first estimate it is valued at roughly $2bn for the UK, $3bn for Germany, $6bn for Japan and $16bn for the USA -- assuming a social return to R&D at 50% and a 5% increase in access and efficiency (Houghton and Sheehan 2006). This lends salience to the anticipation of the emergence and growth of a new knowledge industry around the certification of knowledge and the provision of services to readers and authors. This new industry will sit atop the open access dissemination of research articles and further contribute to growth and innovation."
I would say that the implications of those (and other) estimates of the economic benefits of OA are not implications for the publishing industry but for the research community and the public that funds them: They do not imply that publishing reform is the immediate priority today, but that providing OA is. And this can be done, and will be done, by self-archiving -- and by mandating self-archiving.
Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35 (April 2003).
Harnad, S. (2005) Making the case for web-based self-archiving. Research Money 19 (16).
Harnad, S. (2005) Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research
Harnad, Stevan (2005) Australia Is Not Maximising the Return on its Research Investment. In Steele, Prof Colin, Eds. Proceedings National Scholarly Communications Forum 2005, Sydney, Australia.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
