RE: journal and publication costs, corrected figures

[Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>]

I see confusion arising. See some comments in the text, which I hope will
clarify what 'open access' is about.

Jan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: espositoj@att.net [mailto:espositoj@att.net]
> 
> I wouldn't have thought so.  I would have thought that the 
> problems lie in the way academic work is certified and how academics 
> themselves are credentialled.

Certification of research is very important. And the credentials that come
with it for researchers, too. It functions as a constant assessment of
scientific work done and grant money spent. No one is suggesting to do
away with that. On the contrary, maintaining good certification processes,
proper peer-review, is seen as a 'conditio sine qua non' for open access
journals to succeed.

> The current situation stimulates massive 
> overproduction of materials (though I suppose one man's overproduction 
> is another's riches of civilization), which makes the filtering or 
> winnowing process essential.  This is the primary value publishers add 
> to the process.

Correct. And publishers include open access publishers.

> They certify work through the strength of their imprimaturs, whose
> strength in turn derives from a history of selecting good editors,
> establishing trade relations, and so forth.  

History is important, but 'past performance is no guarantee for future
results' and history is no excuse for thwarting progress. New titles have
been established all along and they need the time to prove themselves. The
superior dissemination and chance to be cited of open access journals is
increasingly being recognised by authors and assessment bodies alike, be
they tenure committees or funding agencies.

> See the recent Morgan Stanley report on Reed Elsevier's economic 
> prospects (I don't have the citation on this hard drive).

Hmm. We all know how right Morgan Stanley and other analysts can be if we
look at the state of our pension or other investment funds.

> A solution?  Sure.  Eliminating copyright will only make the problem
> worse; you can just see the executives at Reed Elsevier rubbing their
> palms together everytime Stevan Harnad posts a squib about 
> self-archiving.

Nobody is arguing for abolition of copyright. Instead, the argument is for
the abolition of wholesale transfer of copyright to the publishers in
order to assure open access to research results, for the sake of the
author, and the sake of scientific progress.

> More content makes the publisher's imprimatur all the more  valuable.  
> I'm a publisher myself and, trust me, the "information-wants-to-be-free"
> movement is to a publisher what a change in the tax code (preferably a
> "simplification")is to the accounting industry. You can't print the money
> fast enough to take advantage of all the economic opportunities that are
> opening up.

Open access publishing is about moving away from the trade in IP rights to
research articles, and moving to the provision of the service of
certification, making 'web-ready' and ensuring permanent, free and
convenient access to research results, providing authors with the optimal
dissemination of their work and the resulting visibility and chance to be
cited, and the scientific community as a whole with the quick and easy
access needed to accelerate scientific discovery. And with this comes a
new way of paying for the process: per article, for the service, at input.

> To "fix" the situation all--all-- that would be necessary is
> for authors to stop writing for attribution.  That's the key: 
> reduce the personal incentives for people to attempt to publish research 
> in the first place.  Genuine scholarship would still get written and 
> published because not all motivation is venal.  The pressure on library 
> budgets would disappear.  I'm sure for some, though, fixing the problem 
> by denying authors credit is akin to fixing a dog.

Although traditional publishing is not unlike the dogfood industry (the
one who pays - the librarian - is not the one who consumes - the
scientist), there is no need to deny authors credit or to 'fix the dog'.
In fact, open access is likely to give authors far more credit than they
get now (more citations, because their articles will be seen more widely).

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