Open Access Archivangelism

Mike Eisen wrote:

“I believe we should get rid of publishers… the services they provide are either easy to replicate (formatting articles to look pretty) or they currently do extremely poorly (peer review)… these services are unnecessary… [we should] move to a system where you post things when you want to post them, and that people comment/rate/annotate articles as they read them post publication.”

1. PLOS (like other publishers) seems to be charging a hefty price for “services that are unnecessary.” ;>)

2. I agree completely that we should get rid of publishers' unnecessary services and their costs. But how to do that, while publishers control what is bundled into subscriptions in exchange for publication and access (or into pre-Green Fools-Gold in exchange for "publication" and OA)?

My answer is the one Mike calls “parasitic”: Institutions and funders worldwide mandate Green OA (with the “copy-request” Button to circumvent publisher OA embargoes). The cancellations that that will make possible will force publishers to drop the unnecessary services and their costs and downsize to post-Green Fair-Gold for peer review alone..

3. But I disagree with Mike about peer-review: it will remain the sole essential service. And the (oft-voiced) notion that peer-review can be replaced by crowd-sourcing, after “publication” is pure speculation, supported by no evidence that it can ensure quality at least as well as classical peer review, nor that is it scalable and sustainable.

Michael Eisen replied:

There is no evidence that post publication review can assure quality, I agree. But there is a wealth of evidence that pre-publication review DOES NOT assure quality, and it is absurd to spend $10b a year and delay the open availability of typical papers by 10 months to achieve it.

1. The relevant question is not whether ("pre-publication") peer review "assures quality" (compared to what?) but whether "crowd-sourcing after 'publication' can ensure quality at least as well as classical [i.e., "pre-publication"] peer review."

2. For years now there has been absolutely nothing preventing every author on the planet from publicly posting their pre-refereeing preprints for feedback on the web. (Virtually all journals have by now dropped the "Ingelfinger Rule" forbidding that.)

3. But public posting on the web is not "publication" (in the academic sense, which means refereed publication), and feedback on the web is not "peer review."

(For good reasons, in some fields researchers don't want to post their unrefereed work publicly. Sometimes this is to protect their reputations, sometimes it is to protect public health.)

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