[GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] OA Overview January 2017
Sandy Thatcher
sgt3 at psu.edu
Mon Jan 9 18:32:05 GMT 2017
Great to have this good summary of your overall
argument about OA. I'm copying it into a Word
file and keeping it in my database of valuable
resources! :)
Happy New Year!
At 7:13 AM -0500 1/9/17, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 5:30 AM, David Prosser
><<mailto:david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>david.prosser at rluk.ac.uk>
>wrote:
>
>SH: (2) No, the institution that pays for the
>research output is not paying a second time to
>buy it back. Institutional journal subscriptions
>are not for buying back their own research
>output. They already have their own research
>output. They are buying in the research output
>of other institutions, and of other countries,
>with their journal subscriptions. So no
>double-payment there, even if you reckon it at
>the funder- or the tax-payer-level instead of
>the level of the institution that pays for the
>subscription.
>
>
>DP: So, when UCL (say) purchases access to
>Elsevier articles through ScienceDIrect (say)
>Elsevier removes all of the UCL articles from
>the bundle and prices accordingly? Of course
>not. The institution is purchasing articles by
>researchers across the world's, including its
>own.
>
>
>To repeat: UCL (and everyone) has their own
>article output. Getting access to their own
>article output is not why researchers publish,
>nor why institutions subscribe to journals. It
>is to get access to the articles of others.
>
>So that version of the simplistic double-payment
>plaint is, and remains, invalid. (And it, and
>its (il)logic predates OA by at least a decade.
>
>
>DP: SBut I agree with (12)
>
>
>But (12) is about OA, not the old double-payment
>argument against subscriptions (which, by the
>way, if it had been valid would also have
>applied to royalty-based output, including the
>institutional purchase of books by its own
>authors!). The essence of the case for OA is and
>has always been that (refereed) research is an
>author giveaway, written only for researcher
>uptake, usage and impact, not for royalty
>revenue. We keep forgetting this, with this
>misleading notion of "double-payment" (for
>subscription access).
>
>There is certainly double-payment in the case of
>OA (subscription plus Fool's Gold publication
>fees) as well as double-dipping (in the case of
>hybrid Fool's Gold). But that is not at all the
>kind of double-payment that the old argument
>against subscriptions was (and is) about.
>
>Stevan Harnad (tilling other fields, but not asleep)
>
> On 6 Jan 2017, at 13:22, Stevan Harnad
><<mailto:amsciforum at GMAIL.COM>amsciforum at GMAIL.COM>
>wrote:
>
>>(1) The old librarians' "double-payment"
>>argument against subscription publishing (the
>>institution pays once to fund the research,
>>then a second time to "buy back" the
>>publication) is false (and silly, actually) in
>>the letter (though on the right track in
>>spirit).
>>
>>(2) No, the institution that pays for the
>>research output is not paying a second time to
>>buy it back. Institutional journal
>>subscriptions are not for buying back their own
>>research output. They already have their own
>>research output. They are buying in the
>>research output of other institutions, and of
>>other countries, with their journal
>>subscriptions. So no double-payment there, even
>>if you reckon it at the funder- or the
>>tax-payer-level instead of the level of the
>>institution that pays for the subscription.
>>
>>(3) The problem was never double-payment (for
>>subscriptions): It was (a) (huge) overpayment
>>for institutional access and (b) completely
>>intolerable and counterproductive access-denial
>>for researchers at institutions that couldn't
>>or wouldn't pay for subscriptions to any given
>>journal (and there are tens of thousands of
>>research journals): The users that are the
>>double losers there are (i) all researchers
>>at all the institutions that
>>produce all research output (who lose all those
>>of their would-be users who are at
>>non-subscribing institutions for any given
>>journal) and (ii) all researchers at all the
>>non-subscribing institutions for any given
>>journal, who lose access to all non-subscribed
>>research.
>>
>>Now take a few minutes to think through the
>>somewhat more complicated but much more
>>accurate and informative version (3) of the
>>double-payment fallacy in (1).
>>
>>The solution is very clear, and has been clear
>>for close to 30 years now (but not reached -
>>nor even grasped by most):
>>
>>(4) Peer-reviewed research should be freely
>>accessible to all its users. It is give-away
>>research. The authors gets no money for it:
>>they (and their institutions and funder and
>>tax-payer) only seek readers, users and impact.
>>
>>(5) The only non-obsolete service that
>>peer-reviewed journals still perform in the
>>online era is peer review itself (and they
>>don't even do most of that: researchers do all
>>the refereeing for free, but a competent editor
>>has to understand the submissions, pick the
>>right referees, umpire their reports, and make
>>sure that the necessary revisions are done by
>>the autho). Journals today earn from $1500 to
>>$5000 or more per article they publish,
>>combining all their subscription revenue, per
>>article. Yet the true cost of peer review per
>>article is a small fraction of that: My
>>estimate is that it's from $50 to $200 per
>>round of refereeing. (Notice that it's not per
>>accepted paper: There's no need to bundle the
>>price of refereeing all rejected, or many times
>>re-refereed papers into the price of the
>>winning losers who get accepted!
>>
>>(6) So the refereeing service needs to be paid
>>for at its true, fair price, per paper,
>>regardless of whether the outcome is accept,
>>revise + re-referee, or reject: a service fee
>>for each round of refereeing.
>>
>>(7) Now comes open access publishing ("Gold
>>OA") - which is not - repeat not - what I have
>>just described in (6)!
>>
>>(8) Gold OA today is "Fool's Gold OA," and it
>>includes two subtler kinds of double payment
>>than the simplistic notion in (1). It has to be
>>calculated at the level of the double-payer,
>>the institution: Institutions must, first, pay
>>(A) for the subscription journals that they
>>need and can afford: the ones whose contents
>>are otherwise not accessible to their users but
>>need to be. Then, second, they must pay (B) the
>>FGold OA publication costs for each paper that
>>their researchers publish in a non-subscription
>>journal. That's already a double-payment:
>>Subscription costs plus FGold OA costs. The S
>>costs are for incoming S-research from all
>>other institutions and the FG costs are for
>>their own outgoing FG research output. And the
>>FG costs are not $50-$200 per paper for peer
>>review, but $1000 or much more for FG
>>"publication costs" (now ask yourself what are
>>the expenses of which those are payment!).
>>
>>(9) And there is another "double" here in some
>>cases, because sometimes the S-journal and the
>>FG-journal are the same journal: The "hybrid"
>>subscription/ FG publishers: These publishers
>>offer FG as an option that the author can
>>choose to pay for. That is double-dipping. And
>>even if the hybrid journal promises to lower
>>the subscription price per article in
>>proportion to how many articles pay for FG,
>>that just means that the foolish institution
>>that is paying for the FG is subsidizing, with
>>its huge payment per article, the subscription
>>costs of all the other subscribing institutions.
>>
>>(10) So FG is not only outrageously
>>over-priced, but it means double-payment for
>>institutions, the possibility of double-dipping
>>by publishers, and, at best, paying
>>institutions subsidizing the S institutions
>>with their FG double payments.
>>
>>(11) So FG does not work: Publishers cannot and
>>will not cut costs and downsize to just
>>providing peer review at a fair price ("Fair
>>Gold") while there are still fat subscription
>>revenues as well as fat FG payments to be had.
>>
>>(12) Yet there is another way that OA can be
>>provided, instead of via Fools Gold OA and that
>>is via Green OA self-archiving, by their own
>>authors, of all refereed, accepted, published
>>papers, in their own institution's Green
>>OA <http://roar.eprints.org/>Institutional
>>Repositories.
>>
>>(13) Not only does Green OA provide OA itself,
>>but once it reaches close to 100%, it allows
>>all institutions to cancel their subscription
>>journals, making subscriptions no longer
>>sustainable, thereby forcing publishers to cut
>>costs by unbundling peer review and its true
>>costs from all the obsolete costs of printing
>>paper, producing PDF, distributing the journal,
>>archiving the journal, etc. That's all done by
>>the global network of Green OA Institutional
>>repositories, leaving only the peer review as
>>the last remaining essential service of
>>peer-reviewed journal publishers. That's
>>affordable, sustainable, Green-OA-based "Fair
>>Gold" OA.
>>
>>(14) 100% Green OA could have been had over 20
>>years ago, if researchers had just provided it.
>>Some did, but far too few. Most were too lazy,
>>too dim-witted or too timid to do it. Then
>>their institutions and funders tried
>>to <http://roarmap.eprints.org/>mandate OA --
>>so publishers decided to embargo Green OA for
>>at least a year from publication, offering
>>Fool's Gold OA instead.
>>
>>(15) And that's about where we are now: Weak
>>Green OA mandates providing some Green OA but
>>not enough. Some FG OA, doubly compromised now
>>by the fact that authors have been taking it up
>>as a kind of pay-to-publish opportunity, with
>>weak peer review (or none at all, in the case
>>of the
>>many <https://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/>scam
>>FG journalswho are rushing to cash in on the
>>Fool's Gold Rush). Meanwhile OA activists are
>>foolishly clamouring ore-emptively for "open
>>data," "CC-BY licenses" and "open science" when
>>they don't even have OA yet, subscriptions are
>>doing fine, and FG is outrageously over-priced
>>and double-paid, hence unaffordable.
>>
>>(16) There are simple solutions for all this,
>>but they require sensible, concerted action on
>>the part of the research community: Green OA
>>mandates need strengthening, monitoring and
>>carrot/stick enforcement; there is a simple way
>>around publishers' Green OA embargos
>>(the <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268511/>"Copy
>>Request" Button , and a
>>few <http://roarmap.eprints.org/94/>institutions and <http://roarmap.eprints.org/362/>funders are
>>sensibly using the eligibility rules for
>>research evaluation as the carrot/stick to
>>ensure compliance with the mandate.
>>
>>But I've tired of repeating myself and tired of
>>waiting. It can all be said in these 16 points,
>>and has been said, countless times. But it's
>>one thing to lead a bunch of researchers to the
>>waters of Green OA self-archiving; it's quite
>>another to get them to stoop to drink.
>>
>>So let their librarians keep whinging
>>incoherently about "double-payment" for yet
>>another decade of lost research access and
>>impactŠ
>>
>>Harnad, S. (1995) Universal FTP Archives for
>>Esoteric Science and Scholarship: A Subversive
>>Proposal. In: Ann Okerson & James O'Donnell
>>(Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A
>>Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing.
>>Washington, DC., Association of Research
>>Libraries, June 1995.
>><http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html>
>>http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html
>>
>>______ . (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges:
>>The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access
>>Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).
>><http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/>http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/
>>
>>______ (2014) The only way to make inflated
>>journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate
>>Green Open Access. LSE Impact of Social
>>Sciences Blog 4/28
>><http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/
>>
>>______ (2015) Open Access: What, Where, When,
>>How and Why. In: Ethics, Science, Technology,
>>and Engineering: An International Resource eds.
>>J. Britt Holbrook & Carl Mitcham, (2nd edition
>>of Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and
>>Ethics, Farmington Hills MI: MacMillan
>>Reference) <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/361704/>
>>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/361704/
>>
>>______ (2015) Optimizing Open Access
>>Policy. The Serials Librarian, 69(2), 133-141
>><http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/381526/>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/381526/
>>
>>______ (2016) Open Access Archivangelist: The
>>Last Interview? CEON Otwarta Nauka (Open
>>Science), Summer Issue
>><http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/398024/>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/398024/
>>
>>Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L.
>>and Harnad, S. (2014) Open Access Mandates and
>>the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair
>>Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture
>>Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler,
>>Eds.)
>><http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/>http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/
>>
>>Swan, A; Gargouri, Y; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, S
>>(2015) Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis,
>>Effectiveness. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report.
>><http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/
>>
>>Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade,
>>Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and
>>Harnad, Stevan (2016) Estimating Open Access
>>Mandate Effectiveness: The MELIBEA
>>Score. Journal of the Association for
>>Information Science and Technology (JASIST)
>>67(11) 2815-2828
>><http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/>http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/
--
Sanford G. Thatcher
Frisco, TX 75034-5514
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu
"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)
"Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in
strict accordance with the limitations and
incapacities of the human
misunderstanding."-Ambrose Bierce (1906)
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