http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

The main participants in the exchange were Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton and Hal Varian, of the University of California, Berkeley, with Bob Parks of Washington University providing an additional comment toward the end. 

The origins of the discussion lie with a thesis Harnad has expounded in a number of recent publications. Put very quickly, Harnad maintains that academics working in the esoteric fields of scientific and scholarly publication do not produce written work with a view to selling it; they merely wish to have it read by their peers. This being the case, Harnad makes the ‘subversive proposal’ that such scholars should no longer publish their work on paper, but should instead put it straight on the Net in pre-print form:

For centuries, it was only out of reluctant necessity that authors of esoteric publications entered into the Faustian bargain of allowing a price-tag to be erected as a barrier between their work and its (tiny) intended readership, for that was the only way they could make their work public at all during the age when paper publication (and its substantial real expenses) was the only option. But today there is another way, and that is PUBLIC FTP.

Archiving the work of esoteric authors in pre-print form in globally accessible local ftp archives would have a number of extremely significant consequences, Harnad contends. Perhaps most importantly, it would free academics from restrictive copyright agreements with publishers, agreements which function to restrict access to academic research to those who can afford to pay for it. (To provide an example which may give a sense of exactly what is at stake here, copy right agreements have recently enabled publishers to clamp-down on the extent to which university lecturers in the UK are able to provide photocopies of relevant course material for their students). As a recent article in the Times Higher explained, the system would get round the problem of copyright in the following manner:

First the author posts a pre-print of his or her paper on the web. Then they submit the paper to a refereed journal. The author makes amendments in light of referees’ and editors’ comments, then signs the publisher’s copyright agreement … 

The author then posts a note onto the web pre-print, pointing out where areas of correction might need to be made, in effect turning the pre-print into a version of the draft refereed paper. 
(Patel, K. (2000) ‘Team Finds Way Round Copyright’, The Times Higher Education Supplement (February 12): 12)

The exchange between Harnad and Varian included here focuses on the problematic issue - crucial to Harnad’s thesis - of the extent to which academic authors are prepared to give their work away by making it freely available, without charge, on the Net. Although the exchange has been edited slightly  to make the discussion easier to follow, it seemed appropriate, given the subject matter, to otherwise retain the marks of its original quote/comment format. Harnad begins by emphasising 11 of his argument’s main points, and by providing addresses for the various locations on the Net where the relevant publications can be found.

----------------------------

Date:         Sat, 10 Jul 1999 
From:         Stevan Harnad 
 

(1) I am speaking ONLY about refereed journal articles, not books or
magazines.

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/thes.html

(2) Unlike all other literature, their authors write these papers to
report their ideas and findings, not to make money on their texts. All
they want is to reach the eyes and minds of a maximum of fellow
researchers, present and future, once their findings have passed peer
review.

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html

(3) They accordingly give them away for free to their publishers,
and, after peer review, give away free reprints to all requesters.

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html

(4) Online self-archiving now makes it possible for them to give away
their refereed reprints to one and all forever on the broadest possible
scale.

http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

(5) Publishers should in no way to attempt to prevent free
self-archiving by authors by trying to forbid it in copyright
agreements. This is the eye of the storm. See:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html

(6) The American Physical Society has already provided a model
copyright policy: Authors may self-archive both the unrefereed
pre-print and the refereed reprint for free for all. The Publisher
retains all rights to SELL either the paper or online version
of the journal.

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0006.html

(7) The effect of online author self-archiving will be a transition of
the reader/user community to the free online versions.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions
http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_weekly_graph

(8) Eventually this will produce cancellation pressure (although it has
not done so yet in Physics, where it is most advanced). If/when it does,
my prediction is that publishers will have to restructure and down-size
so as to provide only the service of quality control and certification
[peer review, editing, tagging as accepted by Journal X].

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html

(9) The much reduced cost of providing solely this service will be
recoverable from author-institution publication charges, which will in
turn be recoverable from institutional savings from cancelling
Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P).

(10) The critical difference is that reader-institution-end payment
(S/L/P) is access-blocking, whereas author-institution-end payment is
not. But as long as author self-archiving rights are guaranteed (5,6),
the market can decide whether or not S/L/P can survive alongside it
(and how long).

(11) The infrastructure for self-archiving is emerging as we speak,
led by Los Alamos, soon to be followed by E-bionet, and then all the
other disciplines.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/
http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/ebiomed.htm
http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

The self-archiving initiative in this very special subdomain of
literature -- the give-away refereed research literature -- is
unstoppable, because ethics, pragmatics, and logic, as well as the
inherent interests of research itself and hence of all of society, are
all behind it. Its progress can only be slowed temporarily by playing
on confusions and uncertainties in people's minds, simply because it is
all so new and they have not yet thought it through. It would be to
publishers' long-term advantage to try to see ahead rather and
restructure accordingly, rather than to try to hold the literature
hostage to the status quo. They must come to terms with what it in the
best interests of research and researchers in the new online world, and
design a new niche for themselves in the PostGutenberg Galaxy.

A tide-over consortial subsidy out of windfall S/L/P savings to smooth
the transition from reader-institution-end cost-recovery via S/L/P to
author-institution-end cost-recovery via quality-control/certification
charges would be worth planning out with the library-institution
and research-funding community in advance.

Stevan Harnad

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:         Hal Varian

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> (2) Unlike all other literature, their authors write these papers to report their ideas and findings, not to make money on their texts. All  they want is to reach the eyes and minds of a maximum of fellow researchers, present and future, once their findings have passed peer review.
>

I think that this point is wrong.  I would claim that most authors write to present their ideas and visions, not to make money.  The evidence is the highly skewed distribution of income from writing.  Like artists and actors, only a very, very small fraction of trade authors make money from their writing.  I conjecture that their motivation is more often glory or recognition, just like academics.

By way of evidence, let me point you towards the US Dept of Labor
Occupational Outlook Handbook, writers and editors section, where it is
asserted that the average starting salary for writers and editorial
assistants in 1996 was $21,000.  Writers with more than 5 years of
experience make more than ‘more than $30,000’.  These are not substantial
sums for highly educated workers!  Freelance writers earn much, much less
on average than professional authors; they can't be in it for the money.

However, I don't think that this claim has any impact on the rest of your
argument.  After all, all you need to assert is that academic authors
aren't in it for the money---whether other authors are or not is
irrelevant to your claims.  It does suggest that if the rest of your
argument is right it will apply more broadly than just to academic
authors.

Hal Varian

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sat, 10 Jul 1999 
From:         Stevan Harnad 
 

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Hal Varian wrote:

> ...I would claim that most authors write
> to present their ideas and visions, not to make money...
> ...only a very, very small fraction of trade authors make money from
> their writing.  I conjecture that their motivation is more often glory or
> recognition, just like academics....
> Freelance writers earn much, much less
> on average than professional authors; they can't be in it for the money.

Eppur, eppur ... And yet I doubt that they would want to lock themselves
into giving it away for life! To start with, by way of promotion, perhaps,
but forever?  Is that really what you think? (Where there's life, there's
hope!)

Whereas refereed journal article authors do not have the slightest
desire to deter a single pair of potential eye-balls for their findings
on the off-chance there might be gate-receipts to be made! They never
have, and they never will. There is a profound and significant divide
here, despite the statistics on the earnings and success of the average
trade author.

> ...if the rest of your
> argument is right it will apply more broadly than just to academic
> authors.

Online self-archiving may be a means for authors to launch their trade,
but I doubt you'll find many for whom it's an end in itself (apart from
the ones who were only destined for a Vanity Press anyway)...

Stevan Harnad

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sat, 10 Jul 1999 
From:         Hal Varian 
 

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> Eppur, eppur ... And yet I doubt that they would want to lock themselves
> into giving it away for life! To start with, by way of promo, perhaps,
> but forever?  Is that really what you think? (Where there's life, there's
> hope!)

Look at the data---hardly any authors actually make their living from
writing.  And the ones that do make a very poor living.  I conclude that
even for trade authors, economic compensation is not the primary factor
leading them to write.  Undoubtedly, they would be happy to be paid for
writing, but academic authors would be happy to be paid for their writing
too.

> Whereas refereed journal article authors do not have the slightest
> desire to deter a single pair of potential eye-balls for their findings
> on the off-chance there might be gate-receipts to be made! They never
> have, and they never will. There is a profound and significant divide
> here, despite the statistics on the earnings and success of the average
> trade author.

No author wants to deter eyeballs, even trade authors.  Some are willing
to do so because they are compensated monetarily.  If academic authors
were sufficiently compensated for deterring eyeballs, I expect many would
be happy to do so.  If a referred journal offered you payment for an
article, would you turn it down?  (Several refereed journals in business
and medicine do pay for articles, by the way.)

Furthermore, even academic authors make money from their publications,
albeit indirectly.  If you regress earnings on publications and citations
you find a large and significant coefficient on refereed journal
publications and citations.  Academic authors who publish more are paid
more, and part of the motivation for academic publishing is the prospect
of academic advancement and higher salaries.

> Online self-archiving may be a means for authors to launch their trade,
> but I doubt you'll find many for whom it's an end in itself (apart from
> the ones who were only destined for a Vanity Press anyway) ...

Well, there is an awful lot of vanity publishing on the Web.  Of course
these authors would love to be paid for their writing, but I suspect they
will continue to write, paid or not.

The point of my note is that motivations are not as far apart as you
claim: there is an (indirect) financial motivation in publication for
academic authors and there is a large component of desire to communicate
in trade authors.  There is certainly a difference in the economic model
in the two industries, but the divide in the motivations of the authors is
not as ‘profound and significant’ as you claim.

But again, I don't think this point makes much difference for the rest of
your argument.

Hal Varian

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sat, 10 Jul 1999
From:         Stevan Harnad 

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Hal Varian wrote:

> Undoubtedly, [trade authors] would be happy to be paid for
> writing, but academic authors would be happy to be paid for their writing
> too.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. The answer is ‘yes’ when the academic
authors are wearing their trade hats (writing books or magazine
articles) but the answer is ‘no’ when they are reporting their
research in peer-reviewed journals.

> No author wants to deter eyeballs, even trade authors.

You might as well say no producer of any product wants to deter greater
consumption of their product (it's just that they would like to get
paid for it!).

> If academic authors
> were sufficiently compensated for deterring eyeballs, I expect many would
> be happy to do so. If a referred journal offered you payment for an
> article, would you turn it down?  (Several refereed journals in business
> and medicine do pay for articles, by the way.)

I'm afraid I have to disagree again: It would require a MONSTROUSLY
large amount of money to make a research author trade off his potential
impact on research for the impact on his pocketbook. (And many
scientists and scholars, still recalling why they chose the leaner path
of Learned Inquiry rather than heading straight for the junk bond market
in the first place, would decline even that!)

But no peer reviewed journal could (or would) afford to make it worth an
author's while anyway.

Here's a test: How much would (should) the author of a refereed journal
article accept to SELL his self-archiving rights to his publisher?

(My guess: a lot more than any publisher could ever afford to offer!
This is not big-market literature we're talking about! And that's the
point!)

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/THES/thes.html

> Furthermore, even academic authors make money from their publications,
> albeit indirectly.  If you regress earnings on publications and citations
> you find a large and significant coefficient on refereed journal
> publications and citations.  Academic authors who publish more are paid
> more, and part of the motivation for academic publishing is the prospect
> of academic advancement and higher salaries.

Correct, but TOTALLY irrelevant! The author is not being paid out of the
access-blocking toll-gate receipts from the sale of his papers by S/L/P!

On the contrary, if you properly regressed THOSE on earnings, you would
find that they REDUCE impact and hence earnings!

This is a completely spurious, non-causal correlation, and the simple
act of self-archiving shows it to be so. (Have the 100,000 authors who
have self-archived in Los Alamos reduced or enhanced their impacts and
incomes?)

http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions

> The point of my note is that motivations are not as far apart as you
> claim: there is an (indirect) financial motivation in publication for
> academic authors and there is a large component of desire to communicate
> in trade authors.  There is certainly a difference in the economic model
> in the two industries, but the divide in the motivations of the authors is
> not as ‘profound and significant’ as you claim.
>
> But again, I don't think this point makes much difference for the rest of
> your argument.

I'm afraid I disagree, and I do think it makes a great difference. The
similarities between the two populations are partial, superficial and,
in the present context, misleading. The deep differences are in the
means/ends: For most trade authors, self-archiving their work free for
all is only a temporary means to an end (hopeful, eventual
compensation); for (most?) refereed journal authors it IS the end
(widest possible access to their findings for peer eyes/mind, present
and future).

The reason stressing the similarities between the trade and non-trade
literatures here is misleading is that the self-archiving model I have
been advocating for refereed journal papers is decidedly NOT the right
model for the rest of the literature, and conflating the two simply
blurs the critical insight at the core of all this.

But this can be settled empirically: Let a line be drawn in Cyberspace,
and let those who are interested in giving away their products
(whatever they are) as freebies in perpetuo step to the left of it
(say), and let those who are not step to the right.

The entire refereed journal authorship will be on the left. Perhaps
some others will be too. Let's see wait and see who. I'm predicting
that most book and magazine authors will not (and note that I said ‘in
perpetuo’, not in ‘pro-tem promo’!).

In any case, that is the literature I am dedicated to freeing (from its
hostage-hood to the trade model and S/L/P) -- not every product of the
human mind!

Stevan Harnad

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sat, 10 Jul 1999 
From:         Hal Varian 

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> > No author wants to deter eyeballs, even trade authors.
>
> You might as well say no producer of any product wants to deter greater
> consumption of their product (it's just that they would like to get
> paid for it!).

Indeed. You've now stated the correct principle: authors (academic and
trade) are happy to be paid for their work.  There is no difference in
their motivation in this regard.  The primary motivation for each
group is visibility, but neither group disdains monetary compensation.

> I'm afraid I have to disagree again: It would require a MONSTROUSLY
> large amount of money to make a research author trade off his potential
> impact on research for the impact on his pocketbook. (And many
> scientists and scholars, still recalling why they chose the leaner path
> of Learned Inquiry rather than heading straight for the junk bond market
> in the first place, would decline even that!)

The evidence contradicts you.  Many academics choose to devote part of
their time to writing textbooks, trade books, consulting and other such
compensated pursuits.  They could be spending this time doing academic
research. It appears that they are choosing to trade off some research
output and recognition for some financial gains.

>Correct, but TOTALLY irrelevant! The author is not being paid out of the
>access-blocking toll-gate receipts from the sale of his papers by S/L/P!

That's true enough, but that wasn't your original assertion.  Your
original claim was

‘(2) Unlike all other literature, their authors write these papers to
report their ideas and findings, not to make money on their texts. All
they want is to reach the eyes and minds of a maximum of fellow
researchers, present and future, once their findings have passed peer
review.’

I asserted that this statement is not entirely true: part of the motivation of
academic authors is economic, due to the relationship between rank,
publication, and salary. I agree that academics would prefer to make more
money without reducing the number of readers, but this is trivial and
obvious: the same is true of non-academic authors.

> This is a completely spurious, non-causal correlation, and the simple
> act of self-archiving shows it to be so. (Have the 100,000 authors who
> have self-archived in Los Alamos reduced or enhanced their impacts and
> incomes?)

Increased them, I would claim, since by increasing their visibility they
have, indirectly, enhanced their income.

>I'm afraid I disagree, and I do think it makes a great difference. The
>similarities between the two populations are partial, superficial and,
>in the present context, misleading. The deep differences are in the
>means/ends: For most trade authors, self-archiving their work free for
>all is only a temporary means to an end (hopeful, eventual
>compensation); for (most?) refereed journal authors it IS the end
>(widest possible access to their findings for peer eyes/mind, present
>and future).

Suppose you cut all linkages between compensation and publication and had
a rigid formula between years-on-the job and academic salary.  Don't you
think that academic publication rates would go down? (As they do in
countries with such rigid academic compensation systems.)

Suppose you offered publication to trade authors with minimal financial
compensation. Don't you think a lot of people would take you up on this? I
submit the answer is yes since very little trade publication is
compensated to any great degree even now.  In fact, it could easily be the
case that the average academic author makes more from publishing a book
(via the impact on promotion and salary) than the average trade author
makes from publishing a  book (via royalties).

> The reason stressing the similarities between the trade and non-trade
> literatures here is misleading is that the self-archiving model I have
> been advocating for refereed journal papers is decidedly NOT the right
> model for the rest of the literature, and conflating the two simply
> blurs the critical insight at the core of all this.

I guess I don't know what ‘right’ means here.  If you mean ‘economically
sustainable’ I would argue that self-archiving is sustainable in both
environments, since the cost of self-archiving is so low.

> But this can be settled empirically: Let a line be drawn in Cyberspace,
> and let those who are interested in giving away their products
> (whatever they are) as freebies in perpetuo step to the left of it
> (say), and let those who are not step to the right.
>
> The entire refereed journal authorship will be on the left. Perhaps
> some others will be too. Let's see wait and see who. I'm predicting
> that most book and magazine authors will not (and note that I said ‘in
> perpetuo’, not in ‘pro-tem promo’!).

Look at the non-academic textual content on the WWW.  The vast
majority of it is available for free.  Some of this free material
involves compensation for the author, some doesn't.  I would argue
that fundamental economic forces will keep it that way.  So the left
side of your line will be heavily populated by both academic and
non-academic authors.

> In any case, that is the literature I am dedicated to freeing (from its
> hostage-hood to the trade model and S/L/P) -- not every product of the
> human mind!

I don't disagree with the rest of your argument.  I just think that your
story about why academic publishing differs from trade publishing is
wrong.  You argue that there is a fundamental difference in motivation
between academic authors and trade authors: academic authors seek readers,
and trade authors seek money.  In reality, academic authors and trade
authors both seek money and readership.  And, in each case, readership
is the primary driver.

The real difference between the economics of academic and trade publishing
is not due to having an entirely different set of motivations as you
claim, but rather in the nature of the academic research process. Academic
articles are both an input to research and an output of research, which is
rather different from trade publications.  (Compare citation patterns in
the two literatures.)

Because the literature is both an inputs and an output, up until the last
decade or so, it made sense for researchers to pay an intermediary to
organize the selection, beautification, production, and distribution of
academic research.  But now that the costs of beautification, production
and distribution have declined so dramatically, the role of the
intermediary has been dramatically changed, and it may make sense for
authors to take on much more of the intermediary's role.  But the primary
reason for this is due to the change in technology and the associated
change in costs---it isn't due primarily to the difference in motivations,
as you assert.

Hal Varian

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sat, 10 Jul 1999 
From:         Stevan Harnad 

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Hal Varian wrote:

> > It would require a MONSTROUSLY
> > large amount of money to make a research author trade off his potential
> > impact on research for the impact on his pocketbook.
>
> The evidence contradicts you.  Many academics choose to devote part of
> their time to writing textbooks, trade books, consulting and other such
> compensated pursuits.  They could be spending this time doing academic
> research. It appears that they are choosing to trade off some research
> output and recognition for some financial gains.

Yes, but the question was whether they would trade it off for their
refereed journal articles, not for their books and other activities.

(It would have been absurd of me to suggest that the authors of refereed
journal articles don't care about making money at all: It's just that
they don't want to make money by selling THOSE articles.)

> >The author is not being paid out of the
> >access-blocking toll-gate receipts from the sale of his papers by S/L/P!
>
> That's true enough, but that wasn't your original assertion.  Your
> original claim was
>
> ‘(2) Unlike all other literature, their authors write these papers to
> report their ideas and findings, not to make money on their texts. All
> they want is to reach the eyes and minds of a maximum of fellow
> researchers, present and future, once their findings have passed peer
> review.’

Perhaps the meaning of ‘make money on their texts’ was not entirely
clear the first time. I hope that now it is: It is the blockage of free
access to THOSE texts (and not other texts they may write, or other
things they may do with their time, that we are discussing here).

> I asserted that this statement is not entirely true: part of the motivation
> of academic authors is economic, due to the relationship between rank,
> publication, and salary. I agree that academics would prefer to make more
> money without reducing the number of readers, but this is trivial and
> obvious: the same is true of non-academic authors.

I said something stronger, and I repeat it: The authors of refereed
journal articles are not interested in making money on THOSE texts at
all.

> > This is a completely spurious, non-causal correlation, and the simple
> > act of self-archiving shows it to be so. (Have the 100,000 authors who
> > have self-archived in Los Alamos reduced or enhanced their impacts and
> > incomes?)
>
> Increased them, I would claim, since by increasing their visibility they
> have, indirectly, enhanced their income.

Fine, but you are missing a rather fundamental point, repeatedly: The
income from the sale of THOSE texts is not the income of the author!
And if the income from the sale of THOSE texts plays any causal role at
all in the author's visibility and hence income, then that is a
negative role: The fact that access is denied till tolls are paid
REDUCES the author's visibility, hence his income.

And self-archiving (i.e., making those texts available for free for
all) enhances their visibility, hence (if you wish) the author's
income. Now is the dissociation (and even opposition) between the two
incomes clear? This is not the case when the income to the AUTHOR comes
from the sale of the text.

The conclusion is that in the case of the refereed journal literature
only, the author has an interest in there being NO INCOME (to anyone)
from sale of his texts, because income means access-blockage. This is
also in the interest of the author's institution, which likewise gains
kudos (and grant income) from the impact of his research (not to
mention their savings from S/L/P cancellations!)

So with refereed journals it makes sense (and with books it does not)
that costs should be paid for at the author-institution end (yielding
free access for all) rather than the reader-institution end (blocking
access, impact income).

I don't think that the DISanalogy could be any more complete than this.

> Suppose you cut all linkages between compensation and publication and had
> a rigid formula between years-on-the job and academic salary.  Don't you
> think that academic publication rates would go down? (As they do in
> countries with such rigid academic compensation systems.)

Sure they would, but so what? That still would not connect the author's
income CAUSALLY to the income from the sale of his (refereed-journal)
texts. (And, to simplify, if we say directly that it is
impact/visibility, and not publication, on which the income
ladder depends, then the NEGATIVE causal relation between S/L/P access
barriers and author/institution income becomes even clearer.)

> Suppose you offered publication to trade authors with minimal financial
> compensation. Don't you think a lot of people would take you up on this? I
> submit the answer is yes since very little trade publication is
> compensated to any great degree even now.  In fact, it could easily be the
> case that the average academic author makes more from publishing a book
> (via the impact on promotion and salary) than the average trade author
> makes from publishing a  book (via royalties).

I agree, insofar as esoteric monographs are concerned. Those no-market
speciality items have always been more like journal articles than more
mainstream academic or non-academic books, their royalties are often a
joke, and many do not even succeed in finding a publisher.

But that happens to be the very subset of the non-journal literature
that I have always said fits the give-away formula too! It is in no way
representative of the book market, however, being at least as esoteric
as, and even more minoritarian than, the refereed journal literature
itself.

And your hypothetical situation above simply amounts to speculating
about what it would be like if more books were more like journals in
this way for academic authors: But one gets out of such a hypothesis
exactly what one puts into it: If more books did fit the esoteric,
give-away formula, then they too would fall on the left of that
figurative line in Cyberspace I invoked in the prior posting (quoted again 
below)!

And if your point was only that online self-archiving will make it
possible to publish more no- or low-market esoteric monographs online
than has been possible in paper, that is certainly true too. (It is an
interesting empirical question what proportion of current scholarly
monographs would have voluntarily gone the royalty-renunciation route
in exchange for the enhanced reach! I don't doubt it would be a
non-negligible number.)

> > The reason stressing the similarities between the trade and non-trade
> > literatures here is misleading is that the self-archiving model I have
> > been advocating for refereed journal papers is decidedly NOT the right
> > model for the rest of the literature, and conflating the two simply
> > blurs the critical insight at the core of all this.
>
> I guess I don't know what ‘right’ means here.  If you mean ‘economically
> sustainable’ I would argue that self-archiving is sustainable in both
> environments, since the cost of self-archiving is so low.

The trade/non-trade divide is fairly represented by desire and
the expectation of revenue directly from the sale of the text. The trade
model continues to be the right one for most books, and it does not
help, in trying to bring out the anomalous state of affairs on the
non-trade side (where refereed journal articles are representative), to
dwell on similarities with esoteric monographs (which are NOT
representative of the trade side and never have been).

Most people (authors, publishers, readers, economists) think of texts
as products that authors, jointly with their publishers, SELL to the
readers (or reader-institutions). It is this reader/consumer intuition
that prevents them from seeing that this reader-end market is the wrong
one for refereed journal articles, which authors have always wanted to
give away, but have been prevented from doing so by the economics of
paper.

These economics change in the online medium, radically, for these
anomalous authors. Their institutions (which paid the costs anyway
already, at the reader-institution end) can now pay much lower costs at
the author-institution end, freeing this literature at last.

But this author-end market does NOT generalize to most books, which
will continue to be bought and sold on the old, trade model. To blur
this crucial distinction in either direction is to miss the fundamental
development that the old, trade model, which was ‘right’ for ALL texts
before, is no longer right for refereed journals.

How much else it is also no longer right for is an empirical question,
and the boundary lines are not nearly as clear or illuminating, though
I expect that the algorithm I've proposed:

    ‘Does the author (1) seek/get any revenue for his text (royalties,
    fees) or does he instead (2) give it away, seeking only the
    eyes/minds of readers? If (1), it is trade, if (2) it is not.’

probably still captures it.

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind99&L=september-forum&F=lf&S=&P=15054

> > But this can be settled empirically: Let a line be drawn in Cyberspace,
> > and let those who are interested in giving away their products
> > (whatever they are) as freebies in perpetuo step to the left of it
> > (say), and let those who are not step to the right.
>
> Look at the non-academic textual content on the WWW.  The vast
> majority of it is available for free.  Some of this free material
> involves compensation for the author, some doesn't.  I would argue
> that fundamental economic forces will keep it that way.  So the left
> side of your line will be heavily populated by both academic and
> non-academic authors.

Fine. I'm actually losing my grip on what we are disagreeing about ...

But just as thinking in terms of the reader-end trade model for
publication has been an obstacle to people's realizing where the
refereed journal literature is headed, so has thinking in terms of
freeware and the general give-away spirit of the Net!

For freebies are then associated with the vanity press, without quality
control (peer review). From this it becomes clear that SOMETHING still
has to be paid for here, and that is the IMPLEMENTATION of the quality
control (for referees referee for free). That is what leads to the
unintuitive shift from a reader-institution market to an
author-institution market for the SERVICE of quality control and
certification (instead of the PRODUCT of a text).

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html

Again, the give-away spirit of the Net is no guide in any of this.
Net freebies are not quality controlled or certified!

> > In any case, that is the literature I am dedicated to freeing (from its
> > hostage-hood to the trade model and S/L/P) -- not every product of the
> > human mind!
>
> I don't disagree with the rest of your argument.  I just think that your
> story about why academic publishing differs from trade publishing is
> wrong.  You argue that there is a fundamental difference in motivation
> between academic authors and trade authors: academic authors seek readers,
> and trade authors seek money.  In reality, academic authors and trade
> authors both seek money and readership.  And, in each case, readership
> is the primary driver.

It's not academic vs. trade authors! It's academics when they wear
their refereed-journal-author hats and every other author, including
themselves, when wearing their book-author hats (except in the case of
esoteric monographs).

> The real difference between the economics of academic and trade publishing
> is not due to having an entirely different set of motivations as you
> claim, but rather in the nature of the academic research process. Academic
> articles are both an input to research and an output of research, which is
> rather different from trade publications.  (Compare citation patterns in
> the two literatures.)

This is all no doubt true. But books, academic and non-academic, can in
principle bring direct incomes to their authors, and journal articles
can't, and that's the point.

> Because the literature is both an input and an output, up until the last
> decade or so, it made sense for researchers to pay an intermediary to
> organize the selection, beautification, production, and distribution of
> academic research.  But now that the costs of beautification, production
> and distribution have declined so dramatically, the role of the
> intermediary has been dramatically changed, and it may make sense for
> authors to take on much more of the intermediary's role.  But the primary
> reason for this is due to the change in technology and the associated
> change in costs---it isn't due primarily to the difference in motivations,
> as you assert.

What you say about beautification and self-beautification applies
indifferently to all texts, but nothing follows from it. There are still
texts that the author wants to sell. Let's call those trade (and they're
mostly books) and texts the author wants to give away (let's call them
non-trade, and ALL refereed journal articles fall into that category --
from their author's viewpoint).

And there is one critical piece of ‘beautification’ that an author
cannot do all on his own, and that is peer review. That is a service
another ‘provider’ will have to continue to provide. In the case of
scholarly books, its cost can be wrapped into the cost of publication,
recovered from sales of the text; in the case of refereed journal
articles, it, and it alone, can be recovered another way, eliminating
the need for all sales barriers (to the eternal benefit, if you like, of
the author's and the author's institution's ‘visibility’, and hence the
indirect income accrued therefrom).

Stevan Harnad

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sat, 10 Jul 1999 
From:         Hal Varian 

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> Yes, but the question was whether they would trade it off for their
> refereed journal articles, not for their books and other activities.

But of course they do---the time spent writing textbooks, consulting,
and so on takes away from time spent writing and publishing academic
articles.

> (It would have been absurd of me to suggest that the authors of refereed
> journal articles don't care about making money at all: It's just that
> they don't want to make money by selling THOSE articles.)

I agree that under the current system they don't expect to make money, but
if they were offered a payment for academic articles, few would turn it
down.

> Perhaps the meaning of ‘make money on their texts’ was not entirely
> clear the first time. I hope that now it is: It is the blockage of free
> access to THOSE texts (and not other texts they may write, or other
> things they may do with their time, that we are discussing here).

This is a very, very limited sense of ‘make money on their texts’.
Obviously academics make money on their works since they are paid,
in part, to publish them.   Perhaps you meant to say that academic
authors would prefer to maximize the readership of their works.
I agree that this is true.  But it is also true of non-academic
authors.

> I said something stronger, and I repeat it: The authors of refereed
> journal articles are not interested in making money on THOSE texts at
> all.

I submit they would be happy to make money on those texts, as long as it
didn't dramatically reduce the readership.  You have implicitly assumed
that the only way to ‘make money on those texts’ is to charge people to
read them, thereby limiting access.  I think this is a very narrow view,
and limits the kinds of business models you might consider for information
industries.

> The conclusion is that in the case of the refereed journal literature
> only, the author has an interest in there being NO INCOME (to anyone)
> from sale of his texts, because income means access-blockage. This is
> also in the interest of the author's institution, which likewise gains
> kudos (and grant income) from the impact of his research (not to
> mention their savings from S/L/P cancellations!)

Here is where your confusion lies.  It is false (as an economic
proposition) that there is a direct relationship between ‘no income’  and
‘access blockage’.  Consider a field where there is an economic demand for
the research (engineering, medicine, finance, etc.) It is common to see
research produced in these fields where publication is delayed. It is
first made available for a high price via consultancies, newsletters,
affiliates, etc., and later made available to the academic world at large.
This way the authors have their cake and eat it too---make money, and
still make the research available to all.  Obviously this practice can be
abused, but that is beside the point.  The point is that income can be
made even while providing broad access.

A similar example is JSTOR, where back issues journal articles are
available at zero marginal price to subscribing institutions.

Indeed, this model is becoming somewhat common in the for-profit trade
literature.  An author first publishes a book, then 2 or 3 years puts the
text up on his or her web site.

This is ‘second degree temporal price discrimination’ and presents one
interesting business model for information goods.   See various papers
at:

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html

for other examples.  Or see my trade book at:

http://www.inforules.com

Or either of my textbooks at:

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/books.html. 

They all tell the same story with respect to this issue, simply directed at
different audience.

> So with refereed journals it makes sense (and with books it does not)
> that costs should be paid for at the author-institution end (yielding
> free access for all) rather than the reader-institution end (blocking
> access, impact income).

The conclusion has some merit, but I disagree with the analysis.  I claim
that the fundamental force is not the difference in motivation of the
authors (since trade authors and academic authors like both money and
readers) but in the nature of the production process of research, and, in
particular, that the producers and consumers are the same people.  To see
why, look at another genre with this characteristic---fanzines for
hobbiests (science fiction, collectors, etc.).  In the print fanzine world
authors were not paid and the readers paid for zine via subscription, just
as in the academic genre.  Now most of the hardcopy zines have moved to
the Web where they are freely available.  I think you are right that this
will happen with academic journals, but it isn't because academic authors
wouldn't like to get paid for their texts.

> Sure they would, but so what? That still would not connect the author's
> income CAUSALLY to the income from the sale of his (refereed-journal)
> texts. (And, to simplify, if we say directly that it is
> impact/visibility, and not publication, on which the income
> ladder depends, then the NEGATIVE causal relation between S/L/P access
> barriers and author/institution income becomes even clearer.)

Well, we could quarrel about the metaphysics of ‘cause’, I guess, but I
would say that there is a pretty direct causal relationship between the
number of readers of one's refereed articles and one's academic salary in
the US.  (This differs, of course, from field to field.)

> The trade/non-trade divide is fairly represented by desire and
> expectation of revenue directly from the sale of the text.

This is simply wrong.  Most trade books make very little money for the
author directly from royalty revenues.  You only have to look at the
statistics on authors' incomes.  The National Writers Union publishes
such a survey and the numbers are strikingly small.

> prevents seeing that this reader-end market is the wrong one for
> refereed journal articles, which authors have always wanted to give
> away, but have been prevented from doing so by the economics of paper.

Again you are making the leap from ‘maximize the readership of’ to
‘give away’.  I agree with the former motivation (at least to the first
order) but I deny that it immediately follows that the content must
be given away.  This is one tool, but not the only one.

> But this author-end market does NOT generalize to most books, which
> will continue to be bought and sold on the old, trade model. To blur
> this crucial distinction in either direction is to miss the fundamental
> development that the old, trade model, which was ‘right’ for ALL texts
> before, is no longer right for refereed journals.

Well, I can hardly dispute the claim that  ‘[physical] books will be
bought and sold on the old trade model’, but the more interesting
question is how ‘writing’ will be distributed.  I claim that a smaller
and smaller fraction of total written works will be sold in the trade
model. The majority of written work will be given away on the Web
(in fact, that is probably true today).

> Fine. I'm actually losing my grip on what we are disagreeing about...

The only substantive point on which we disagree is that I claim that the
stark distinction between trade publication and academic publication that
you make is overstated.  I say this from the perspective of an author who
has written:

   1) journal articles that are read by thousands of people each year
(according to the Social Science Citation Index);
   2) textbooks that are read by tens of thousands of people each year
(according to my royalty statements);
   3) technical trade books that are read by a thousand or so people each
year); and
   4) a non-technical trade book that has sales in the many tens of
thousands.

I've also edited an academic journal read by tens of thousands of people a
year, and have self-archived many of my publications online for 10 years
using gopher, ftp and the Web.

In my experience, most publication is a mixture of economic and
non-economic motivations.  My textbooks and trade book were successful
because my academic papers were widely read.  The visibility resulting
from the academic, text, and trade books leads to more offers for speeches
and consulting.  I don't see the stark division that you describe.

> For freebies are then associated with the vanity press, without quality
> control (peer review). From this it becomes clear that SOMETHING still
> has to be paid for here, and that is the IMPLEMENTATION of the quality
> control (for referees referee for free). That is what leads to the
> unintuitive shift from a reader-institution market to an
> author-institution market for the SERVICE of quality control and
> certification (instead of the PRODUCT of a text).

I agree that the filtering is what need to be paid for.  (A quibble:
some referees are paid, though typically not a sum that covers the
time cost.)

> It's not academic vs. trade authors! It's academics when they wear
> their refereed-journal-author hats and every other author, including
> themselves, when wearing their book-author hats (except in the case of
> esoteric monographs).

Hmm. So academic authors like money when they write trade books and don't
like money when they write trade books?  This seems rather strange.  A
more accurate account is that they like money and readership
whichever hat they are wearing.

The real difference is not at the level of the author, but at the level of
the industry.  In the trade book industry the authors and the readers are
quite distinct, whereas in the academic publishing industry the authors
and readers are, by and large, the same people.  The academic publications
are both an input to and an output of the research process.  Other
publishing industries where authors and readers are the same people had
similar business models, and, I suggest will have similar dynamics in
their move to the Web.  (The apparent necessity of paying for the
refereeing overhead makes things a bit more complicated in the academic
markets.)

> This is all no doubt true. But books, academic and non-academic, can in
> principle bring direct incomes to their authors, and journal articles
> can't, and that's the point.

I agree that journal articles don't bring direct income to the authors
under the current business model, but that is a rather obvious
observation.  Whether they ‘can't’ or not could be disputed.  But the more
interesting observation is that trade books generally don't bring much
direct income to authors either.  Authors publish trade books because of
glory they get, for the most part, some of which can be translated into
money.

> There are still
> texts that the author wants to sell. Let's call those trade (and they're
> mostly books) and texts the author wants to give away (let's call them
> non-trade, and ALL refereed journal articles fall into that category --
> from their author's viewpoint).

You are simply making the same false claim over and over again.  Authors
would be happy to make money from their journal articles, it's just that
few publishers offer them this option.  So it is not the motivation of the
authors that is relevant, but rather the business model for the industry.

I don't have substantive quarrels with the rest of your argument, or
with your understanding of the academic publishing industry.  I just
think that you don't understand the economics of the trade publishing
industry.  The simple fact is that very, very few authors make any
substantial sum of money in the trade industry, and their motivation
for publishing trade books is more complex than you assert.

Hal Varian

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sun, 11 Jul 1999 
From:         Stevan Harnad 

An intrinsically interesting side-issue is emerging from the exchanges
with Hal Varian. Nothing substantive hinges on it for the purposes
of the strategy and outcome I happen to advocate -- what I have taken to
calling the ‘optimal and inevitable’ one for the refereed journal
literature:

    freeing the literature online for everyone, everywhere, forever,
    through (1) universal public self-archiving of all refereed journal
    papers, and, when the time comes, (2) a downsizing of journals to
    providers of the service of quality control and certification, paid
    for on the author-institution out of S/L/P savings rather than at
    the reader-institution end via access-blocking S/L/P.

Our disagreement is only about whether I am exaggerating the difference
between the motivations of refereed-journal papers-authors (regarding
THOSE papers) and authors in general -- of books, magazine articles,
etc. -- in suggesting that the former are, and have always been,
interested ONLY in giving those papers away, whereas other authors (as
well as themselves, when wearing other hats) have at least the hope of
some direct revenue from the sale of their texts.

If I AM exaggerating this difference, then Hal's view would be that
the ‘optimal and inevitable’ for the refereed journal literature may well
prove to be the optimal and inevitable for much of the rest of the
literature too.

Let me declare my cards at this point: I consider myself quite expert
on many aspects of the refereed journal literature (having edited one
major refereed paper journal for over two decades and one of the first
refereed online-only journals for nearly a decade, having provided an
online public archive for the self-archiving of unrefereed and refereed
papers over two years now, and having written a number of articles on
peer review and online journal publication), but I do NOT consider
myself expert on any other forms of publication (nor on ANY kind of
economics!).

So I am taking up the gauntlet here for one reason only: That if I
should happen to be right and Hal should happen to be wrong about the
reality of the fundamental motivational difference between
refereed-journal authors and (just about) all others, then it is
important to sort this out, because it is only too easy otherwise to
dismiss self-archiving initiatives as naive and Quixotic, tilting at
the very Windmills of Capitalism, rather than as bringing out a
little-known home-truth about a small, anomalous subset of the
published corpus, a home-truth with radical implications (but for that
small literature only).

There have been several repeated points of misunderstanding. One has
been that I am clearly not claiming that refereed-paper authors don't
care about money! Nor that if there were some hypothetical,
counterfactual way that they could have their cake and eat it too --
i.e., if everyone everywhere could and would have free access to their
esoteric papers in perpetuo AND some entity were also prepared to pay
them (the authors) for it -- then they would quite happily accept the
eyes/minds AND the cash!

The trouble is, that in reality there is a trade-off: If money must
change hands in exchange for access, this entails that access is
reduced. Moreover (again, in reality), none of the money that changes
hands in exchange for access to the refereed journal corpus actually
ever reaches its authors! So they get the worst of both worlds from the
present system:  Fewer (much fewer) eyes/minds, and no cash! Nor would
the cash that IS made from the toll-booths be nearly enough to
compensate them for the trade-off, even if it WERE passed on to the
authors.

Now what I contend is that this non-optimal paradigm simply does not fit
book publishing in general (nor even scholarly/academic book publishing
in general -- although I agree that it may fit the special case of
esoteric scholarly monographs with only the hope of a success d'estime, or
perhaps no hope of publication at all).

So it is not saintliness about potential direct revenue from these
papers, if revenue could drop like Manna from heaven, that sets these
authors (when wearing these hats) apart. It is the reality of the
trade-off, which means revenue here could only come at the expense of
access barriers, and there isn't faintly enough potential revenue to
make it even thinkable to embrace that trade-off.

So much for potential misunderstandings about DIRECT revenue, from the
sale of the papers themselves. There is no contest on the subject of
INDIRECT revenue, from the IMPACT of the papers, and the way that can
enhance the incomes of their authors and their authors' institutions.
Here too, refereed-paper authors are anything but saintly.

But there IS a persisting misunderstanding about the CONTINGENCY (or
causal relation) between the direct and indirect revenues: My point is
that (as we have established that the direct S/L/P revenue (a) does not
go into the author's pocket in any case -- and (b) it would not be
nearly large enough to compensate for the trade-off of eyes/minds for
cash even if it did) it follows that for this special literature the
fact that ANY DIRECT INCOME AT ALL is being made by ANYONE from
charging S/L/P tolls for access to the papers is actually NEGATIVELY
correlated with the INDIRECT-revenue benefits to the authors.

And causality is indeed the issue, rather than mere correlation, for
Hal is merely pointing to the overall positive correlation between
publication/sales and impact/income: {more publication, more sales} --
{more impact, more income}. Sure! But if there were no sales, the
impact/income would be still higher (MUCH higher, by my lights)!

Now here comes my ignorance about the rest of the literature: I feel,
intuitively and anecdotally, that this paradigm does not fit it, as it
does the refereed journal literature. It's certainly true that authors'
(and especially academic authors') careers are likewise enhanced, the
more they are read. And that if their books were given away for free,
they would certainly be read more. I'm even ready to believe that their
indirect income (from being read) outweighs their direct income (from
the gate-receipts) in some cases (especially for beginning authors,
vanity authors, and authors who, for whatever reason, are not destined
to have many readers -- I have already conceded the authors of esoteric
academic monographs as a special case).

But (and it is hard to put this in formal terms), I still feel that
that this is not the PARADIGMATIC case for books, as it IS for refereed
papers; with books, is not the ‘name of the game’, and hence it would be
misleading to treat it as such.

But that's my best shot. I have no stronger arguments. So I now proceed
to quote/comment mode with someone who is clearly far more expert in
such matters than myself:
 

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Hal Varian wrote:

>sh> Yes, but the question was whether they would trade it off for their
>sh> refereed journal articles, not for their books and other activities.
>
> But of course they do---the time spent writing textbooks, consulting,
> and so on takes away from time spent writing and publishing academic
> articles.

This is a misunderstanding I have tried twice to correct! I am talking
about trading off (a) the collection of gate receipts for a given
article, and even the receipt by the author of all revenue therefrom, in
exchange for (b) the loss of eyes/minds therefrom.

In other words, it's about whether they would rather have the eyes or
the cash (even if the cash were forthcoming -- which in this literature
it is not!), NOT about how they trade off the rest of their timetable of
activities.

I can't understand why Hal's alternative, irrelevant and arbitrary
trade-off keeps being swapped for the relevant one I had singled out
from the outset. We are talking about the trade-off between selling it
and giving it away; and in this special literature (papers) -- as
opposed to the rest (books) -- there is simply NO CONTEST!

Perhaps the direct/indirect trade-off would be resolved the same way
for some no- or low-market books too, or at some early embryonic stages
of their authors' careers, but those would be case-by-case decisions,
whereas for the refereed literature it is, as they say, an open and
shut case, paradigmatic.

(Or am I the only one who continues to see a profound disanalogy here,
where direct revenue could at least in principle, if not always in
practise, offset the trade-off in the one case, but not even in
principle in the other?)

>sh> Perhaps the meaning of ‘make money on their texts’ was not entirely
>sh> clear the first time. I hope that now it is: It is the blockage of free
>sh> access to THOSE texts (and not other texts they may write, or other
>sh> things they may do with their time, that we are discussing here).
>
> This is a very, very limited sense of ‘make money on their texts’.
> Obviously academics make money on their works since they are paid,
> in part, to publish them.   Perhaps you meant to say that academic
> authors would prefer to maximize the readership of their works.
> I agree that this is true.  But it is also true of non-academic
> authors.

Let's just talk in terms of the direct/indirect income trade-off
(direct = sales royalty income; indirect = income from impact); it
encapsulates it all. And let's even throw out the red herring of the
non-academic author. So henceforth we are only talking about academic
authors. And let's drop the polysemous trade/non-trade vocabulary
(because academics write both ‘trade’ and ‘scholarly’ books).

So it's just about journal-papers vs. books (by academics). And my
contention is that, because of the direct/indirect trade-off, the
PARADIGM for journal-papers is give-away and the paradigm for the rest
is not (although there are exceptions, such as esoteric monographs).

> > I said something stronger, and I repeat it: The authors of refereed
> > journal articles are not interested in making money on THOSE texts at
> > all.
>
> I submit they would be happy to make money on those texts, as long as it
> didn't dramatically reduce the readership.  You have implicitly assumed
> that the only way to ‘make money on those texts’ is to charge people to
> read them, thereby limiting access.  I think this is a very narrow view,
> and limits the kinds of business models you might consider for information
> industries.

Insofar as my refereed journal articles are concerned, For-Fee or
For-Free ARE the only pertinent options. (I will get to the putative
alternative ‘business models’ presently; to let the cat out of the bag,
though: the story does not change one bit if one introduces a ‘delay’
variable – ‘fee now, free later: the trade-off is the same, and so is
the outcome; besides, the author doesn't get the fee anyway, and even if
he did, it wouldn't be worth his while, now or later; and research
authors want immediacy as well as impact for their work!)

>sh> The conclusion is that in the case of the refereed journal literature
>sh> only, the author has an interest in there being NO INCOME (to anyone)
>sh> from sale of his texts, because income means access-blockage. This is
>sh> also in the interest of the author's institution, which likewise gains
>sh> kudos (and grant income) from the impact of his research (not to
>sh> mention their savings from S/L/P cancellations!)
>
> Here is where your confusion lies.  It is false (as an economic
> proposition) that there is a direct relationship between ‘no income’  and
> ‘access blockage’.  Consider a field where there is an economic demand for
> the research (engineering, medicine, finance, etc.) It is common to see
> research produced in these fields where publication is delayed. It is
> first made available for a high price via consultancies, newsletters,
> affiliates, etc., and later made available to the academic world at large.
> This way the authors have their cake and eat it too---make money, and
> still make the research available to all.  Obviously this practice can be
> abused, but that is beside the point.  The point is that income can be
> made even while providing broad access.

Good case in point: The reply, insofar as my refereed journal papers are
concerned, is loud and clear: Forget about the pennies I could make from
the gate by denying or delaying access. Let everyone have it for free
NOW. There aren't pennies enough in the (realistic) world to make me
change my mind.

No, offering the author a cut of the gate receipts will NOT cut it in
this peculiar literature, and if that's the alternative ‘business
model’, it's a non-starter here. (And hence the analogies where it may
work are simply irrelevant, again.)

> A similar example is JSTOR, where back issues journal articles are
> available at zero marginal price to subscribing institutions.

Yes, IF (equals where, and when) the subscription is paid. Tell that to
all my potential readers who are NOT lucky enough to be at an
institution that can afford the subscription!

(The weasel-word was ‘marginal price’, because it glosses over the
S/L/P barrier itself. Nor is an author happy about having his
retrospective journal publications held hostage to S/L/P either: why
should he be?)

Remember, the alternative to each of these cases is self-archiving (which
authors can do retrospectively too!).

> Indeed, this model is becoming somewhat common in the for-profit trade
> literature.  An author first publishes a book, then 2 or 3 years puts the
> text up on his or her web site.

Interesting, but its relevance to the journal literature is unclear,
for the reasons mentioned above.

(Moreover, short-half-life print runs and the actuarial statistics behind
them are probably behind the practise you mention, as is the current
inconvenience of on-screen discursive reading for book-length
materials: Immediacy, and constant on-line accessibility and
navigability are assets peculiar to the journal literature.)

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html

> This is ‘second degree temporal price discrimination’ and presents one
> interesting business model for information goods.

Might be useful to a journal publisher looking for add-ons to help
preserve an S/L/P market, but the author wants immediate visibility, so
it is a minus, not a plus for him, with or without the pennies.

>sh> So with refereed journals it makes sense (and with books it does not)
>sh> that costs should be paid for at the author-institution end (yielding
>sh> free access for all) rather than the reader-institution end (blocking
>sh> access, impact income).
>
> The conclusion has some merit, but I disagree with the analysis.  I claim
> that the fundamental force is not the difference in motivation of the
> authors (since trade authors and academic authors like both money and
> readers) but in the nature of the production process of research, and, in
> particular, that the producers and consumers are the same people.

I'm afraid I can't entirely agree. First, the trade/academic distinction
is a red herring here; it's journal-papers by academics vs. books by
academics that we are focusing on now.

It is true that both of these have a smaller and more inbred
constituency than the non-academic book authorship/readership, but even
in the former it is not literally true that the producers and consumers
of any given work are the same (not even to the extent that it is true
that contemporary composers compose only for one another!). It may very
well be that a large proportion of the readers of my refereed journal
articles are themselves authors of refereed journal articles, but so
what? And so what if (when) it is true that most of the buyers of a
book by an academic author are themselves authors of refereed journal
articles? (The buyers can't be mostly book-authors -- not enough to go
'round except in the special case of those esoteric monographs, for a
narrow circle of peers only, which are again non-representative.)

I don't think any principles follow from this inbredness -- except for
that last special case where fellow-specialists are the only ones
willing to shell out for an esoteric volume in their own speciality. The
academic community is simply too large to be treated as just a peer
market for one another's work.

I think a potentially much more important side-effect of this
inbredness, though, is peer review itself, and here again, the
implications are different, and much more profound, for journals:
For we are not only the authors and the consumers of the refereed
literature, we are also its referees: WE do the quality controlling,
and we do it for free, motivated, when all is said and done, by
the Golden Rule, intrinsic interest (and perhaps some superstition and
sometimes worse) more than anything else.

The fact that even the quality controllers are us means that if journal
publishers should prove (as I hope they will not) to be inclined to try
to hold the literature hostage to access-tolls by trying to prevent us,
through regressive copyright agreements, from self-archiving, then
editorial boards are certainly in a position to bolt (as they have
already done -- or threatened to do -- in a few cases)...

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html

> To see
> why, look at another genre with this characteristic---fanzines for
> hobbiests (science fiction, collectors, etc.).  In the print fanzine world
> authors were not paid and the readers paid for zine via subscription, just
> as in the academic genre.  Now most of the hardcopy zines have moved to
> the Web where they are freely available.  I think you are right that this
> will happen with academic journals, but it isn't because academic authors
> wouldn't like to get paid for their texts.

This is the general Net freeware/vanity-press analogy, and I'm afraid I
still don't find it helpful: Yes, refereed journal articles are
give-aways, like fanzines, but they are quality-controlled, certified
give-aways, hence not vanity press (and they still require an economic
model for covering the essential costs of
quality/control/certification).

http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html

> Well, we could quarrel about the metaphysics of ‘cause’, I guess, but I
> would say that there is a pretty direct causal relationship between the
> number of readers of one's refereed articles and one's academic salary in
> the US.

Please see above for a more fine-grained causal analysis of the causal
structure of that correlation!

>sh> The trade/non-trade divide is fairly represented by desire and
>sh> expectation of revenue directly from the sale of the text.
>
> This is simply wrong.  Most trade books make very little money for the
> author directly from royalty revenues.  You only have to look at the
> statistics on authors' incomes.  The National Writers Union publishes
> such a survey and the numbers are strikingly small.

Are those figures adjusted for time-lines? At any given time, there must
be a large number of authors at the earliest embryonic stages, where
their output is not matched by income. And perhaps the profession also
contains a large proportion of failures. But surely no writer's desires
and expectations are based on the actuarial facts about starters and
failures!

There is a counterpart in refereed-journal writing too, though. Most
articles are read by few and cited by none (except the author himself).
Does this restore the analogy? Hardly, for the dream of the researcher
is of making an important finding and thereby making an important impact
on further research (and, yes, its indirect income-enhancing
consequences); what is the non-academic writer's dream, if not being
widely read?

(I made a mistake when I wrote earlier that reaching a maximum number
of eyes/minds was an end in itself for the researcher, rather than just
a means of making money from the sales of the texts: the end is
actually reaching the RIGHT minds, the ones that will understand, build
upon, and, yes, cite their work. What is the non-academic author's
counterpart for this?)

We had agreed we would only speak of academic authors' though: DO
academic authors write books with motivations so different from
those of non-academic authors? Are they really primarily after the
indirect benefits rather than the direct ones from sales? It would be
interesting to see the statistics for that specific literature (and
controlled for cumulative life-cycle effects -- and perhaps even culled
for esoteric ‘failures’)... But remember that ‘desire and expectation’
does refer to motivation (dreams), and not actuarial realism ...

>sh> this reader-end market is the wrong one for
>sh> refereed journal articles, which authors have always wanted to give
>sh> away, but have been prevented from doing so by the economics of paper.
>
> Again you are making the leap from ‘maximize the readership of’ to
> ‘give away’.  I agree with the former motivation (at least to the first
> order) but I deny that it immediately follows that the content must
> be given away.  This is one tool, but not the only one.

Would you not say that the long-standing practise of distributing free
(paper) reprints to reprint-requesters tends in my direction? As does
the absence of a corresponding tendency with books (except in the case
of Vanity Press)? (Publishers are always happy to pay royalties to an
author in the form of free copies of his book: Why is this not taken up
more by authors?)

I would be interested to know what would be a BETTER ‘tool’ for maximizing
access to my papers than making them available online for free for all
forever. For self-archiving is within reach of one and all. Paul
Ginsparg has led us to the water, and all we need do now is drink...

> I claim that a smaller
> and smaller fraction of total written works will be sold in the trade
> model.   The majority of written work will be given away on the Web
> (in fact, that is probably true today).

Would you say that the rising success of Amazon Books was evidence for or
against your prediction?

> In my experience, most publication is a mixture of economic and
> non-economic motivations.  My textbooks and trade book were successful
> because my academic papers were widely read.  The visibility resulting
> from the academic, text, and trade books leads to more offers for speeches
> and consulting.  I don't see the stark division that you describe.

Uncontested. And still the papers are give-aways whereas the rest are
not.

> I agree that the filtering is what need to be paid for.  (A quibble:
> some referees are paid, though typically not a sum that covers the
> time cost.)

A propos, from a previous posting:

    There is another Harnad, not myself, but a mathematical physicist by
     the name of John Harnad (and the one who first drew my attention to the Ginsparg
    Archive way back in the early '90s). J. Harnad has some further recommendations on the
    subject of referee answerability and compensation: He recommends
    that (a) all referees should be paid to referee papers; (b) payment
    for a rejected paper should be minimal (say, $200), but payment for
    an accepted paper should be commensurate with the effort of seeing
    it through the successive revisions (say, $2000) to successful
    publication; and, to avoid the potential abuse discussed above, (c)
    if a paper is accepted, the name of the accepting referee(s) should
    be co-published with it, to share the responsibility, praise or
    blame. He feels this would raise the quality of the refereeing and
    make the entire process much more answerable, hence effective, than
    it is now.

    Obviously this proposal is compatible with the transition from
    reader-institution-end payment to author-institution-end payment,
    but it is an as yet untested peer-review reform proposal; all such
    reform proposals need to be tested empirically and practically
    before being implemented on any scale. Hence it should not detain
    us on the road to freeing the CURRENT refereed literature, such as
    it is.

    (I also think that there is not enough money in the world to pay
    fairly for the precious time that referees steal from their own
    research in order to do the mostly thankless task of peer review;
    hence the Golden Rule is probably the only one we can continue to
    rely on! SUBMISSION charges, creditable toward PUBLICATION charges
    should the paper be accepted, may not be a bad idea to levy on
    authors, though, with or without referee payment, for it to might
    help raise submission standards and even revision
    conscientiousness, hence perhaps even lightening some of the burden
    on the work-horse referees; but this too would need pre-testing.)

>sh> It's not academic vs. trade authors! It's academics when they wear
>sh> their refereed-journal-author hats and every other author, including
>sh> themselves, when wearing their book-author hats (except in the case of
>sh> esoteric monographs).
>
> Hmm. So academic authors like money when they write trade books and don't
> like money when they write [journal papers]?

Correct. Vide supra.

> The real difference is not at the level of the author, but at the level of
> the industry.  In the trade book industry the authors and the readers are
> quite distinct, whereas in the academic publishing industry the authors
> and readers are, by and large, the same people.  The academic publications
> are both an input to and an output of the research process.  Other
> publishing industries where authors and readers are the same people had
> similar business models, and, I suggest will have similar dynamics in
> their move to the Web.

This again conflates books/journals and separates academic/non-academic,
which I think are the wrong fault lines. (I have tried to discuss the
inbred issue above.) Perhaps you could give another example (besides
esoteric monographs) that fits the give-away algorithm of refereed
papers?

> (The apparent necessity of paying for the
> refereeing overhead makes things a bit more complicated in the academic
> markets.)

Vide supra.

>sh> This is all no doubt true. But books, academic and non-academic, can in
>sh> principle bring direct incomes to their authors, and journal articles
>sh> can't, and that's the point.
>
> I agree that journal articles don't bring direct income to the authors
> under the current business model, but that is a rather obvious
> observation.  Whether they ‘can't’ or not could be disputed.

I'd like to hear a realistic scheme for this! To my mind it founders on
the following: Journal papers average next to no readers/citers
(with the access barriers of both paper and S/L/P). Going on-line is one
step forward; bypassing S/L/P through self-archiving is a second. Can
you think of a better way?

> But the more
> interesting observation is that trade books generally don't bring much
> direct income to authors either.  Authors publish trade books because of
> glory they get, for the most part, some of which can be translated into
> money.

So how do most trade authors make their fortunes? Is it all appearances
and movie rights now?

> You are simply making the same false claim over and over again.  Authors
> would be happy to make money from their journal articles, it's just that
> few publishers offer them this option.  So it is not the motivation of the
> authors that is relevant, but rather the business model for the industry.

By what business model would authors make money from their journal
articles? How much? And how do you think that would fare against
self-archiving? (Another way to put it -- I think I've already asked
this once: How much money would the publisher of my refereed paper have
to pay me so that I relinquish my self-archiving right? And where would
he get enough money for that?)

> I don't have substantive quarrels with the rest of your argument, or
> with your understanding of the academic publishing industry.  I just
> think that you don't understand the economics of the trade publishing
> industry.  The simple fact is that very, very few authors make any
> substantial sum of money in the trade industry, and their motivation
> for publishing trade books is more complex than you assert.

If none of my comments so far bears on how this is to be interpreted or
applied, then I acquiesce to your much more extensive knowledge on that
subject!

Stevan Harnad

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Mon, 12 Jul 1999 
From:         Hal Varian

Stevan Harnad wrote:

> Our disagreement is only about whether I am exaggerating the difference
> between the motivations of refereed-journal papers-authors (regarding
> THOSE papers) and authors in general -- of books, magazine articles,
> etc. -- in suggesting that the former are, and have always been,
> interested ONLY in giving those papers away, whereas other authors (as
> well as themselves, when wearing other hats) have at least the hope of
> some direct revenue from the sale of their texts.
>
> If I AM exaggerating this difference, then Hal's view would be that
> the ‘optimal and inevitable’ for the refereed journal literature may well
> prove to be the optimal and inevitable for much of the rest of the
> literature too.

Yes, I think that this is correct---we will certainly see much more
‘author pays’ production of literature, now that the Web has lowered the
costs of distribution so dramatically.  Indeed, we already see a huge amount of
writing on the Web that has no (direct) compensation at all.

The big question, as you have rightly identified, is the role of the
editors/referees/filterers of information.   What is the economic
model for this activity, in both the academic and the non-academic
literature?  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,
and that is the real value added in the publication process, especially
now that the other costs have been driven so low.

> There have been several repeated points of misunderstanding. One has
> been that I am clearly not claiming that refereed-paper authors don't
> care about money! Nor that if there were some hypothetical,
> counterfactual way that they could have their cake and eat it too --
> i.e., if everyone everywhere could and would have free access to their
> esoteric papers in perpetuo AND some entity were also prepared to pay
> them (the authors) for it -- then they would quite happily accept the
> eyes/minds AND the cash!

I would say that this ‘counterfactual’ is exactly what the system of
government research funding agencies  & university libraries does: 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.  Indeed, I would claim that 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!

> So it is not saintliness about potential direct revenue from these
> papers, if revenue could drop like Manna from heaven, that sets these
> authors (when wearing these hats) apart. It is the reality of the
> trade-off, which means revenue here could only come at the expense of
> access barriers, and there isn't faintly enough potential revenue to
> make it even thinkable to embrace that trade-off.

There is something of a trade-off, 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 causality is indeed the issue, rather than mere correlation, for
> Hal is merely pointing to the overall positive correlation between
> publication/sales and impact/income: {more publication, more sales} --
> {more impact, more income}. Sure! But if there were no sales, the
> impact/income would be still higher (MUCH higher, by my lights)!

This may be correct, but then we come back to the issue of filtering.
I can self-archive/publish for free on the Web, but I probably end up
with more readers (of my technical articles) by publishing in a journal,
since the articles are vetted by peer review.  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.

> But (and it is hard to put this in formal terms), I still feel that
> that this is not the PARADIGMATIC case for books, as it IS for refereed
> papers; with books, is not the ‘name of the game’, and hence it would be
> misleading to treat it as such.

I think a lot depends on how you average in creating your paradigm.
Most books don't make much money, if any.  A few books make a lot.  The
same goes for authors.  The primary motive for authors, I think, is to
be read.  They would like to be paid for this activity, but only
a few manage to do so.

I turn now to the direct responses, limiting myself only to those
where something new can be said.

> Yes, IF (equals where, and when) the subscription is paid. Tell that to
> all my potential readers who are NOT lucky enough to be at an
> institution that can afford the subscription!

JSTOR price discriminates as well---large organizations pay more than
small ones.   In general, the savings in shelf space vastly outweighs
the cost of JSTOR.  So if an organization ‘can't afford’ access, it is
likely an accounting illusion rather than actual lack of money.

> It may very
> well be that a large proportion of the readers of my refereed journal
> articles are themselves authors of refereed journal articles, but so
> what?

> I don't think any principles follow from this inbredness ...

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.

> This is the general Net freeware/vanity-press analogy, and I'm afraid I
> still don't find it helpful: Yes, refereed journal articles are
> give-aways, like fanzines, but they are quality-controlled, certified
> give-aways, hence not vanity press (and they still require an economic
> model for covering the essential costs of
> quality/control/certification).
>
> http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html

We are, I think, agreed on this point---that the costs of quality
control must still be covered by someone.  The issue is, should it be the
author or the reader?  I maintain that the reader gets substantial value
from the quality control, which is as argument for making the reader
pay.  This doesn't negate your argument---I perfectly agree that the
author gets value from having his works published, which is an argument
for making the author pay.   I just don't know what the net of these two
effects is.

> And perhaps the profession also
> contains a large proportion of failures. But surely no writer's desires
> and expectations are based on the actuarial facts about starters and
> failures!
>
> There is a counterpart in refereed-journal writing too, though. Most
> articles are read by few and cited by none (except the author himself).
> Does this restore the analogy? Hardly, for the dream of the researcher
> is of making an important finding and thereby making an important impact
> on further research (and, yes, its indirect income-enhancing
> consequences); what is the non academic writer's dream, if not being
> widely read?

This is a fair point---it may be that authors of book want to make
money, but few of them do.  And, as you say, authors of journal articles want
to be read, but few of them are.

> Would you not say that the long-standing practise of distributing free
> (paper) reprints to reprint-requesters tends in my direction? As does
> the absence of a corresponding tendency with books (except in the case
> of Vanity Press)? (Publishers are always happy to pay royalties to an
> author in the form of free copies of his book: Why is this not taken up
> more by authors?)

I would say that paper reprints are provided to me for free, or
at least can be purchased via a grant.  But copies of my book have
to be purchased out of my own pocket.  I don't find it remarkable
that authors give away for free something that they receive for free,
but wish to charge for something they have to pay for.

> > I claim that a smaller
> > and smaller fraction of total written works will be sold in the trade
> > model.   The majority of written work will be given away on the Web
> > (in fact, that is probably true today).
>
> Would you say that the rising success of Amazon Books was evidence for or
> against your prediction?

Last year the aggregate sales of books in the US fell by 2%, after
several years of increase.  Amazon's success is coming at the expense of other
vendors, not from an increase in the total sales of books.

> By what business model would authors make money from their journal
> articles? how much? and how do you think that would fare against
> self-archiving? (Another way to put it -- I think I've already asked
> this once: How much money would the publisher of my refereed paper have
> to pay me so that I relinquish my self-archiving right? And where would
> he get enough money for that?)

Remember, the real question at issue here is not whether the author gets
paid or not---the debate started when I asserted that authors of trade
books don't get paid much either.  The question that is of primary
concern to you is whether readers pay.  You argue that authors derive the most
value from publication, therefore it makes sense for them to pay
for the costs of publishing.  This may be right, but another argument
is that readers benefit the most from the filtering, so they should pay
for the costs.

Hal Varian

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Mon, 12 Jul 1999 
From:         Stevan Harnad 

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
off-loading 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 rechannelling 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 trade-off, 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 world-wide.’
    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 non-trade 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 my POTENTIAL readers whose institutions
CANNOT pay...

Stevan Harnad

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Mon, 12 Jul 1999 
From:         Hal Varian 

On Mon, 12 Jul 1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> 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.

No problem there; I just shortened the phrase in the interests
of my weary fingers.

> If you must think in terms of who the ‘consumer’ is and how he
> benefits, the consumer is the author-institution in both cases

Completely agreed.  In fact, you will remember that I argued that it is
this point (that the readers and the authors are by-and-large the same) is
the critical aspect of academic publishing that differentiates it from the
trade press, as opposed to the different motivations of the authors that
you emphasize.  (Perhaps it is not surprising that a psychologist
emphasizes motivations and economist emphasizes industry structure.)

> 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...

I agree that S/L/P, as currently implemented, reduces readership.
However, that's not the end of the story.  I think you need to look
at why and how S/L/P was created and survived for many years.  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?  This very fact calls for a deeper analysis of the economic
forces that kept it alive in the face of the inefficiency you describe.

> > There is something of a trade-off, 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 ....

> 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.)

And what about countries and institutions that can't afford submission
fees?  In the long run, the same costs have to be paid.  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.)

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.

>     ‘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 world-wide.’
>     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.)

> 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!

>     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!)

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.

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.  Furthermore, there is
no reason to use a 0-1, publish/don't publish scale any more---much
more sophisticated systems could be used.

One scenario is for public-archiving and self-archiving as the publication
mechanism and an essentially separate system of cataloguing/ranking/peer
reviewing as the filtering system.  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.

> > 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.

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.

Hal Varian 

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Mon, 12 Jul 1999 
From:         Stevan Harnad 

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 rechannelled 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 world-wide’
> >     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 cataloguing/ranking/peer
> reviewing as the filtering system.

This is already covered by the dichotomy: ‘U’ unrefereed pre-print 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
replacing 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

------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Mon, 12 Jul 1999
From:         Hal Varian 

On Mon, 12 Jul 1999, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> 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.

This is what strikes me as peculiar in your position.  You argue that
the dramatic change in costs will have a big effect on the academic
publishing model, and yet the same S/L/P model ‘is still fine’ for the trade
literature.

Doesn't it seem strange that the same change in costs will have such a big
effect in one area and a tiny effect in another?  I argue that the change
in costs will also have a dramatic effect in the trade literature with
lots of free publication of unvetted material (see the Web) with people
paying for filtering/vetting.  Hence the business model for the two
literatures will tend to become more similar.

> > 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!

But, as you well know, peer review varies dramatically in its quality.
There are good journals (which tend to be more selective) and bad journals
(which tend to be less selective) under the current system.   If authors
pay to get published, there will be a natural tendency to increase the amount
published and reduce average quality.

> > 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!

But you are paying for different things: authors are paying for
the hosting, readers are paying for the filtering.  This makes sense
since the authors value being published (as you repeatedly emphasize)
and the readers value selectivity.  I think that your 1/3 figure for
refereeing process is about right (I have made the same estimates in my
papers), so it's the same total amount paid, by essentially the same people,
in either case.

And if there are those that don't want to pay for filtering, they are welcome
to go out and search for the material they want on their own, spending time
rather than money.  But if there are those that want to pay money to have
the searching and filtering done for them, why should you object?

> 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!

My argument is that you seem to think that you can take the existing
refereed journal literature, reverse the payment system, and have nothing
else change. To a social scientist, this is highly unlikely.  The existing payment
system influences incentives, and changing the payment system will change
the incentives.

> 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.

Hmm.  I thought we were talking about the economics of 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:

I'm not talking about post-publication peer commentary; I'm talking
about post-publication peer review, just as you describe in the following
excerpt: