In a comment on my last post, Bill Hooker makes the point that I mis-represented Stevan Harnad's position on peer review. I don't think I did, but for the avoidance of any doubt, I know that Stevan is a very strong supporter of peer review and so am I. In a way, that is precisely the problem. Stevan wants peer review, but not to pay for the process of formal publishing in peer-reviewed journals. That, he argues, should be done by librarians. I wouldn't dispute that, but according to him librarians should (or is it just will?) keep the subscription model going and in that way provide sustenance for the formal peer-reviewed journal system.
But why would librarians do that? If the articles published were freely available from elsewhere - institutional repositories - buying what looks like access to the formal peer-reviewed journals, but what is a donation to support them seems a rather convoluted idea.
Would it really not be better to sustain the system and secure OA by directly paying for the publishing services rendered rather than via subscriptions to access that can be had for free elsewhere anyway?
Bill Hooker also makes the point that "... it could conceivably become attractive for researchers - perhaps through the NIH, or professional societies, for instance - to co-ordinate the review process themselves, construct a robust search architecture that encompasses the vast majority of institutional repositories and thumb their noses once and for all at the STM publishing industry." Become publishers, in short. He is absolutely right.
Three comments:
1. Yes please. History is littered with groups of researchers that have organised themselves to do just that. Mostly in the form of a scholarly society expressly established for the purpose. And subsequently they have become publishers and joined the STM publishing industry, or outsourced the publishing of their journals to independent publishers.
2. If anybody has problems with the harnadian solution, it's scholarly societies that publish journals.
3. It is just possible that there may be reasons why researchers are researchers and publishers publishers. Everbody can sow the seed to grow the wheat to grind the flower to bake the bread. Who, after all, needs farmers, millers and bakers?
Jan Velterop
(Bill Hooker has followed up on his blog 'Open Reading Frame')
Necessity Is the Mother of Invention
ReplyDeleteIt always puzzles me why people find this 4-liner so hard to understand:
(1) Today, all publication costs are being paid by institutional subscriptions
(2) The outcome of mandated self-archiving will be that it either does or doesn't cause institutional subscriptions to be cancelled
(3) If it does, then those cancelled institutional subscription savings will provide the missing cash to cover institutional author OA publishing costs
(4) If it doesn't, then there are no OA publishing costs to cover
Ergo, unless one has an extra source of cash, if one wishes to provide OA for one's research today it does not make sense to pay for OA publishing: it makes sense to self-archive. And because OA makes sense and is highly beneficial to research, it makes sense to mandate OA self-archiving. Then we will find out whether or not there is eventually a need for a transition to OA publishing.
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum