[Previous message][Next message][Previous in topic][Next in topic] [Previous by same author][Next by same author][Previous page (1999)] [Back to main SEPTEMBER98-FORUM page] [Join or leave SEPTEMBER98-FORUM (or change settings)][Reply] [Post a new message][Proportional font][Non-proportional font] Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 11:51:16 +0100 Reply-To: September American Scientist Forum Sender: September American Scientist Forum From: Stevan Harnad Subject: Re: Journal Papers vs. Books: The Direct/Indirect Income Trade-off Comments: To: Hal Varian Comments: cc: mloeb@computer.org, Tim Ingoldsby , Lib Serials list , VPIEJ-L@LISTSERV.VT.EDU, Elib List EJ In-Reply-To: <378A7EE3.4486A261@sims.berkeley.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII The exchange with Hal Varian has been very interesting, but in the interests of hastening convergence, I will be more telegraphic in my quote/commenting in this round, but first a summary: The only two substantive issues now are (1) an error (about "author charges") and (2) a disagreement (about who should pay for peer review). (1) Hal speaks of AUTHOR charges, and I keep speaking of AUTHOR-INSTITUTION charges. The annual costs for quality control/certification (QC/C) (less than 1/3 of the total institutional S/L/P costs for full paper and online publication in the present, obsolete system) will not and should not come from authors' pockets but from (less than 1/3 of) author-institution's annual S/L/P savings from total S/L/P cancellation. The rest of the (marginally vanishing) costs of periodical publication in the new system are to be borne by centralized self-archiving facilities (Los Alamos, E-biomed, CogPrints, Scholar's Forum), backed up by distributed institutional self-archives, plus the increased offloading of word-processing (and soon tagging/mark-up) onto authoring software (which is on the rise anyway). (2) Hal acknowledges the trade-off between direct benefits (royalty income) from the sale of texts and indirect benefits ("impact" income). (I put this in crass income terms just for the sake of simplicity.) The trade-off is that charging for access (royalty income) means loss of access to those who can't/won't pay (impact income). (I won't even mention that journal authors don't even get the pennies from the royalty income!) Yet, despite acknowledging this loss of potential readership (hence indirect revenue) caused by S/L/P barriers, and despite agreeing that self-archiving may even be the way for many books, let alone journals, when it comes to the question of how to recover the much lower residual costs of quality control/certification [QC/C], Hal regresses on the S/L/P trade model, seemingly forgetting both the trade-off and the self-archiving option! Part of this misunderstanding may revolve around institutional S/L/P, which currently SUBSIDIZES readers (at that lucky institution); Hal contrasts this with PERSONAL (out-of-pocket or out-of-grant) payment of author charges in the proposed system, whereas the most natural way to think of it is simply as rechanneling what is already an institutional subsidy from S/L/P costs to the much lower up-front QC/C costs! If you must think in terms of who the "consumer" is and how he benefits, the consumer is the author-institution in both cases, the benefit in the former case (reader-institution end S/L/P) being to buy in SOME of the journal literature for the use of its scholars and scientists (to enhance their research impact), the benefit in the latter case (author-institution end QC/C) being to buy in ALL of the journal literature for the use of ALL scholars and scientists (thereby enhancing everyone's potential impact) -- and at less than 1/3 of the price!. When you speak of retaining S/L/P from the author-institution's point of view, always keep in mind their lost potential impact on the eyes/minds of the many institutions and countries that cannot afford that particular journal... In fact, the best intuition pump I have found for why charging S/L/P for access makes no sense for the refereed research literature is that it is for exactly the same reason that charging for access to advertisements would make no sense! Now to (telegraphic) quote/comment mode: On Mon, 12 Jul 1999, Hal Varian wrote: > ...You argue that the author should pay for this filtering > role. Perhaps that is right, but one could also make a case that the > reader should pay since he is the direct beneficiary of the filtering, > ...now that the other costs have been driven so low. But this makes the author and author-institution the LOSER of all those potential eyes/minds (and impact income) -- and PARTICULARLY considering how low those "filtering" (QC/C) costs really are! > ... the funding agencies pay researchers to produce papers which are sent > to journals to be evaluated and, in most cases, published, which are > then purchased by libraries for the free use of the researchers. > ... it is the role of intermediaries that has got us into the current > mess; if the authors/researchers faced the true costs of the current > publication system, they would find a way to reform it quite quickly! Indeed they would, but it would not be by simply lowering S/L/P barriers, but by eliminating them completely, through author-institution end QC/C payment out of 1/3 of S/P/P savings, plus author self-archiving. > There is something of a tradeoff, but perhaps less than you think. > There are ways to vary access and recover costs from customers. Even > now you can purchase a journal subscription directly or go access > it "for free" in your library. Here are two different kinds of access, > one more convenient than the other, and they are priced accordingly. > So it isn't "access" vs "no access" but different degrees of access. > The same can be done in the online world; whether this is desirable or > not is a different question. And what about the many countries and institutions that can't afford either form of access? (And re-calculate that at least 14,000 times for each of the refereed journals in Ulrich's that some institutional author's work might appear in.) "It is easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable from any researcher's desk worldwide" http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html As an author, how many potential readers of my work would I like to deprive of this resource -- in the interests of a reader-end S/L/P model (from which I do not make a penny, and which costs my institution at least twice as much as barrier-free QC/C would)? And what is the counterpart of personal vs. library access in the desk-top, networked world? > You argue that author charges could pay for peer review. This maybe > correct, but I worry about the incentives in such a system. Under > reader pays, the publisher has an incentive to keep quality high in > order to attract readers. Under author pays, the publisher has an > incentive to get as many authors to pay as possible, and other > mechanisms must be used to maintain quality. I have already replied to this, in response to Frank Norman at the National Institute for Medical Research. This "vanity press" model of author-pays profoundly misunderstands peer review! Nothing like this will happen; it is based on a misunderstanding of peer review -- and of what it is that makes the prestigious journals prestigious, and hence makes authors prefer to submit to them rather than elsewhere: The prestige of the top journals is based on their quality, which in turn depends on their quality-control standards: They only accept the very best papers (and their typically high citation impact factors reflect this). (They are not "designer labels," for the patina of which a "consumer" is willing to pay more!) The way that high standards of quality are maintained is through rigorous peer review: One cannot BUY success in that process; authors must EARN it (by doing high quality work). Otherwise the prestigious journals would simply lose their prestige (and be replaced by other, more rigorously refereed journals, that recapture their standards, and THEREBY the best papers. [And, no, they will not LOWER their charges to capture to higher-prestige authors either! This sort of market thinking is all based on the wrong, old, reader/consumer-end model: or, to put it another way, the "competition" in this nontrade literature is for high-quality papers, not for author-dollars.]). On the contrary, it is much lower down in the peer review hierarchy, as one approaches the vanity press, that some abuse of the author-end system is conceivable: Authors may try to buy their way into the pages of low-quality journals when they have failed to earn their way into the high-quality ones. But, frankly, I don't find this at all worrisome! Vanity publications are apparent to everyone; they wear the result (low quality) on their sleeves (and their contents, their authorships, and their impact factors); and such journals already exist today, where the "subsidy" currently comes on the reader-institution end rather than the author-institution end -- everyone knows which ones they are, and that caveat emptor prevails when it comes to deciding whether to read them or rely on what they report. And don't forget: The peers review for free... QC/C costs are only for IMPLEMENTING refereeing, not for the referees themselves (who, like the author, contribute for free). Vide supra. > if an organization "can't afford" access, it is > likely an accounting illusion rather than actual lack of money. I'd like to see the data for that, not even for all 14K journals in Ulrichs, but just, say, the top 6.5K indexed by the ISI. And please tell me the figures per journal, per institution, per country. As an author/advertiser, I would like to know how many potential customers I am really LOSING if I endorse the SELLING of my papers/ads, instead of having my institution pay up front to GIVE them away to one and all... > The important principle is that the readers are willing to pay > something for the filtering services provided by the journal. And it is > this willingness-to-pay that supports the current business model. You > could be right that "author pays" is superior for the reasons you cite. > But my worry is that the economic incentives to provide value to the > reader (via filtering) are weakened. Vide supra. Peer review will take care of itself (money is not involved in refereeing); focus on the my POTENTIAL readers whose institutions CANNOT pay... -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science harnad@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 2380 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 2380 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to: Top of message | Previous page | Main SEPTEMBER98-FORUM page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to the LISTSERV home page at LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG.