Publishing Lobby

Sandy Thatcher, President, Association of American University Presses (AAUP) wrote:

ST: "You make it all sound so simple, Stevan, but there is nothing simple about a transition from Green OA to Gold OA, including the redirection of savings from journal subscriptions to funding Gold OA journals, because as many wise people like Jim O'Donnell have pointed out on this list [liblicense], universities don't work that way."

I make no wishes, wise or unwise. And I make no conjectures ("Hypotheses non Fingo") -- except perhaps (if forced) as counter-conjectures, to counter others' unforced conjectures.

The actual empirical evidence (neither wish nor conjecture) is that OA self-archiving (Green OA) is (1) feasible, (2) being done, (3) beneficial, and (4) being mandated. Whether and when it ever goes on to generate cancellations and transitions and redirections is all pure speculation, based on no empirical evidence one way or the other (except that it hasn't happened yet, even in fields that reached 100% Green OA years ago). But if you insist on asking a hypothetical "what if?" question just the same, I respond with an equally hypothetical "then..." answer.

The factual part is fact. If wise men have privileged access to the future, so be it. I have none. I have only the available evidence, and logic. (And logic tells me, platitudinously, that necessity is the mother of invention, and where there's a will, there's a way, especially if/when the hypothetical cancellation windfall savings that no one has yet seen should ever materialize. Till then, I'll just go with the evidence-based four -- OA self-archiving (2), OA self-archiving mandates (4), and their already demonstrated feasibility (1) and benefits (3) -- leaving the speculation to those who prefer that sort of thing.)

ST: "Wishing it were so does not make it so. And by talking about peer review only, you oversimplify what is involved in journal publishing, which requires skills that go beyond simply conducting peer review and that are not most economically carried out by faculty, who are not trained for such tasks and whose dedication of time to them detracts from the exercise of their main talents as researchers."

Well, I could invoke my quarter century as founder and editor in chief of a major peer-reviewed journal as evidence that I may know what I am talking about...

But I'd rather just point out that the conjecture about journal-publication downsizing to just peer-review service-provision is part of the hypothetical conditional that I only invoke if someone insists on playing the speculation game. It is neither a wish nor a whim. I am perfectly content with 100% Green OA. Full stop.

Apart from that, I'll stick with the empirical facts -- reminder: self-archiving, self-archiving mandates, their demonstrated feasability and their demonstrated benefits -- and abstain from the hypothesizing.

ST: "You are also wrong in interpreting PRISM as just another repetition of the same old tired anti-OA rhetoric. As a member of the publishing community whose press is a member of the PSP (but not an endorser of PRISM), I can tell you that this is not just more of the same."

If PRISM is making any new points -- empirical or logical -- I would be very grateful if Sandy (or anyone) would point out to me exactly what those new points are. For all I have seen has been a repetition of the very few and very familiar old points I and others have rebutted so many, many times before...

(Sandy seems to have overlooked the linked list of 21 references I included as evidence that these points have all been voiced, and rebutted, repeatedly, in bygone days. If anyone sends me a list of new points, it would be very helpful if they first checked that list to see whether those points are indeed new, rather than dated, discredited duplicates.)

ST: "Whether we are getting close to a "tipping point" is of course a matter of conjecture, but then so is the overall benefit from Green OA, which you always state as though it were an established fact rather than a hypothesis with some evidence in support of it yet hardly overwhelming evidence at this point in time."

First, since we are talking about wishful thinking, I know full well that the OA self-archiving advantage -- in terms of citations and downloads -- is something that the anti-OA publishers dearly wish were nonexistent, or merely a methodological artifact of some kind.

Second, I and others are quite happy to continue conducting actual empirical studies and analyses confirming the OA advantage, and demonstrating that it is not just an artifact (of either early access or self-selection bias for quality). That interesting ongoing question is at least substantive and empirical, hence new (especially when the challenges come from those -- such as Kurtz and Moed -- who have no vested interests in the outcome one way or the other). The doomsday prophecies and the hype about government control and censorship are not.

"Where There's No Access Problem There's No Open Access Advantage"

(I expect that the tobacco industry did more than its share of wishing that the health benefits of not smoking would turn out to be nonexistent or a self-selection artifact too: When money is at stake, interpretations become self-selective, if not self-serving, too!)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum