[GOAL] Re: Unnecessary Services

[Jean-Claude Guédon]

Let me pipe in here.

Stevan writes:

"2. I agree completely that we should get rid of publishers' unnecessary
services and their costs. But how to do that, while they are still
controlled by publishers and bundled into subscriptions in exchange for
access?"

The answer is by beginning to add equivalent - I repeat "equivalent",
not the same - services to repositories, and by making sure that
repositories thus become guarantors of quality.

If repositories could build a certification system for the repositories
themselves - Germany had started doing this years ago with the DINI
certification; see http://eprints.rclis.org/8136/ - and if people could
deposit as Michael suggests (but with some very light vetting to avoid
totally stupid stuff), then the issue becomes creating trust in those
documents. Science can build up only if its foundations are trustworthy.
Once trust is worked out, we can move to issues of prestige, visibility,
etc. by associating various (open) metrics to the ways these documents
are being used, recycled, disseminated, etc. Repositories can add some
of those services right now if they network intelligently.

Stevan's strategy relies on one crucial and untested hypothesis: when
will the cancellations in subscriptions kick in? Faculty members are
watching subscriptions like hawks, and they will not accept
cancellations until they have the absolute certainty that the
repositories are offering a better service. Faculty also need the
branding of journals so long as administrations rely on such methods to
hire, promote and give grants. If repositories cannot give them this
branding, they will spontaneously turn to journals and depositories will
tend to disappear from their radars.

Where is the threshold point for cancellations to happen? I suspect it
is quite close to 100%. Where are we now, in terms of mandates, and
after more than a decade of fierce advocacy? Less than 10% (and I am
being optimistic). At that pace, publishers can count on another century
of profiteering, and, meanwhile, they will go on with attempts at
commercializing data, at developing "executable papers", at developing
nano-publications, while exploiting possibilities with text and data
mining, etc...

So far, the gradual increase in mandates has had no effect on
cancellations. In fact, the PEER project in Europe, which involved
publishers, reached the opposite conclusion. This was a way to tell
publishers that they do not have to worry, but it was also a way to say
that the Green mandates were not making the smallest dent in the
subscription patterns. 

Cancellations, so far, have been the result of budget cutbacks, not
mandates, and the presence of "big deals" has made these cuts far more
painful for small publishers than for big ones with the result that the
concentration of scientific publishing continues unabated.

Finally, discussions and debates between OA advocates are fine, but
should we not focus our energy on building things together rather than
trying to impose one's vision on others? PLoS, because it is APC-based,
is far from a perfect solution; Stevan's mandates, because they are so
difficult to have, is also far from a perfect solution. Isn't the task
at hand to reconsider, take the best of both roads, and see how to merge
them to form a better system of scientific communication?




Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal



Le samedi 30 mai 2015 à 00:27 -0400, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> Mike Eisen 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 (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 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 is the one Mike calls “parasitic”: 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: 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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