<div dir="ltr">On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 6:40 AM, Éric Archambault <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eric.archambault@science-metrix.com" target="_blank">eric.archambault@science-metrix.com</a>></span> wrote:<div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-CA" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)">Assuming one lives in a purely solipsistic universe, you are unanimously right.</span></p></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Solipsism? I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean...</div><div><br></div></div></div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>The funder funds the research.</div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>The institution salaries the researcher.</div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>The researcher writes the paper.</div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>The peers review (for free).</div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>The author deposits the final draft in the institutional repository (cost per paper of tagging, archiving, preservation is near-zero)</div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>The repository is funded by the institution for multiple purposes</div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>The only remaining essential cost of peer-reviewed research publication in the online (PostGutenberg) era is the cost of managing peer review (around $200 per paper)</div></div></div></blockquote><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br></div><div>The rest is just coal-stoking, waiting to be phased out as obsolete (but still clinging desperately to the status quo, its current raison d'être, and the revenue streams to which it has become accustomed).</div><div><br></div><div>No. Tagging, archiving, and preservation's tiny cost will not sustain those accustomed revenue streams or anything faintly like them, so there is no point talking about the cost of access-provision ("toll"). That real cost today is virtually zero, but the research community has not yet realized it.</div><div><br></div><div>(Southampton University as a whole had a very weak Green OA mandate (since <a href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/405/">2008</a>). Now, thanks to <a href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/362/">HEFCE REF 2020</a>, it will be much stronger. The subset of Southampton paper output that has been available as full-text OA since <a href="http://roarmap.eprints.org/406/">2003</a> is the output of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), which has had a strong and effective OA mandate since 2003. The ECS repository was integrated with the University repository two years ago. That is why the ratio of accessible full-texts to mere metadata is still so low. For a better ratio, see other repositories in ROARMAP with stronger (and longer) mandates.)</div><div><blockquote style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Times"><p>Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2014) <a href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/">Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: I. The MELIBEA Score.</a>(Submitted) <a href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/">http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/370203/</a><br></p><p>Swan, Alma; Gargouri, Yassine; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, Stevan (2015) <i>Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness</i>. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report. <a href="http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/">http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/375854/</a></p></blockquote></div><div>Don't conflate particular Green OA mandate failures with Green OA's actual potential, which is exactly as I have described it: "The only essential cost in peer-reviewed research publication in the online (PostGutenberg) era is the cost of managing peer review."</div><div><br></div><div>Ipso et alii.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-CA" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif">From:</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif"> <a href="mailto:goal-bounces@eprints.org" target="_blank">goal-bounces@eprints.org</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:goal-bounces@eprints.org" target="_blank">goal-bounces@eprints.org</a>]
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Stevan Harnad<br>
<b>Sent:</b> May-01-15 5:11 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [GOAL] Re: Elsevier (and other traditional publishers) and PLOS<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">The only essential cost in peer-reviewed research publication in the online (PostGutenberg) era is the cost of managing peer review.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Times,serif;color:black">Harnad, S (2014) </span><a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Times,serif">The
only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access</span></a><span style="font-family:Times,serif;color:black">. <i>LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog 4/28 </i></span><a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:Times,serif">http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/</span></a><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p>Harnad, S. (2014) <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/" target="_blank">Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute or supplement for the current outdated system?</a> <i>LSE Impact Blog</i> 8/21
August 21 2014 <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/" target="_blank">http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/</a><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:black">Harnad, S. (2010) </span><a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/" target="_blank">No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed</a><span style="color:black">. D-Lib Magazine </span><a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html" target="_blank">16
(7/8)</a><span style="color:black">. <a href="http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/" target="_blank">http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/</a></span><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 10:04 PM, Éric Archambault <<a href="mailto:eric.archambault@science-metrix.com" target="_blank">eric.archambault@science-metrix.com</a>> wrote:<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Heather<br>
<br>
I think using the term "toll" when what we mean is "subscription" is quite limiting. There is always a toll charged or taken whatever the model used to diffuse scientific knowledge. The important question is not about toll or profit, it is about seeking an
effective knowledge delivery system that is as close as possible to universal access to academic and scientific knowledge, while doing this relatively efficiently at the system level. Like anything else in our money-mediated society, there is a cost associated
with achieving this objective. Several models are available, all with their own tolls.<br>
<br>
PLoS charges tolls at the entry point in the form of Article Processing Charge while Elsevier charges tolls in the form of subscription. Both limit access at one end of the communication pipeline (to publish, or to read), both charge money. Hence, Elsevier
and PLoS both are toll access publishers.<br>
<br>
Everything being equal, between the two, the APC model is inherently more efficient as it more largely unleashes the $450 billion spent annually by governments the world over to support public research. However, it presents its own problems of equal access
(that is, equal access to the capacity to publish equal quality papers) and is likely to perpetuate the North-South divide if no steps are taken.<br>
<br>
Gold with no APC is certainly also associated with large tolls, including resource allocation inefficiencies, and lack of sustainability which reduces the value of the published output (it takes a long time to build a reputation for a publication venue and
papers in abandoned journals are less likely to be read over time). Individuals in the top 5% income bracket (e.g. university professors) producing journals is not a model of efficient allocation of public money. Finding long term sustainable income to pay
for the rest of the personnel involved in APC-less gold also present some definitive challenges, sustainability being the toughest.<br>
<br>
Hybrid, à la pièce, gold probably present the worse of all worlds as it is expensive, paid twice for, and very difficult to discover considering that publishers are packaging these papers among the restricted access material. These should be duplicated on separate
parts of the publishers' website and their metadata freely harvestable by anyone, and the papers themselves mass downloadable. This would increase their value, and facilitate oversight.<br>
<br>
Green alas does not seem to save it all. On the Southampton repository, there are only some 7000-8000 peer-reviewed published papers which are available for download out of about 57,000 claimed peer-reviewed papers in the repository. For most of these 57,000
items, there is only fairly unequal quality and often incomplete metadata (what is the purpose of putting varying quality metadata in a repo if no associated paper is available is something I still have to understand), and frequently, when there is a paper,
access is restricted to Southampton. Postscript files (.ps) are nice for technically inclined users but most ordinary users do not what to do with them and having PDF presenting only a cover page is only a loss of time. Sifting through this is time consuming,
presents a huge toll in time, as the signal to noise ratio really is poor. This model takes its toll on the those who depose, and on those who are audacious enough to search in there. In my opinion, for what it's worth, Green in institutional repositories
needs to be re-loaded with clean, curated, and useful documents, as currently it is mostly a mess that hides too few gems.<br>
<br>
If we had proper economic models, we would probably find that the social optimum at the moment for green is in the form of central "repositories" such as arXiv, CiteSeerX, PubMedCentral and Scielo. If we had hard data, we would certainly find that they cost
very little to operate per available paper. These are smart models as they present considerable economies of scale, reasonable user friendliness and good discoverability, in addition to making their metadata available and making papers fairly convenient to
retrieve. This model of access is great.<br>
<br>
Getting closer to universal access to public knowledge is not a simple question of tolls - it comprises subscription costs, publications costs, production costs, distribution cost, opportunity costs.<br>
<br>
Eric Archambault<br>
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-----Original Message-----<br>
From: <a href="mailto:goal-bounces@eprints.org" target="_blank">goal-bounces@eprints.org</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:goal-bounces@eprints.org" target="_blank">goal-bounces@eprints.org</a>] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison<br>
Sent: April-29-15 8:42 PM<br>
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)<br>
Subject: [GOAL] Elsevier (and other traditional publishers) and PLOS<br>
<br>
Elsevier has much in common with Public Library of Science: both are scholarly publishing organizations, focused on science, and in my opinion both aggressively advocate sometimes for the best interests of scholarship, but often primarily for their own business
interests.<br>
<br>
If policy-makers are aiming to help traditional publishers like Elsevier survive in an open access environment (a goal I am not sure we all agree on), then in formulating policies it is important to keep in mind some very basic differences.<br>
<br>
PLOS was born digital and open access and with a full commitment to open access. Traditional publishers like Elsevier have a legacy of works under copyright and a business model that involves selling rights to these works and integrated search services (rather
a lot of money at that). In the case of Elsevier, this involves millions of works over a long period of time. Even if every single article Elsevier publishes from today on were open access, this would not impact previously published works. Unless I am missing
something there is no business model for Elsevier to provide access to these previously published works free-of-charge. This means that traditional publishers like Elsevier are very likely to have to continue with a toll access business model even if they
move forward with open access publishing. This is an essentially different environment from that of a full open access publisher like PLOS. It is not realistic to assume that a traditional publisher that must maintain a toll access environment will behave
in the same way that born open access publishers do. PLOS was started from a commitment to providing works free-of-charge. Elsevier and publishers like Elsevier have thrived in a toll access environment, and will have to maintain a toll access environment.
There will be far more pressure and incentive to revert to toll access for traditional publishers than for PLOS. This is why arguments along the lines that PLOS has been around for a while, therefore there are no problems with CC-BY, don't necessarily apply
to a publisher like Elsevier.<br>
<br>
Elsevier, unlike PLOS, does have its own suite of value-added services such as Science Direct and Scopus. When friends of PLOS say there is no reason not to grant blanket commercial rights to anyone downstream, I think it is important to remember that this
represents the perspective of one type of publisher. Other journals and publishers either provide value added services themselves, or receive revenue from providers of such services, e.g. payments from journal aggregators.<br>
<br>
Note that while Elsevier has no incentive to provide access to previously published works free-of-charge, they are a green publisher and so authors from recent years can make their works published with Elsevier freely available through institutional archives.
This is one thing green open access can achieve right now that gold OA cannot. I'd like to acknowledge that Stevan Harnad has been right on this point for many, many years.<br>
<br>
I'm still signed on for the Elsevier boycott, in case anyone is wondering:<br>
<a href="http://thecostofknowledge.com/" target="_blank">http://thecostofknowledge.com/</a><br>
<br>
best,<br>
<br>
--<br>
Dr. Heather Morrison<br>
Assistant Professor<br>
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies<br>
University of Ottawa<br>
<a href="http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html" target="_blank">http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html</a><br>
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons <a href="http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/" target="_blank">
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/</a><br>
<a href="mailto:Heather.Morrison@uottawa.ca" target="_blank">Heather.Morrison@uottawa.ca</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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