[GOAL] Unnecessary Services

[Stevan Harnad]

Mike Eisen <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/14da0a74f200e99b>
 writes:

*“I believe we should get rid of publishers… the services they provide are
either easy to replicate (formatting articles to look pretty) or they
currently do extremely poorly (peer review)… these services are
unnecessary… [we should] move to a system where you post things when you
want to post them, and that people comment/rate/annotate articles as they
read them post publication.”*1. PLOS
<http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1580> (like other publishers) seems to
be charging a hefty price for “services that are unnecessary.” ;>)

2. I agree completely that we should get rid of publishers' unnecessary
services <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2> and
their costs. But how to do that, while they are still controlled by
publishers and bundled into subscriptions in exchange for access?

My answer
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1154-The-Inevitable-Success-of-Transitional-Green-Open-Access.html>
is
the one Mike calls “parasitic <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1710>”:
Institutions and funders worldwide mandate Green OA (with the
“copy-request” Button to circumvent publisher OA embargoes). The
cancellations that that will make possible will force publishers to drop
the unnecessary services and their costs and downsize to Fair-Gold for peer
review alone..

3. But I disagree with Mike about peer-review
<http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html>: it will
remain the sole essential service. And the (oft-voiced) notion that
peer-review can be replaced by crowd-sourcing, after “publication” is pure
speculation, supported by no evidence that it can ensure quality at least
as well as classical peer review, nor that is it scalable and sustainable
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