[GOAL] Re: reducing volume of research publications

Thu Jun 21 12:16:07 BST 2012

My first email to this list. Hello!

Regarding Richard Poynder's discussion about funders and universities potentially rationing the number of peer-reviewed publications - yes, I can also imagine this happening in the future. Personally, I think a formal rationing would be insupportable - more likely, subtle pressure could be put on academics to think about how many papers they are publishing. 

In future, when academics apply for grants, I imagine they would include in their grant application the publishing costs and volume of papers 'expected' to emerge from that research grant. Libraries would then keep an eye on how many papers were being published by which academics, and at what cost.

Hence the line in my Nature article on the Finch report [http://www.nature.com/news/britain-aims-for-broad-open-access-1.10846]: "Whatever the solution, academics will be much more aware of the costs of publishing. This could, in turn, modify their behaviour, with researchers submitting papers to the journals they can afford to publish in, or trying to publish fewer, broader articles."

This will be an interesting issue to watch. 

Richard.

Richard Van Noorden 
Assistant news editor 
+44 (0)20 7843 3670 
r.vannoorden at nature.com 
Web: www.nature.com/news 
Twitter: @naturenews 
Nature, 4 Crinan St, London, UK 
N1 9XW 

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Agreement on Green OA not needed from publishers but from
      institutions and funders (Thomas Krichel)
   2.   Adam Tickel on Finch Report, Green OA and Peer Review Costs
      in Times Higher Ed (Richard Poynder)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:30:43 +0200
From: Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org>
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Agreement on Green OA not needed from publishers
	but from institutions and funders
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>
Message-ID: <20120621093043.GA7255 at openlib.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

  Peter Murray-Rust writes

> Nature "has to charge" 10000 USD for an open-access paper because it is
> selling glory. Glory commands whatever price people are willing to pay.

  Exactly. That's why publishers will stay in business whatever the 
  fate of the subscription model.

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                      http://authorprofile.org/pkr1
                                               skype: thomaskrichel

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:53:57 +0100
From: Richard Poynder <ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk>
Subject: [GOAL]   Adam Tickel on Finch Report, Green OA and Peer
	Review Costs in Times Higher Ed
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>
Message-ID: <4FE2EF35.9090509 at richardpoynder.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

What I find striking about Adam Tickell's comments in the THE article is 
his suggestion that funds for publishing will have to be "managed" and 
that "Quite a large number of people publish a huge volume of papers. If 
they were to reduce that, it may not make any significant difference to 
the integrity of the science base."

It reminds me that when I spoke to David Sweeney, HEFCE's directorof 
research, innovation,and skills, 
(http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/big-deal-not-price-but-cost.html 
<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/big-deal-not-price-but-cost.html>) last 
year he said that it was not obvious to HEFCE "that a constraint on the 
volume of material published through the current scholarly system would 
be a bad thing and that is why, in our research assessment system, we 
only look at up to four outputs per academic."

He added, "The amount of research deserving publication 'for the record' 
is much less than the amount deserving publication 'for immediate debate 
within the community' and whereas print journals have met both needs in 
the past the internet offers the prospect of decoupling the two, leading 
to a drop in the amount of material requiring/meriting the full peer 
review and professional editing service."

This suggests to me a scenario in which universities and research 
funders follow the Finch Committee's advice: opt for Gold OA and agree 
to pay to publish papers, but then severely restrict the number of 
papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Researchers who want to 
publish more than, say, one paper a year might be told to either pay the 
publication fees themselves, or to use services like arXiv (or perhaps 
their institutional repository, or even a blog) for any they wish to 
publish beyond their ration.

As Sweeney put it, "[T]here is a question about the point of publishing 
material using the full panoply of quality-assured journal publication. 
Our view is that we should look at research quality as an issue of 
excellence rather than an issue of volume of publications. I can't speak 
for the [UK] Research Councils on this but, for us, one publication 
which is ground-breaking and world-leading is worth more than any number 
of publications which would be recognised internationally but not as 
excellent or as world-leading."

And indeed, that is what the title of the THE article implies: "Open 
access may require funds to be rationed."

Richard Poynder

Stevan Harnad writes:

These are comments on Paul Jump's article in today's Times Higher Ed.,
quoting Adam Tickel on the Finch Report, Green OA and Peer Review Costs
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1 
<http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1> 
  <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1 <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1>>

THE COST OF PEER REVIEW: PRE-EMPTIVE GOLD VS. POST-GREEN-OA GOLD

Professor Tickell is quite right that peer review has a cost that must be
paid. But what he seems to have forgotten is that that price is already
being paid *in full* today, handsomely, by institutional subscriptions,
worldwide.

The Green Open Access self-archiving mandates in which the UK leads
worldwide (a lead which the Finch Report, if heeded, would squander)
require the author's peer-reviewed final draft to be made freely accessible
online so that the peer-reviewed research findings are accessible not only
to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in
which they were published, but to all would-be users.

The Finch Report instead proposes to pay publishers even more money than
they are already paid today. This is obviously not because the peer review
is not being paid for already today, but in order to ensure that Green OA
itself does not make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering
the costs of publication.

To repeat: the Finch Report (at the behest of the publishing lobby) is
proposing to continue denying access-denied users access to paid-up,
peer-reviewed research, conducted with public funding, and instead pay
publishers 50-60 million pounds a year more, gradually, to make that
research Gold OA. The Finch Report proposes doing this instead of extending
the Green OA mandates that already make twice as much UK research OA (40%)
accessible as the worldwide average (20%) at no extra cost, because of the
UK's worldwide lead in mandating Green OA.
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