[GOAL] Re: Nice blog post on OA

[Stevan Harnad]

A HAPPIER ENDING: UNBUNDLING QUALITY CONTROL

Mike Taylor's allegory is brilliant. But its pessimistic ending is not
inevitable.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/feb/10/parable-farmers-teleporting-duplicator?CMP=twt_gu

The "distributors" (journals) performed two functions in the
"pre-teleportation" (Gutenberg, per-web) era: One was (1) to package
and distribute (but not produce) the produce (articles), for those who
could afford to pay the price; and the other was (2) to manage (but
not provide) the quality control (peer review) that would ensure and
certify that the produce was fit for consumption. (The peers did the
actual reviewing for free.)

Mike's analogy suggests that the producers (authors) only need the
quality control (peer review) for their careers (journal prestige).
But they need it as "consumers" (users) too, so they know what is safe
to eat (use, apply, build upon). [And (as David Prosser has been
correctly but so far unsuccessfully trying to explain here) the
quality control (provided free by the peers) does not just *rate* the
quality of the produce: it *improves* it, to the benefit of authors,
users, and public health. ]

Since the peers review for free, the only essential service that
peer-reviewed journals still perform in the "teleportation"
(Post-Gutenberg web) era is to manage the peer review. Teleportation
can now take care of all the rest of the obsolete Gutenberg products
and services (distribution and storage) for free, but quality control
itself still has to be managed by a neutral 3rd party honest-broker,
as farmers cannot be entrusted to "police" their own produce, and that
still costs a little money (though incomparably less than the whole
obsolescent bundle now costs).

So here comes another wrinkle in Mike's analogy: Journals, unlike
food, are purchased by users' institutions (universities) via annual
institutional journal subscriptions, not by individual consumers. If
there were a way to unbundle the obsolete products and services
(distribution and storage) from the sole remaining essential service
(managing peer review), then institutions could easily pay the far
lower cost of just the quality control for just their own outgoing
produce out of their windfall savings from no longer having to pay for
the incoming quality-controlled produce of other institutions
(co-bundled in annual journal subscriptions).

So the outcome of the allegory need not be pessimistic if there is a
way to get from "here" (increasingly unaffordable annual institutional
subscriptions to obsolete products and services) to "there"
(downsizing journals to just the costs of managing quality control).

And there is a way. And that way is precisely the one that the
"distributors" have been vigorously lobbying against:

The institutions and funders of the "farmers" (researchers) need to
mandate (require) that their quality-controlled produce (peer-reviewed
final drafts of their articles -- not yet "packaged" by the
distributor) must be "teleported" (deposited in their institutional
repositories, free for all online) by their employees and fundees,
immediately upon being certified as having met the quality control
standards of the distributor (i.e., upon acceptance by the journal).

This way the full cost of the essential quality control (as well as
the obsolete packaging and distribution) is still being paid for in
full (by the institutions that can still afford the journal
subscriptions), but no one is going hungry, because teleportation
makes the quality-controlled food accessible free for all ("open
access").

Then, if and when institutions decide that they no longer need or want
the obsolete products and services still co-bundled with the quality
control, they can cancel their subscriptions. And if and when
institutional cancelations make subscriptions unsustainable as the
means of covering their costs, the (former) distributors can cut the
obsolete costs (per journal) of packaging and distribution, offloading
them onto teleportation (the global network of mandated institution
repositories), leaving just the essential service of managing and
certifying the quality control, which the institutions can then pay
(per outgoing article) out of a fraction of their annual subscription
cancelation savings.

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged
Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the
Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/

Public Access to Federally Funded Research
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/865-guid.html

> CHARLES OPPENHEIM [c.oppenheim -- btinternet.com]
> Sent: Friday, February 10, 2012 6:53 AM
> To: GlobalOpen Access List ( Successor of Am Sci)
> Subject: [GOAL] Nice blog post on OA
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/feb/10/parable-farmers-teleporting-duplicator?CMP=twt_gu
>
> Very nice analogy!
>  Professor Charles Oppenheim