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--></style><title>Re: [SCHOLCOMM] Big Deals, Big Macs and Consortial
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<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Sandy Thatcher</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>At 12:44 PM -0500 11/19/13, Stevan Harnad wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Ann Okerson (as <a
href=
"http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ann-okerson-on-state-of-open-access.html"><span
></span>interviewed</a> 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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
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 (<a
href=
"http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/sky-writing-or-when-man-first-met-troll/239420/"><span
></span>"Scholarly Skywriting"</a>), 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).<br>
<br>
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) "<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal">esoteric</a>"
(i.e., they had few users) but that they were<i> peer-reviewed
research journal articles</i>, written by researchers solely <a
href="http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.1">for
impact, not for income</a>.</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
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).<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
I must alas disagree with this view, on entirely <a
href=
"'"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"><span
></span>pragmatic -- indeed logical -- grounds</a>: 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!).<br>
<br>
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 <a
href=
"http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1073-The-Journal-Publisher-Lobby-in-the-UK-Netherlands-Part-I.html"><span
></span>lately proposed</a>, 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 <a
href=
"https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=oI6LUpG8LPLCyAHT5IHQDg#q=McNopoly+harnad"><span
></span>yearly global consortial pre-payment deal</a> for their Big
Macs tooŠ)<br>
<br>
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.)<br>
<br>
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</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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).<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
No, it was the creation of the online medium that made OA not only
practically feasible (and optimal) for research and researchers, but
inevitable.<br>
<br>
<b>Stevan Harnad</b></blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>Sanford G. Thatcher<br>
8201 Edgewater Drive<br>
Frisco, TX 75034-5514<br>
e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu<br>
Phone: (214) 705-1939<br>
Website: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html<br>
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sanford.thatcher<br>
<br>
"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John
Ruskin (1865)<br>
<br>
"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few
people who can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)<br>
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