Publishing Reform

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SUMMARY: The notion of an "Overlay Journal" often unwittingly confuses (1) access-provision with peer-review service-provision, (2) pre-peer-review preprints with peer-reviewed postprints (or posting with publishing), (3) archives (repositories) with journals, or (4) Central Archives/Repositories (CRs) in particular with distributed Institutional Repositories (IRs) in general. Throughout the evolution of research communication -- from On-Paper to On-Line to Open Access -- peer review remains peer review, a journal remains a journal (i.e., a peer-review service-provider and certifier), and texts tagged as "published" by journal X remain texts tagged as published by journal X. All that changes is the access-medium and the degree of accessibility. (And possibly, one day, the cost-recovery model.)

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The notion of an "Overlay Journal" is and always has been somewhat inchoate -- potentially even incoherent, if construed in a way that conflates (1) access-provision with peer-review service-provision, (2) pre-peer-review preprints with peer-reviewed postprints (or posting with publishing), (3) archives (repositories) with journals, or (4) Central Archives/Repositories (CRs) in particular with distributed Institutional Repositories (IRs) in general.

(1) Access-Provision vs. Peer-Review Service-Provision. A research journal is and always has been both (i) an access-provider (producing, printing and distributing the print edition; producing and licensing the online edition) and (ii) a quality-control service-provider (implementing and certifying the peer review process -- but with the peers independent and refereeing for the journals for free). In the Open Access (OA) era, the access-provider functions of the research journal can and will be supplemented by author self-archiving of the final, revised, peer-reviewed postprint (in the author's own IR and/or a CR) in order to ensure that all would-be users have access, rather than only those whose institutions can afford access to the journal's subscription-based version.

It is also possible -- but this is hypothetical and it is not yet known whether and when it will happen -- that the distributed network of IRs and CRs containing authors' self-archived postprints may eventually substitute for the traditional access-provision function of journals (i), at least insofar as online access is concerned. This does not mean that IRs and CRs become journals. It just means that the online access-provision function (i) is unbundled from the former double function of journals (i, ii), and offloaded onto the IR/CR network. And this is merely hypothetical at this time. Only the supplementary function is a reality today, not yet the substitute function. (Is this hypothetical outcome what is meant by "Overlay Journals"? If so, let's forget about them for now and work on reaching 100% OA self-archiving, crossing our "overlay" bridges only if/when we ever get to them.)

(2) Unrefereed Preprints vs. Refereed Postprints (Posting vs. Publishing). Authors self-archive both their pre-peer-review preprints and their peer-reviewed postprints in IRs and CRs, but the primary target of the OA movement, and of OA self-archiving mandates, is the peer-reviewed postprint (of all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed research journals). Self-archiving preprints (usually done in order to elicit informal peer feedback and to assert priority) is neither publication nor a substitute for publication. To post a preprint in an IR or CR is not to publish it; it is merely to provide access to it. In providing access to preprints, IRs and CRs are certainly not substituting for journals. (Preprints are not listed in academic CVs as "Publications" but as "Unpublished Manuscripts.")

(3) Archives (Repositories) vs. Journals. IRs and CRs are not themselves journals, nor even part-journals. They cannot and do not provide peer review, or certify its outcome. If an author's own IR were to try to do this, for its own research output, it would become an in-house vanity press, not a peer-reviewed journal. If a CR tried to do this, it would simply become a new journal start-up (competing with existing journals). Right now, IRs and CRs are merely access-providers -- providing access to both unpublished preprints and journal-published, -peer-reviewed, and -certified postprints.

(4) Central Archives/Repositories (CRs) vs. Distributed Institutional Repositories (IRs). CRs and IRs also differ in that CRs are few, and do not exist for all or most fields, whereas IRs are many and cover all fields. CRs are independent 3rd parties, not affiliated with, beholden to, or sharing common interests with the authors who deposit in them, whereas IRs are authors' own institutional showcases, sharing with their authors a joint interest in maximizing the visibility, usage, impact and prestige of their research findings. IRs are hence not eligible for undertaking the independent, neutral, 3rd-party quality-control function of journals. CRs, in contrast, are in principle eligible to become journals (just as any online entity today is), but if they do so, they do it in competition with the 24,000 existing journals, just as any new start-up journal does. Moreover, although CRs may already host preprints, those preprints are currently all destined for submission to established journals today; and those same CRs also host the postprints that result from the peer-review service provided by those journals. Hence CRs in no way substitute for that peer-review service-provision (ii) today.

So what is an "Overlay Journal"? The idea arose (incoherently, almost like an Escher drawing of an impossible staircase) from the idea that journals could simply "overlay" their peer-review functions on the self-archived preprint. The idea was first mooted in connection with a CR (Arxiv), but it was never coherently spelled out.

(I will not be discussing here any of the speculations about "overlay" and "disaggregated" and "deconstructed" journals that are based on untested notions about scrapping peer review altogether, or replacing it with open peer commentary; nor will I be discussing far-fetched notions of "multiple-review/multiple-publication" (in which it is imagined that peer review is just a static accept/reject matter, like a connotea tag, and that papers can be multiply "published" by several different journals, taking no account of the fact that referees are already a scarce and over-used resource, nor of the fact that peer review depends on answerability and revision): These conjectures are all fine as possible supplements to peer review, but none has yet been shown to be a viable substitute for it. The notion of an "Overlay Journal" is accordingly only assessed here in the context of standard peer review, as it is practised today by virtually all of the 24,000 journals whose peer-reviewed content is the target of the OA movement.)

One rather trivial construal of "Overlay Journal" (not the intended interpretation) would be that instead of submitting preprints to journals, authors could deposit them in CRs (or IRs) and simply send the deposit's URL to the journal, to retrieve it from there, for peer-review. This would not make the journal an "Overlay" on the CR or IR; it would simply provide a more efficient means of submitting papers to journals (and this has indeed been adopted as an optional means of submission by several physics journals, just as the submission of digital drafts instead of hard copy, and submission via email instead of by mail has been quite naturally adopted, to speed and streamline submission and processing by most journals, in the digital era).

So submitting preprints to journals via IRs or CRs is not tantamount to making the IR or CR into an underlay for "Overlay Journals," nor to making journals into overlays for the IR or CR. (In the case of IRs, because the authorship of most journals is distributed across many institutions, depositing in IRs would have meant "Distributed-Overlay Journals" in any case, but let us not puzzle about what sort of an entity those might have been!)

What might be meant by an "Overlay Journal" in something other than this trivial optional-means-of-submission sense, then? Could the users of the term mean the hypothetical outcome contemplated earlier (1), with journals offloading their former access-provision function (i) onto the IR/CR network and downsizing to become just peer-review service-providers (ii)? Possibly, but at the moment journals don't seem to be inclined to do so, and if they did, it is likely that they would prefer to continue to be thought of as what they have always been: journals, with a name and an imprimatur. Paper journals were not "overlays" on libraries. Journals that abandon their print edition are still journals, not "overlays" on their electronic edition. If their electronic edition is jettisoned too, they're still journals, not "overlays" on IRs/CRs.

Once we recognise that access-provision (i) (whether on-paper or online) was always just an incidental, media-dependent function of peer-reviewed research journals, whereas peer-review service-provision and certification (ii) was always their essential function, then it becomes clear that -- medium-independently -- a journal was always just a peer-review service-provider and certifier of a paper's having successfully met its established quality standards: It has always provided a quality-control tag, -- the journal name -- affixed to a text, whether the text is on-paper on a bookshelf, in the journal's proprietary on-line archive, or in an OA IR or CR. In this very general sense, all journals already are (and always have been) "overlay journals": overlays over all these various media for storing and providing access to the papers resulting from having passed successfully through the journal's peer review procedure (which is not itself a static tagging exercise, but a dynamic, interactive, feedback-correction-and-revision process, answerable to the referees and editors).

In other words, throughout the evolution of research communication -- from On-Paper to On-Line to Open Access -- peer review remains peer review, a journal remains a journal (i.e., a peer-review service-provider and certifier), and texts tagged as "published" by "journal X" remain texts tagged as published by "journal X." All that changes is the access-medium and the degree of accessibility. (And possibly, one day, the cost-recovery model.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

On the premise that the Article Accessibility problem is solved, there is no longer any Journal Affordability problem left. Let us suppose (and hope) that researchers' institutions and funders soon mandate, at long last, that their employees/fundees (or their assigns) do the pathetically small number of keystrokes it takes to self-archive all their final, peer-reviewed drafts in their own Institutional Repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication.

That will generate 100% Open Access (OA).

Once it is no longer true that any would-be user is unable to access an article because his institution cannot afford the journal in which it happens to have been published, there is no longer any Accessibility Problem. Librarians' annual agony over which journals to keep and which to cancel within the constraints of their finite serials budgets (never anywhere near enough to afford all published journals) will be over. They can purchase as many as they can afford from among those journals for which their users indicate that they would still quite like to have them in-house (whether out of desire for the paper edition or for online add-ons, or out of habit, sentimentality, loyalty, civic-mindedness or superstition): Nothing important hinges on the choice or the outcome once it is sure that no potential user is any longer doing without (hence no research or researcher is any longer needlessly losing impact because of access denial).

To ever have thought otherwise is simply to have conflated the Accessibility and Affordability problems: Accessibility was always what made Affordability a problem at all.

And before the inevitable, tedious question is asked about how the essential costs of peer-reviewed journal publishing will continue to be covered if/when subscriptions become unsustainable, please consult the prophets.

(Publishing will adapt, cutting the costs of the inessentials, downsizing to the essentials, possibly right down to peer-review service-provision alone; those irreducible essential costs will then be covered on the OA cost-recovery model, out of a fraction of the annual institutional windfall savings from the institutional journal cancellations. Till that income stream is released, however, OA Publishing is OA-Publicatio Praecox...)

Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/

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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.)

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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

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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.

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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