[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 18:27:53 +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: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Mon, 12 Jul 1999, Hal Varian wrote: > You may end up being right that S/L/P is no longer appropriate given > the change in costs. If it was so inefficient, how could it have > survived for so long? The answer couldn't be simpler: Because of the technology and economics of print-on-paper! In that medium, S/L/P was the only viable option if one wanted to be published at all. In the PostGutenberg, online-only era, for refereed journals, the days of S/L/P are over! But S/L/P is STILL fine for the trade literature (books, magazines). It's only the anomalous, give-away literature that has been freed at last of the "Faustian Bargain" that held it hostage to S/L/P tolls until now. >sh> And what about the many countries and institutions that can't afford >sh> either form of access? (And re-calculate that at least 14,000 times for >sh> each of the refereed journals in Ulrich's that some institutional >sh> author's work might appear in.) > > And what about countries and institutions that can't afford submission > fees? In the long run, the same costs have to be paid. I knew, as I wrote that, that this would be the come-back! The answer is: (1) Those disenfranchised institutions are currently NET CONSUMERS of the literature (they aspire only to READ it, if they could only afford it!). They are not net providers (they are not publishing much). They could not afford most of the journals under the S/L/P system. So their researchers had much less basis for publishing anything either, being starved of access to the literature. In the up-front system, these institutions will simply get a free ride from the NET PROVIDERS (research-active, high publishing-rate institutions), but no one will lose as a result of this. (Stealing my paper to read is a victimless crime in the post-print-photocopy age! Among other things, this is the end of the "Copyright Clearance Center" for the journal literature, which is merely a variant of the "P" in S/L/P.) It should still average out to less than 1/3 of every institution's prior S/L/P budget being rechanneled toward up-front costs. And as the institutions that were disenfranchised by S/L/P barriers begin to become more research-active as a result of free access to the literature, their research productivity and income should rise, as should their publication rate, and the resulting revenue available for covering those increasing publication costs. (Research and research-impact revenue should always be ahead of QC/C costs by at least a factor of two, if my < 1/3 figure holds.) (2) What about institutionally unaffiliated scholars? I think a modest slush fund should be able to cover that minoritarian need quite adequately. > Your argument is > that the author-institution pays system covers the costs and allows for > broader readership, an observation with which I agree. However, there is > a more subtle issue. An economic system tends to favor those who pay. If > the authors pay, then the system will lean towards the author's goal > (getting published) whereas if the readers pay the system will lean > towards the reader's goal (effective filtering.) This is the vanity-press argument again. Reply: Peer Review. The peer community will continue to maintain the standards, as always, for free! It is only the IMPLEMENTATION of peer review that needs to be paid for, not referee time/effort. And journal rejection-rates and impact-factors will continue to be the marks of quality (and the magnet for authors), not the money exchanged for implementing peer review! > I'm not sure which effect is larger. But, of course, there is no > reason why both sides couldn't pay, if that turned out to be the > appropriate way to align incentives. Heaven forfend! The worst of all possible worlds! You have to pay to read AND you have to pay to be published! Insult upon Injury! > > "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)? > > The publication system shouldn't be designed only to serve authors---it > has to serve the needs of readers as well (especially if they are the same > people!). One might add terms like "all meritorious papers, systematically > evaluated and vetted" to your "ideal online resource". (I realize that > you acknowledge elsewhere that refereeing is a critical part of academic > publication, even though it ends up being missing as a desideratum here.) Precisely. It is and always has been the freeing of the REFEREED JOURNAL LITERATURE to which all these efforts have been directed. And as far as I can tell, that completely nullifies your objection here! >sh> This "vanity press" model of >sh> author-pays profoundly misunderstands peer review! > >sh> The prestige of the top journals is based on their quality, which >sh> in turn depends on their quality-control standards: They only >sh> accept the very best papers (and their typically high citation >sh> impact factors reflect this). (They are not "designer labels," for >sh> the patina of which a "consumer" is willing to pay more!) > > I think that your subsequent analysis is a more-or-less correct analysis > of the pressures for quality in the current system. Essentially, low > quality journals are cancelled since their benefits aren't worth their > costs. But in your proposed system, the reader bears no costs, so > this particular feedback is eliminated. The way for a reader to vote is not with his (institution's) S/L/P dollars, but with his eyes, his citations, his refereeing, and his research! This is not commerce we are talking about, but Learned Inquiry. > You may well respond that authors will want to submit to quality journals, > a point I accept. But what does "submit" really mean in this world? > I have argued elsewhere that when publication costs were expensive, > it made sense to evaluate ex ante. Now that publication costs are > cheap, it makes sense to evaluate ex post. Untested speculations about replacing peer review by post-publication peer commentary are a can of worms on which I've written before: Excerpt from: Harnad, S. (1998) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998) http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible.html Peer Commentary vs. Peer Review "And is peer commentary (even if we can settle the vexed "peer" question) really peer review? Will I say publicly about someone who might be refereeing my next grant application or tenure review what I really think are the flaws of his latest raw manuscript? (Should we then be publishing our names alongside our votes in civic elections too, without fear or favour?) Will I put into a public commentary -- alongside who knows how many other such commentaries, to be put to who knows what use by who knows whom -- the time and effort that I would put into a referee report for an editor I know to be turning specifically to me and a few other specialists for our expertise on a specific paper? "If there is anyone on this planet who is in a position to attest to the functional difference between peer review and peer commentary (Harnad 1982, 1984), it is surely the author of the present article, who has been umpiring a peer-reviewed paper journal of Open Peer Commentary (Behavioral and Brain Sciences http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs.html, published by Cambridge University Press) for over 2 decades (Harnad 1979), as well as a peer-reviewed online-only journal of Open Peer Commentary (Psycoloquy, sponsored by the American Psychological Association, http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html for what will soon be a decade too). "Both journals are rigorously refereed; only those papers that have successfully passed through the peer review filter go on to run the gauntlet of open peer commentary, an extremely powerful and important SUPPLEMENT to peer review, but certainly no SUBSTITUTE for it. Indeed, no one but the editor sees [or should have to see] the population of raw, unrefereed submissions, consisting of manuscripts eventually destined to be revised and accepted after peer review, but also (with a journal like BBS, with a 75% rejection rate) many manuscripts not destined to appear in that particular journal at all. Referee reports, some written for my eyes only, all written for at most the author and fellow referees, are nothing like public commentaries for the eyes of the entire learned community, and vice versa. Nor do 75% of the submissions justify soliciting public commentary, or at least not commentary at the BBS level of the hierarchy." http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html Food for thought: Would you rather have an ailing relative treated on the basis of the traditionally peer-reviewed biomedical literature, with referees selected and their reports adjudicated by a qualified, answerable Editor, or on the basis of navigating a Netnews chatgroup peppered with "articles" and "comments" by God knows who (guided by hit rates?). [cf. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/shtml/misc/peer/index.shtml] > Furthermore, there is > no reason to use a 0-1, publish/don't publish scale any more---much > more sophisticated systems could be used. On this topic, see: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html 1999 Thread: Independent scientific publication - Why have journals at all? Short answer: Peer review is not 0/1, red/green light. It is an interactive, iterative feedback cycle that sometimes leads to a paper that passes the threshold for THAT journal in the hierarchy (everything gets published SOMEWHERE eventually). But referees are a scarce resource, and journal quality is equivalent to referee quality and rigour (and rejection rate). > One scenario is for public-archiving and self-archiving as the publication > mechanism and an essentially separate system of cataloging/ranking/peer > reviewing as the filtering system. This is already covered by the dichotomy: "U" unrefereed preprint vs. "R" refereed reprint (+ journal name "JX"). BOTH can be self-archived (and suitably tagged). > The question then is who should pay > for the peer reviewing? I submit that it may well be the readers, due to > the incentive effects described above. No, the readers need merely CHOOSE to search only on items tagged "R" in the free Eprint Archive. The refereeing can be provided by peer review (which ain't broke, hence don't need fixin' -- let alone replacin' by untested alternatives). > >hv> if an organization "can't afford" access, it is > >hv> likely an accounting illusion rather than actual lack of money. > > >sh> I'd like to see the data for that, not even for all 14K journals in >sh> Ulrichs, but just, say, the top 6.5K indexed by the ISI. And please >sh> tell me the figures per journal, per institution, per country. > > See Lemberg, Richard, 1996 thesis on costs of digitization, UC Berkeley. > JSTOR did some calculations with the same conclusion, which are reported > in part by a speech from Bill Bowen, which, I believe, is available > on the JSTOR Web site. That does not answer my question: We are not talking about the costs of digitization, current or retrospective. We are talking about how many institutions/countries can and do afford how many journals! You focus on capturing the available money (via S/L/P), whereas I ask "Why not give it away for free for all, and pay the small remaining cost -- quality control -- out of the S/L/P SAVINGS?" If there is no other way to free your intuitions from reader-end market thinking, run your whole argument through on advertisements: Why shouldn't advertisers give their ads only to those who can afford to pay for it? Answer: Ads are not the right PRODUCT to think of! It is ad companies' SERVICES that advertisers want to pay for. (But before this segues into the vanity-press argument again, note that it's only an analogy; for something closer to a homology, you would have to make it the services of a quality-controller/certifier (the FDA?), and one in which the quality assessment itself is done by independent and incorruptible -- because unpaid! -- assessors [referees]!) -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.