SUMMARY: Jean-Claude Guédon [J-CG] has suggested that (1) the percentage of non-OA journals that are subsidised may be closer to 50% than 5%, and that hence (2) OA self-archiving mandates could also mandate the conversion of those subsidised journals to OA. It is not clear, however, (i) whether the percentage of national journals that are subsidised is representative of the total percentage of the world's 24,000 journals that are subsidised. The right question is: (ii) what percentage of a nation's research output is published in subsidised journals? A second, unavoidable question is: (iii) where in the quality hierarchy of 24,000 peer-reviewed journals do the subsidised journals tend to fall? (The answer to (ii) and (iii) will differ by both nation and discipline.) In any case, the adoption of the proposed OA self-archiving mandates (such as the US FRPAA proposal or the European Commission's A1 recommendation) should on no account be handicapped by trying to add to them a mandate to convert subsidised journals to OA. The same is true of individual institutional self-archiving mandates. The efforts to convert subsidised journals to OA should proceed separately, in parallel. Once self-archiving mandates prevail, the need to convert journals to OA will in any case become a far less urgent one, and no longer an OA matter. (Kimmo Kuusela has provided some helpful data for Finland.)
On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Jean-Claude Guédon [
J-CG] wrote in the
American Scientist Open Access Forum:
J-CG: "Samples available certainly place the [proportion of journals that are subsidised at] closer to 50% than to 5%."
I am afraid I'm still not sure that's accurate (or if so, what it means).
If it were really true that half of the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals are subsidised, it would be important to know
which half -- top or bottom? This is not snobbery: The need for OA is definitely top-down insofar as the user-end need for
access is concerned. What users need first and foremost is access to the articles in the best journals.
And on the author-end, although all authors yearn for more
impact, the findings are that the size of the OA Advantage is greater for the higher quality articles (the "Quality Advantage," QA) in that the proportion of self-archived articles is
higher in the higher citation brackets. (This is the effect that some have interpreted --
wrongly, in my opinion, -- as a non-causal Self-Selection effect, or Quality Bias, QB, rather than QA. There is both a noncausal QB and a causal QA component in the OA advantage, and I am betting QA is the bigger component).
The majority of articles are not cited at all, and for the worst of them, making them OA does not help! OA allows the best work -- the work destined to be used and built upon -- to be used fully, and to be built upon purely on the basis of its quality and relevance, no longer limited by its affordability (hence accessibility).
Even if half of a country's national journals are subsidised, it does not follow that half of that country's research output is published in its national journals, let alone subsidised journals. (And that's without even asking
which half.)
J-CG: "I am not sure one can compare hypothetical... money that might have been earned... with actual cash outlay [in pitting money actually spent on subsidising journals against the hypothetical monetary value of lost potential research impact]."
I'm afraid that here I disagree very fundamentally: Although the serials crisis definitely helped alert us to the OA problem, historically, OA is not in fact about saving money spent on journals -- neither the money spent on subscribing to overpriced journals nor the money spent subsidising journals. It is about ending the needless loss of potential research access and impact. And the estimates of the amount of money lost because of that access denial are the real measures of the cost of not providing OA. Neither journal prices nor journal subsidies are measures of that real, preventable loss to research progress and productivity.
J-CG: "Every sample examined so far, outside the US, UK and Australia, shows levels of subsidies that go from significant to almost total. Why play skeptical on this issue? "
I am still skeptical because my question about proportion of journals subsidised was not about what proportion of a country's national journals are subsidised, but about what percentage of that country's research output is published in subsidised journals (by discipline -- and, to get an even better idea: by quality-bracket).
J-CG: "Side by side, mandating self-archiving and pushing, perhaps even mandating, the conversion of subsidized journals to OA would help reach OA faster."
In my opinion, complicating and handicapping the (still not yet adopted) self-archiving mandate proposals with journal-conversion mandates at this time would make it harder, not easier, to get the self-archiving mandates adopted at all -- especially because it would couple mandates with funding commitments. Moreover, until the question of the true proportion of the 24,000 peer-reviewed journals (by discipline, as well as their standing in the quality hierarchy) is answered, it is not even clear what marginal gains in OA are to be expected from trying to convert subsidised journals to OA.
There is nothing wrong with continuing efforts to convert non-OA journals into OA journals, including the subsidised non-OA journals, but I do not think this should be conflated or combined with the efforts to get the OA self-archiving mandates adopted. (And, to repeat, once the self-archiving mandates prevail, the issue of converting subsidised non-OA journals to OA becomes moot, insofar as OA is concerned. It reverts to just being a matter of the evolution of journal publishing: No more access/impact problem making it seem urgent -- though I do think that reaching 100% OA through self-archiving mandates is likely to
accelerate journal reform too.)
J-CG: "Many journals of a "national" reach... tend not to appear in [Ulrich's or ISI]"
The question still stands: What percentage of
those journals is subsidised?
And there is a second question: Would it help or handicap the prospects of adoption for OA self-archiving mandates to try to add subsidised-journal-conversion clauses to them? Mandates are adopted by research institutions and funders and applied to the research output of their employees and fundees. Subsidised-journal-conversion mandates would be addressed to an entirely different constituency. Moreover, OA self-archiving mandates would already cover all the contents of all journals, subsidised or unsubsidised.
J-CG: "in the social sciences and the humanities... top-down distinctions are much more difficult to establish."
No doubt. But the percentage of research output in subsidised journals should be much less difficult (than that) to establish.
J-CG: "how does one determine if a Finnish journal on Finnish literature, published in Finnish, is inferior or superior to a Dutch journal on Dutch literature, written in Dutch?"
No need to compare Finnish journals to Dutch journals. Just Finnish research output in subsidised journals to total Finnish research output. (If there is a way to estimate relative quality, that would be helpful too, as would separate tallies by discipline.)
J-CG: "If impact factors do not work well as tools to rank journals, how does one go about deciding what is top and what is down?"
There are other ways to rank journals, but point taken: Where quality ranking is unavailable, percentage of research published in subsidised journals, by discipline, without a quality estimate, will do.
J-CG: "in each discipline... the pecking order is there, but... not always clearly visible [from] SCI or Ulrich's."
Then use the pecking order, not SCI, to estimate the relative quality of subsidised and unsubsidised journals. (Ulrich's does not rank.)
J-CG: "Stevan's disbelief in the significant reality of subsidized scholarly journals..."
It seems reasonable to ask for percentages, by discipline, in order to weigh the significance of this reality.
J-CG: "In the debates with opponents to OA... estimates of lost money because of access denial... [have] never gained much traction..."
The traction of the access/impact argument is not meant to be with the
opponents of OA, but with the
beneficiaries of OA (and of access/impact), namely, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the tax-paying public that funds the funders (for the sake of research usage/impact, productivity, progress).
The potential mandator of OA self-archiving is the research community itself -- research funders and institutions -- not the publishers who oppose OA.
Lost subscription money is a matter of concern to publishers, and shortage of subscription money is a matter of concern to librarians, but the former are unwilling and the latter unable to mandate either OA self-archiving or conversion to OA publishing.
Hence the traction for OA needs to be with research institutions and funders. Any potential traction from subsidised-journal-conversion mandates would depend entirely on the percentage of subsidised journals and the willingness of the subsidisers to mandate conversion. (But if access/impact loss had no traction with subsidisers, what
would have traction? Why is subsidising non-OA journals bad, if not because of access/impact loss? "Monetising" access/impact loss is merely estimating how bad that access/impact loss is.)
J-CG: "These are two different, parallel strategies. The whole of the BOAI document was also very clear on this point."
BOAI was about OA, not about OA mandates. We've come a long way since December 2001...
SH: "once the self-archiving mandates prevail, the issue of converting subsidised non-OA journals to OA becomes moot, insofar as OA is concerned."
J-CG: "One could argue symmetrically that once all journals have turned OA, self-archiving is moot insofar as OA is concerned. So where does that leave us?"
It leaves us with one route (green) to 100% OA (self-archiving) that depends only on the research community itself -- the research providers and users, their institutions and funders -- and that can be 100% mandated.
And another route (gold) that depends on converting journals, hence on journal publishers, most of whom are not so inclined; and if conversion is mandatable at all, it is mandatable only for the subsidised journals, whose percentage and distribution in the quality hierarchy is not known (but unlikely to be very high).
In other words, one route (green) that, once mandated, is certain to deliver 100% OA, and another route (gold) that, even it can be mandated for some unknown percentage of journals, is likely to leave us waiting for 100% OA for a long, long time to come.
I'd go with the sure road.
Many thanks to
Kimmo Kuusela for the prompt provision of data on Finland's research output, by discipline!
On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Kimmo Kuusela wrote:
"I have compared Finnish research output in Finnish subsidised journals (that is, practically all Finnish journals) to total Finnish research output in 2005.
The results:
16% (2100) of the total number of articles (12839) in refereed journals were published in Finnish journals.
By field of education: Theology 5 %
The Humanities 49%
Art and Design 64%
Music 44%
Theatre and Dance 43%
Education 45%
Sport Sciences 0%
Social Sciences 47%
Psychology 16%
Health Sciences 31%
Law 77%
Economics 21%
Natural sciences 6%
Agriculture and Forestry 14%
Engineering 8%
Medicine 11%
Dentistry 18%
Veterinary Medicine 2%
Pharmacy 13%
Fine Arts 100%
Field of education unspecified 15% Here's a handy tool for even more calculations."
On the question of whether the proportion of national research output published in subsidised national journals is closer to 5% or 50%, the answer for Finland overall is closer to 5%; but looked at by discipline, for arts, humanities and social sciences it is closer to 50%. (The overall average is presumably 16% because of the lower relative proportion of articles in the arts, humanities and social sciences.)
"[T]he relative weight of each discipline in the category of refereed journal articles was as follows: Theology 0%
The Humanities 5%
Art and Design 0%
Music 0%
Theatre and Dance 0%
Education 3%
Sport Sciences 0%
Social Sciences 5%
Psychology 2%
Health Sciences 2%
Law 1%
Economics 4%
Natural sciences 21%
Agriculture and Forestry 2%
Engineering 13%
Medicine 31%
Dentistry 2%
Veterinary Medicine 1%
Pharmacy 1%
Fine Arts 0%
Field of education unspecified 5%The total output in 2005 was 24847 items, of which 7642 items (31%) were published domestically. Total output includes refereed articles, articles in compiled works or in printed conference publications, monographs (theses and dissertations excluded), and articles in universities' own serials (departmental serials excluded)."
On the basis of these data, if I were a Finnish researcher, institution or funder, I would hope that (1) all Finnish researchers would be required by their funders and institutions to self-archive all their refereed journal articles and that (2) all subsidised Finnish journals would be required by their subsiders to make their online editions open access.
I don't think trying to combine (1) and (2) into a single mandate would make much sense, since not only would the
requirees -- researchers in (1), publishers in (2) -- not be the same in the two cases, but it is not even clear that the
requirers -- research institutions and funders in (1), journal subsidisers in (2) -- would be the same either.
Hence it would be best if the two were pursued separately, in parallel. It is also worth noting that (1) would already moot (2), since 100% OA self-archiving would include the OA self-archiving of the subsidised 16% too! But I agree with
Jean-Claude Guedon that this is no reason not to pursue the subsidised option (2) in parallel: just don't wrap (2) into (1) (at least not until (1) is adopted!).
It would be splendid if we could see data from other countries (along with their discipline data) along the lines Kimmo Kuusela has provided for Finland. (
Arthur Sale has already made a stab for Australia, though I'll bet there are a few subsidised journals still lurking in the Aussie outback somewhere, possibly in the arts?)
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
