[GOAL] Re: Nice blog post on OA

[David Prosser]

Hi Stevan

While it is nice to be agreed with, perhaps you are thinking of somebody else in your third paragraph?  I don't recall being part of the debate recently.

Best wishes

David
 


On 11 Feb 2012, at 14:31, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> 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
> 
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