[GOAL] Re: Nice blog post on OA

[Stevan Harnad]

Apologies, David (and Steven): I meant Steven Pinfield, not David. -- SH

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 10:34 AM, David Prosser
<david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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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