[GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

Apologies for cross-posting.

Thank you, Stevan, for this analysis. 

You may be a little too generous in attributing a "green staus" to
Elsevier, but so be it! Together, we can play the good-cop, bad-cop
game.

Meanwhile, all the points you make are spot on. They all point to the
attempts by publishers such as Elsevier to grant while not granting, yet
grant somewhat, etc... so as to preserve public image and revenue
streams. I believe this is basically called "obfuscation". It
contributes to confusing the landscape, and it slows down the moves
toward Open Access. From one publisher to another, authors lose track of
what each one of them allows or does not allow. And author-researchers
have better things to do in life than studying publishers' contractual
fine points in tiny print.

One fundamental question lurks behind all this: are publishers serving
knowledge production, storage and dissemination, or is research serving
publishers?

And please, publishers, do not come back with some win-win solution...
So long as the profit rate of commercial publishers remains at present
levels, win-win solutions are inconceivable; and so ,long as these
publishers are traded publicly, they will relentlessly try to maximize
profit rather than optimize the research cycle. Of course, fig-leaves
will multiply, with the intent to hide all this, but let us not be
deluded: commercial market mechanisms are not optimal for the
intellectual market of research results.

The answer is clear: if publishers play their fundamentally subservient
role honestly within the research world, even granting limited and
reasonable profits (say 5%), that is if they honestly try helping the
dissemination phase of research without polluting it with other, alien,
dynamics such as maximum profit seeking, revenue stream augmentations
and other commercial intents, then the world of knowledge will work
better and will be cleaner. This is what the OA movement is all about:
make research work according to one's ability to do research, and not
according to one's ability to pay subscription, licensing and author-pay
schemes.

This said, the dissemination of research costs money; no one disagrees
with this. But let us not call this "sustainability". let us call it
"financial viability". Why ? Because research itself is viable
financially only because it is constantly subsidized by public money all
over the world. Placed in a purely commercial context, scientific
research would be but the shadow of itself because companies are not
interested in financing the infrastructures of commerce, such as
fundamental research or ... roads. Which companies would pay for CERN?
For Hubble? Etc...

The peer-review and publishing of research results is an integral part
of the research life-cycle. Without publishing, research is truncated
out of public existence.

If publishing is an integral, essential part of the research life-cycle,
why insist that it be "sustainable" in the commercial sense of the term?
Why not dispose of it financially in the same way as most of research:
let it be subsidized. This is, I believe, the conclusion that the
Wellcome and Max Planck have reached with their decision to subsidize a
journal. I simply wish that journal were free to authors as well as to
readers, but with rigorous peer-review, of course.

And let us remember that the cost of the dissemination of research is,
at most, 2% of the cost of research, even taking into account the huge
profits taken in by publisher such as Elsevier. Given that these
research results are paid for by public monies, that the resulting
publications are bought by libraries which, for the most part are also
rely on public monies (let us not all be mesmerized by the ivy-league
model and its extensions), the subsidies are already in place; by
feeding into the publishers' extraordinary rates of profit, they simply
are not directed in the right way.

Given the present political climate in the world, it may be time to
occupy Elsevier (and others...) :-) 

Jean-Claude Guédon

-- 
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal



Le dimanche 13 mai 2012 à 11:06 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit :

> ** Cross-Posted **
> 
> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 9:10 PM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sat, May 12, 2012, Alicia Wise (Elsevier Director of Universal
> >> Access) wrote:
> >>
> >> It will be very helpful in helping researchers to provide -- and their
> >> institutions and funders to mandate -- Open Access if Elsevier drops
> >> its "you may if you wish but not if you must" clause, which is not
> >> only incoherent, but intimidates authors.
> >
> > Stevan,
> > Could you please explain this clause? (This is my ignorance as I don't
> > publish with Elevier and so am unfamiliar with their author-side contracts).
> > Does it mean that Elsevier sometimes allows Green Open Access and sometimes don't?
> 
> It means that Elsevier formally endorses its authors' right to make
> their final, peer-reviewed drafts Open Access immediately upon
> publication (no embargo) by posting them on their institutional
> website (Green Gratis OA) -- "but not in institutional repositories
> with mandates for systematic postings."
> 
> The distinction between an institutional website and an institutional
> repository is bogus.
> 
> The distinction between nonmandatory posting (allowed) and mandatory
> posting (not allowed) is arbitrary nonsense. ("You retain the right to
> post if you wish but not if you must!")
> 
> The "systematic" criterion is also nonsense. (Systematic posting would
> be the institutional posting of all the articles in the journal; but
> any single institution only contributes a tiny, arbitrary fraction of
> the articles in any journal, just as any single author does; so the
> mandating institution would not be a 3rd-party "free-rider" on the
> journal's content: its researchers would simply be making their own
> articles OA, by posting them on their institutional website, exactly
> as described.)
> 
> This "systematic" clause is hence pure FUD, designed to scare or bully
> or confuse institutions into not mandating posting, and authors into
> not complying with their institutional mandates. (There are also
> rumours that in confidential licensing negotiations with institutions,
> Elsevier has been trying to link bigger and better pricing deals to
> the institution's agreeing not to adopt a Green OA mandate.)
> 
> Along with the majority of publishers today, Elsevier is a Green
> publisher: It has endorsed immediate (unembargoed) institutional Green
> OA posting by its authors ever since 27 May 2004:
> http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3771.html
> 
> Elsevier's public image is so bad today that rescinding its Green
> light to self-archive after almost a decade of mounting demand for OA
> is hardly a very attractive or viable option:
> http://cdn.anonfiles.com/1334923359479.pdf
> http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#32.Poisoned
> 
> And double-talk, smoke-screens and FUD are even less attractive:
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/822-.html
> 
> It will be very helpful in helping researchers to provide -- and their
> institutions and funders to mandate -- Open Access if Elsevier drops
> its "you may if you wish but not if you must" clause, which is not
> only incoherent, but intimidates authors. (This would also help
> counteract some of the rather bad press Elsevier has been getting
> lately...)
> 
> Stevan Harnad
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