No Such Thing As "Provostial Publishing": II

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SUMMARY: OA IRs provide free supplemental copies of published, refereed journal articles. The way to access them is via a harvester/indexer. Direct searching of the IR is more relevant for (1) institution-internal record-keeping, (2) performance assessment, (3) CV-generation, (4) grant application and fulfillment, and perhaps also some window-shopping by prospective (5) faculty, (6) researchers or (7) students. The main purpose of depositing refereed journal articles is (8) so they are accessible to all would-be users, not just to those whose institutions happen to have a subscription to the journal in which they were published. That way (9) the usage and impact of the institutional research output is maximized (and so is (10) overall research progress).
   What content an IR accepts is an entirely different matter from what content an IR mandates. Harvard is mandating OA target content, which is the refereed, accepted final drafts of peer-reviewed journal articles. Harvard is not publishing its journals articles. The journals are publishing them, and providing the peer review and copy-editing. Harvard is merely providing supplementary access to the peer-reviewed final drafts for those would-be users who cannot afford access to the publishers published (and copy-edited) version.
   OA is needed for researcher (peer to peer) access. The lay public benefits indirectly from the enhanced research productivity, progress, impact and applications generated by OA, not from direct public access to esoteric, technical reports. But whatever is one's primary rationale -- public access or peer access -- the other comes with the OA territory.
   Are would-be users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access to the publisher's copy-edited version better off with a refereed final draft, not copy-edited, or are they better off without it? (The answer is obvious.)
   If and when Green OA self-archiving (of refereed, non-copy-edited final drafts of journal articles) and Green OA self-archiving mandates should ever make journal subscriptions unsustainable, author-institutions can pay for peer review by the article out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings on the Gold OA cost-recovery model. If they find it worth paying for too, the copy-editing service can be bundled with the peer review service.

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[See also: No Such Thing As "Provostial Publishing": I]

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On Fri, 30 May 2008, Sandy Thatcher wrote in liblicense:

ST: "[O]ne is not likely to start with an IR to find the most important work in a discipline, unless one happens to follow the work of a particular scholar, in which case one would likely go to the scholar's own web site first, not the IR."

OA IRs provide free supplemental copies of published, refereed journal articles. The best and most likely way to find and access them is via a harvester/indexer that links to the item, not by directly searching the IR itself. (Direct searching of the IR is more relevant for (1) institution-internal record-keeping, (2) performance assessment, (3) CV-generation, (4) grant application/fulfillment, and perhaps also some window-shopping by prospective (5) faculty, (6) researchers or (7) students.)

The main purpose of depositing refereed journal articles is (8) to maximize their accessibility, so they are accessible to all would-be users, not just to those whose institutions happen to have a subscription to the journal in which they were published. That way (9) the usage and impact of the institutional research output is maximized (and so is (10) overall research progress).

ST: "But I do continue to question what the institution gains from its IR."

It seems to me that (1) to (10) above is quite a list of institutional gains from their IRs.

ST: "Does Harvard really need, or will it gain, any more "prestige" by having its faculty's work deposited there?"

Prestige is only a small part of it. All universities want and need (1) - (10) (and not all universities are Harvard for prestige either!).

ST: "It seems equally likely that it will lose some respect if too many scholars post articles that are first drafts or occasional pieces that would never appear in any peer-reviewed forum. It could easily become a grab bag of miscellany that will not reflect well on Harvard's presumed reputation for quality."

What content an IR accepts is an entirely different matter from what content an IR mandates. Harvard is mandating OA target content, which is the refereed, accepted final drafts of peer-reviewed journal articles.

It does not seem to have done the prestige of high energy physics any harm to have been (for over a decade and a half) self-archiving their pre-refereeing preprints too, even before their refereed, final drafts. But that is an individual and disciplinary choice, not one that the Harvard mandate is making for its faculty, and not the primary purpose of an OA IR.

ST: "Harvard authors, on the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I would suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the institution."

That may or may not be a good argument against depositing unrefereed preprints, but it has nothing to do with OA, OA mandates, or the primary purpose of OA IRs.

ST: "And, as for the general public, what members of that public are really going to bother spending their time pouring over esoteric scholarship when they can go to Wikipedia to get the information they need? This seems to me as false an assumption as the expectation that somehow members of the public are going to benefit greatly from reading the technical articles posted on PubMed Central under the new NIH program."

I think you are quite right about that, Sandy. I myself have been somewhat uncomfortable all along with the heavy emphasis that some of the advocacy for OA has placed on the putative need of the general tax-paying public for access to peer-reviewed research journal articles. The need is there for health-related research, and perhaps a few other areas, but I have always felt it weakens rather than strengthens the case for OA to argue that its primary purpose and urgency is for the sake of lay public access. It is not. OA is needed for researcher (peer to peer) access. The lay public benefits indirectly from the enhanced research productivity, progress, impact and applications generated by OA, not from direct public access to esoteric, technical reports.

However, I have to admit that my worries may have been misplaced, because the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (which I strongly support) managed to get through to a lot more people (lay public, academics and congressmen) with the message of taxpayer access than they would have done if they had stressed only peer-to-peer access. So they perhaps overgeneralized the special case of health-related research, suggesting that it was a matter of similar urgent public interest in all public-supported research. In reality, it is a matter of similarly urgent interest for the public -- but an interest in maximizing research progress and applications, by making research openly accessible to its real intended users, namely, other researchers. That is the way the tax-paying public maximizes its benefits from the research it supports -- not by reading it for themselves!

This public access argument, however, applies more to the public funding of research grants (such as those of NIH) than to university research access policy. In the university case, it is clear that the objectives of OA mandates are mostly peer-to-peer (or, if you like, university-to-university access) rather than a burning need for public access.

It is to be noted, though, that whatever is one's primary rationale -- public access or peer access -- the other comes with the OA territory. So the outcome is exactly the same.

Harnad, S. (2007) Ethics of Open Access to Biomedical Research: Just a Special Case of Ethics of Open Access to Research. Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, 2 (31).

ST: "I imagine that very few members of the public are going to be able to understand the vast majority of these articles, let alone derive any useful lessons for life from them. There seems to be a general fantasy that the whole world is somehow waiting breathlessly for access to all this highly specialized knowledge. I speak as director of a press that has a hard time selling books that we think to be of "general interest," compared with our monographs. The audience just isn't there, folks! And institutions that believe their reputations are going to soar because of what their faculty post on their IRs are just kidding themselves."

I agree with most of this, as you see.

(But be careful, Sandy! Some might be tempted to say you have a hard time selling books, but you might have less of a hard time giving them away free (OA)! As you know, I do not make this argument for books in general, because I know that there are true and unavoidable production costs to cover there -- whereas with Green OA IRs, journal publication reduces to just the costs of implementing peer review alone. Moreover, book authors are more inclined to seek royalties than to pay production costs and give their books away free. But for some esoteric monographs, an online-only OA edition, with costs covered by the author's institution, may very well turn out to be the optimal model, much as it will probably end up for journal article publication.)

Harnad, S., Varian, H. & Parks, R. (2000) Academic publishing in the online era: What Will Be For-Fee And What Will Be For-Free? Culture Machine 2 (Online Journal)

Ceterum Censeo: The notion of "provostial publishing" is utter nonsense:

No Such Thing As "Provostial Publishing": I.

ST: "On what basis do you [claim journal copy-editing is minimal]? Have you surveyed journals to find out how much copyediting they do? Are you basing this on your own personal experience with copyediting done by the journals to which you have submitted your own work primarily?"

It is based on the CUP journal I edited for 25 years, plus many other journals for which I have refereed and in which I have published. It is also a judgment shared by many not only in the research community but also in the publishing community: Journal article copy-editing today is down to which-hunting and reference-querying, for the most part. Software can do the latter and we can do without the former, I think.

ST: "I, of course, cannot claim sufficiently wide knowledge to make sweeping generalizations about the degree and level of copyediting done for journals compared with books at all publishing houses. But as director of a press that publishes 11 journals in the humanities, and a past employee of another press that published three (including one in mathematics), I can attest that the copyediting done for these journals is at the same level as done for books, which in university presses is pretty high. I suspect that other university presses operate in this respect the same way we do--which would mean that at least 1,000 scholarly journals get far more than 'minimal copy-editing'."

That may well be. But there are only two underlying issues here, so it's best not forget them:

(1) Are would-be users whose institutions cannot afford subscription access to the publisher's copy-edited version better off with a refereed final draft, not copy-edited, or are they better off without it? (The answer is obvious, I think.)

(2) If and when Green OA self-archiving (of refereed, non-copy-edited final drafts of journal articles) and Green OA self-archiving mandates should ever make journal subscriptions unsustainable, author-institutions can pay for peer review by the article out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings on the Gold OA cost-recovery model. If they find it worth paying for too, the copy-editing service can be bundled with the peer review service.

Nothing hangs on either of these things, and all other questions (such as how much copy-editing is really being done on journal articles today) are irrelevant to the Green OA and Green OA mandate issue.

ST: "I can also attest, from my own years of experience as a copyeditor, that the job does not just involve polishing prose and improving grammar. Not uncommonly, copyeditors will find and correct egregious factual and other errors, thus sparing the authors from considerable embarrassment. Without their "value added" services, much will get published in Green OA form that will NOT serve either the authors' peers or the general public well."

Right now, that value-added is being paid for by subscriptions. If subscriptions ever vanish, and the value is still desired, it can be paid for along with peer review on the Gold OA cost-recovery model.

ST: "Hence, I conclude, Harvard and others that follow its example and are content to publish less than the final archival version will be opening themselves to the exposure of all the flaws of scholarly writing that now get hidden from public view by the repair work done by copyeditors. Caveat lector!"

Harvard is not publishing its journals articles. The journals are publishing them, and providing the peer review and copy-editing. Harvard is merely providing supplementary access to the peer-reviewed final drafts for those would-be users who cannot afford access to the publishers published (and copy-edited) version. To complete the circle again, please refer to (1) above...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum