[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Big Deals, Big Macs and Consortial Licensing

Mon Nov 25 21:12:18 GMT 2013

Stevan continues to be hung up on the idea that 
some academic authors still have visions of fame 
and fortune they'd like to achieve through 
publishing books in the traditional manner, so he 
believes that the time for OA in book publishing 
has not yet arrived. But perhaps a simple 
terminological distinction may suffice to place 
this problem in proper perspective.  Academic 
books may be divided into two types: monographs 
and trade books. Monographs, by definition, are 
works of scholarship written primarily to address 
other scholars and are therefore unlikely to 
attract many, if any, readers beyond the walls of 
academe. Trade books encompass a large category 
that includes, as one subset, nonfiction works 
written by scholars but addressed not only to 
fellow scholars but also to members of the 
general public.

There is an easy practical way to distinguish the 
two: commercial trade publishers (as distinct 
from commercial scholarly publishers that do not 
aim at a trade market) have certain requirements 
for potential sales that guarantee that 
monographs will never be accepted for 
publication.  It is true that the authors of 
monographs, published by university presses and 
commercial scholarly publishers, are sometimes 
paid royalties. But these amounts seldom 
accumulate to large sums (unless the monographs 
happen to become widely adopted in classrooms as 
course assignments--a phenomenon that happens 
less these days when coursepacks and e-reserves 
permit use of excerpts for classroom 
assignments).  Thus not much is sacrificed, 
financially speaking, by publishing these books 
OA. And, indeed, a scholar may have more to gain, 
in terms of increased reputation from wider 
circulation that may translate into tenure and 
promotion, which are vastly more financially 
rewarding over the long term than royalties are 
ever likely to be from monograph sales.

Also, of course, financial opportunities do not 
need to be sacrificed completely by OA if the 
CC-BY-NC-ND license is used for monographs, 
preserving some money-generating rights to 
authors even under OA.

It also needs to be said that even trade authors 
can benefit from OA, as the successes of such 
authors as Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Jonathan 
Zittrain, and others have demonstrated, with the 
free online versions of their books serving to 
stimulate print sales.

Thus I believe Stevan is not being quite 
pragmatic enough in recognizing that the time has 
arrived for OA monograph publishing also, not 
just OA article publishing.

Sandy Thatcher

At 12:44 PM -0500 11/19/13, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>Ann Okerson (as 
><http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.html>interviewed 
>by Richard Poynder) is committed to licensing. I 
>am not sure whether the commitment is 
>ideological or pragmatic, but it's clearly a 
>lifelong ("asymptotic") commitment by now.
>
>I was surprised to see the direction Ann 
>ultimately took because -- as I have admitted 
>many times -- it was Ann who first opened my 
>eyes to (what eventually came to be called) 
>"Open Access."
>
>In the mid and late 80's I was still just in the 
>thrall of the scholarly and scientific potential 
>of the revolutionarily new online medium itself 
>(<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/sky-writing-or-when-man-first-met-troll/239420/>"Scholarly 
>Skywriting"), eager to get everything to be put 
>online. It was Ann's work on the serials crisis 
>that made me realize that it was not enough just 
>to get it all online: it also had to be made 
>accessible (online) to all of its potential 
>users, toll-free -- not just to those whose 
>institutions could afford the access-tolls 
>(licenses).
>
>And even that much I came to understand, 
>sluggishly, only after I had first realized that 
>what set apart the writings in question was not 
>that they were (as I had first naively dubbed 
>them) 
>"<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal>esoteric" 
>(i.e., they had few users) but that they were 
>peer-reviewed research journal articles, written 
>by researchers solely 
><http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1>for 
>impact, not for income.
>
>But I don't think the differences between Ann 
>and me can be set down to ideology vs. 
>pragmatics. I too am far too often busy trying 
>to free the growth of open access from the 
>ideologues (publishing reformers, rights 
>reformers (Ann's "open use" zealots), peer 
>review reformers, freedom of information 
>reformers) who are slowing the progress of 
>access to peer-reviewed journal articles (from 
>"now" to "better") by insisting only and 
>immediately on what they believe is the "best." 
>Like Ann, I, too, am all pragmatics (repository 
>software, analyses of the OA impact advantage, 
>mandates, analyses of mandate effeciveness).
>
>So Ann just seems to have a different sense of 
>what can (hence should) be done, now, to 
>maximize access, and how (as well as how fast). 
>And after her initial, infectious inclination 
>toward toll-free access (which I and others 
>caught from her) she has apparently concluded 
>that what is needed is to modify the terms of 
>the tolls (i.e., licensing).
>
>This is well-illustrated by Ann's view on 
>SCOAP3: "All it takes is for libraries to agree 
>that what they've now paid as subscription fees 
>for those journals will be paid instead to CERN, 
>who will in turn pay to the publishers as 
>subsidy for APCs."
>
>I must alas disagree with this view, on entirely 
><'"https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=scoap+OR+scoap3+blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.epr>pragmatic 
>-- indeed logical -- grounds: the transition 
>from annual institutional subscription fees to 
>annual consortial OA publication fees is an 
>incoherent, unscalable, unsustainable Escherian 
>scheme that contains the seeds of its own 
>dissolution, rather than a pragmatic means of 
>reaching a stable "asymptote": Worldwide, across 
>all disciplines, there are P institutions, Q 
>journals, and R authors, publishing S articles 
>per year. The only relevant item is the article. 
>The annual consortial licensing model -- 
>reminiscent of the Big Deal -- is tantamount to 
>a global oligopoly and does not scale (beyond 
>CERN!).
>
>So if SCOAP3 is the pragmatic basis for Ann's 
>"predict[ion that] we'll see such journals 
>evolve into something more like 'full 
>traditional OA' before too much longer" then one 
>has some practical basis for scepticism -- a 
>scepticism Ann shares when it comes to "hybrid 
>Gold" OA journals -- unless of course such a 
>transition to Fool's Gold is both mandated and 
>funded by governments, as the UK and Netherlands 
>governments have 
><http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1073-The-Journal-Publisher-Lobby-in-the-UK-Netherlands-Part-I.html>lately 
>proposed, under the influence of their 
>publishing lobbies! But the globalization of 
>such profligate folly seems unlikely on the most 
>pragmatic grounds of all: affordability. (The 
>scope for remedying world hunger, disease or 
>injustice that way are marginally better -- and 
>McDonalds would no doubt be interested in such a 
><https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=oI6LUpG8LPLCyAHT5IHQDg#q=McNopoly+harnad>yearly 
>global consortial pre-payment deal for their Big 
>Macs tooŠ)
>
>I also disagree (pragmatically) with Ann's 
>apparent conflation of the access problem for 
>journal articles with the access problem for 
>books. (It's the inadequacy of the "esoteric" 
>criterion again. Many book authors -- hardly 
>pragmatists -- still dream of sales & riches, 
>and fear that free online access would thwart 
>these dreams, driving away the prestigious 
>publishers whose imprimaturs distinguish their 
>work from vanity press.)
>
>Pragmatically speaking, OA to articles has 
>already proved slow enough in coming, and has 
>turned out to require mandates to induce and 
>embolden authors to make their articles OA. But 
>for articles, at least, there is author 
>consensus that OA is desirable, hence there is 
>the motivation to comply with OA mandates from 
>authors' institutions and funders. Books, still 
>a mixed bag, will have to wait. Meanwhile, no 
>one is stopping those book authors who want to 
>make their books free online from picking 
>publishers who agreeŠ
>
>And there are plenty of pragmatic reasons why 
>the librarian-obsession -- perhaps not 
>ideological, but something along the same lines 
>-- with the Version-of-Record is misplaced when 
>it comes to access to journal articles: The 
>author's final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft 
>means the difference between night and day for 
>would-be users whose institutions cannot afford 
>toll-access to the publisher's proprietary VoR.
>
>And for the time being the toll-access VoR is 
>safe [modulo the general digital-preservation 
>problem, which is not an OA problem], while 
>subscription licenses are being paid by those 
>who can afford them. CHORUS and SHARE have 
>plenty of pragmatic advantages for publishers 
>(and ideological ones for librarians), but they 
>are vastly outweighed by their practical 
>disadvantages for research and researchers -- of 
>which the biggest is that they leave 
>access-provision in the hands of publishers (and 
>their licensing conditions).
>
>About the Marie-Antoinette option for the 
>developing world -- R4L -- the less said, the 
>better. The pragmatics really boil down to time: 
>the access needs of both the developing and the 
>developed world are pressing. Partial and 
>makeshift solutions are better than nothing, 
>now. But it's been "now" for an awfully long 
>time; and time is not an ideological but a 
>pragmatic matter; so is lost research usage and 
>impact.
>
>Ann says: "Here's the fondest hope of the 
>pragmatic OA advocate: that we settle on a 
>series of business practices that truly make the 
>greatest possible collection of high-value 
>material accessible to the broadest possible 
>audience at the lowest possible cost - not just 
>lowest cost to end users, but lowest cost to all 
>of us."
>
>Here's a slight variant, by another pragmatic OA 
>advocate: "that we settle on a series of 
>research community policies that truly make the 
>greatest possible collection of peer-reviewed 
>journal articles accessible online free for all 
>users, to the practical benefit of all of us."
>
>The online medium has made this practically 
>possible. The publishing industry -- pragmatists 
>rather than ideologists -- will adapt to this 
>new practical reality. Necessity is the Mother 
>of Invention.
>
>Let me close by suggesting that perhaps 
>something Richard Poynder wrote is not quite 
>correct either: He wrote "It was [the] 
>affordability problem that created the 
>accessibility problem that OA was intended to 
>solve."
>
>No, it was the creation of the online medium 
>that made OA not only practically feasible (and 
>optimal) for research and researchers, but 
>inevitable.
>
>Stevan Harnad

-- 
Sanford G. Thatcher
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
e-mail: sgt3 at psu.edu
Phone: (214) 705-1939
Website: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sanford.thatcher

"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John Ruskin (1865)

"The reason why so few good books are written is 
that so few people who can write know 
anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20131125/3196ed08/attachment.html 