[GOAL] Re: Statement: Australian Open Access Support Group applauds new ARC open access policy

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

Le samedi 19 janvier 2013 à 10:14 +1100, Arthur Sale a écrit : 

> Thanks Jean-Claude Guédon and Falk Reckling for your comments.  It is
> difficult to answer them succinctly, but I will try.
> 
>  
> 
> 1.     There is a substantial difference between books and articles in
> the current situation. Almost no researcher reads the printed copy of
> a journal article any more: they access the online version. Journal
> publishers who continue to print paper journals are largely wasting
> money, or doing it for archival purposes. On the other hand, until
> very recently, no-one read a book in any other format than paper. This
> is beginning to change with Kindle, iPad and other tablets, but the
> paradigm change is far from complete.


The reading situation you describe is not yet the dominant situation in
HSS. As for publishers who continue to publish on paper, I agree, they
are wasting money, but this is not the point of this discussion. They
are doing so, however, in part to respond to a real demand from
significant fractions of their readership. This may be a generational
thing, but the generalization above is inaccurate in HSS.

> 
> 2.     Editorial work on journal articles is mimimal (and often
> counter-productive), while refereeing (selectivity of articles) is a
> major issue. With books the situation is reversed. Editorial work is
> often extensive, and acceptance (the parallel for refereeing) is
> largely in-house and there are fewer proposals.


Again, you generalize too fast. Editorial work is still important in SSH
journals, in part because articles do not obey any particular templates.
It is comparable to book editing. 

Many academic publishers use external referees to evaluate book
manuscripts ( I have done such work on a number of occasions). Granting
agencies that support the publishing of academic books use external
referees extensively, if only to have ready justification for their
decision-making results.

> 
> 3.     I used ibooks as my example because they offer the best example
> of where electronic books are going: interactive. The conventional
> ebook that one can see in novels or .pub format is just a slightly
> souped-up pdf of text and a few pictures. An ibook is an interactive
> object, albeit at present in a proprietary format. I could also have
> cited Wolfram’s CDF (Computable Document Format). Have you used an
> ibook or CDF? Tried to write one? I have done both and the experience
> tells me that this is going to be an influential development.


I obviously do not have your expertise on this topic, but this was only
a very minor, marginal point in my counter-argument.

> 
> 4.     Why do academic presses produce open access books? Because they
> are subsidized to do so, and their performance indicators are not
> profit-oriented, but academic prestige. I know that Jean-Claude
> realizes this, because he says so. The same for some professional
> societies. Good for them too, but it is not the norm.


The norm is that academic presses that produce books are generally
subsidized. The are subsidized by either by their own institution or by
external, governmental, agencies. This is true of OA books, but it is
also true of books for sale. OA books, and I agree with you, are not the
norms among academic presses, but various projects (e.g. OAPEN in
Europe) point in that direction. 

The subsidies from institutions have gone down and this has led a number
of academic presses to become more like commercial presses. In turn,
this situation has produced a crisis for the career management of many
SSH disciplines. Both Robert Darnton (historian) and Stephen Greenblatt
(literature) have, as presidents of their respective associations,
published their concern about this. It demonstrates, in passing, the
central importance of books in those disciplines.

> 
> 5.     Printing, stock and distribution is largely wasted effort for
> journals. My own university library frequently simply trashes unwanted
> print copies sent to them as not worth the costs of cataloguing or
> shelving.


But It just happens, to repeat myself, that many SSH journals are still
being distributed in paper form, if only because a number of
(presumably) old farts want to read them that way. Personally, I don't,
but many of my colleagues do. And the type of reading needed to study a
30-page SSH article is a lot easier when print is available. In SSH
disciplines, people, when they use on-line journals, download and print
to read. Try reading Derrida on a screen... :-) 

> 
> 6.     A book is not just a long article, any more than the Golden
> Gate Bridge is just a long log across a creek. Scale changes things.
> Every engineer knows this. So do the publishing industries. Books have
> much smaller purchasing groups and much greater costs, in general,
> than a journal house. They also are not serials and cannot rely on
> continuing business.


Again, this is way too general and too fast. Book series exist, as do
thematic journal that really are book series in disguise. Books vary in
length from a few dozen pages to thousands of pages; articles vary from
a few pages to a few dozen pages. In the print world, historians know
that articles published in two or three instalments, although a
minority, do exist. In short, drawing a firm boundary line between
articles and books is a difficult task.

The purchasing groups of books are not large, it is true, but the
subscription lists of some journals are equally pitiful. Once, Hindawi
picked up a journal that was indexed in the Web of Science but had fewer
than one hundred subscribers, if I remember correctly the story I was
told from the horse's mouth. 

> 
> 7.     Yes, I agree that academic presses will reduce costs to produce
> books. The ANU Press for example publishes online OA, or on-demand
> print for a fee. Sensible and makes OA books more viable. But academic
> presses are subsidized.


And many journals are subsidized too. In fact, in a number of countries,
even commercial scholarly journals are subsidized. France is a good
example of this situation, as is Italy. Canada also plays with this
formula.

> 
> 8.     My point in mentioning other forms of research outputs (and
> some of them are research outputs in the fine arts, others in
> engineering, and others in various other disciplines) was to point up
> the absurdity of interpreting “all research outputs” literally. 


OK

> 
>  
> 
> I apologise to any pure scientists who are bemused by this exchange.
> If one only publishes in journals or conferences, then the practices
> of other disciplines may appear strange. You may note that I did not
> include furniture prototypes, sculptures, etc to try to be succinct.
> The concept of making a sculpture open access would be an interesting
> question for a morning tea discussion. I could have made up a much
> longer list of objects which are research outputs, including databases
> and datasets, plant patents, etc. I fully expect that the ARC
> guidelines will spell out what research outputs they specifically
> intend.


OK

> 
>  
> 
> I hope that this explanation has helped.


Well, it has demonstrated one point I have regularly felt: the OA debate
is sometimes framed in terms that fit well with only some disciplines.
Arthur's answers reflect this limitation extremely well. As a historian
of science first trained in chemistry and teaching now comparative
literature, I have explored wide enough a variety of research practises
to know that they are very diverse indeed. Disciplinary provincialism is
one of the problems we must face up to in the OA community. Some of the
tactics offered from a limited disciplinary perspective do not agree
well with other disciplinary contexts, and they may even work against
wider strategic goals. Being sensitive and open to these possibilities
can only help the OA communities.




Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal

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