Re: Call for Boycott of Cell Press Journals

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

The logic and causal-chains involved in the quest for free full-text
access to the peer-reviewed journal literature are alas not always simple,
though I believe that they can be understood, with a little effort.

First, it is important to note that I fully support Peter Walter's and
Keith Yamamoto's call for a boycott of Elsevier's Cell Press journals
because of the high license-toll price demanded and the resulting
access-denial at University of California. I support it (and would sign
the petition threatening boycott, just as I signed the Public Library of
Science's similar open letter, which gathered over 30,000 signatures, if I
were a Cell Press author or user).

But I would also draw one logical point to the attention of UC (and other)
authors, and add one strategic recommendation that I believe would bring
them what they seek with much greater certainty and speed than petitions
and boycott threats or even founding competing journals will.

The logical point: This petition is based in part on the familiar, but
incorrect suggestion that the reason high access-tolls are unjust is that
UC *gives* its research output to these journals for free, and is then
forced to buy it back at a high price. This is not true, or rather not the
point: UC is not buying back its *own* research output in purchasing
access to these journals. It already *has* its own research output. It is
buying *in* the research output of *other* institutions! (No publisher
could or would object to a university setting up an internal arrangement
where it shares its own research output with its own researchers!) So that
cannot be the real problem. The problem is access to the research output
from elsewhere.

And access-denial because of toll-barriers is definitely an extremely
serious problem, responsible for mounting quantities of needlessly lost
daily, weekly, monthly and yearly research impact for the research output
and researchers of all institutions as long as it persists.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/dual-strategy.htm

But if -- *in addition* to writing petitions and threatening boycotts --
UC researchers (and all others) would simply self-archive their own
research output, this would make it freely accessible to one another and
to all other researchers too, putting an end at last to its needless
accumulating impact loss. And the solution would scale, for it is
reciprocal: "Self-archive unto others as ye would have them self-archive
unto you." In other words, all researchers would gain free access to the
research output of other institutions because of the Golden Rule.

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/unto-others.html

And the irony is that Elsevier is already a Romeo "blue" (and probably
also "green") publisher! That means that their 1500+ journals are among
the 55% of journals sampled that already support the author self-archiving
of the preprints (and probably also the postprints, if asked) of their
articles. Why it is that the research community continues to prefer *only*
to petition and to found competing journals, instead of *also* grasping
what is already within their reach?

This will be a puzzle that the historians of the optimal and inevitable
outcome of all this -- namely, free, universal, full-text, online access
to all the peer-reviewed research literature, for everyone, forever --
will be the ones to unravel, once we're there. The answer is no doubt
related to the slight complexity of the logic and causality involved,
hence it is just a matter of time before we at last get it!

But that logic is no doubt not lost on publishers! Why take petitions for
free access seriously if the petitioners obviously don't care enough about
free access to make sure their *own* research output is freely accessible,
even when they have the publisher's green (or blue) light!

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm

Please let me repeat in closing that this is *not* a criticism of drafting
and signing petitions or founding competing open-access journals! it is a
criticism of doing *only* that, when another obvious means is at hand too,
and time's a'wasting...

Stevan Harnad