Re: Olbers' Paradox and OA

[jcg <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

On Wed April 21 2004 11:22 am, Ann Okerson wrote:

[snip]

> Mark suggests that publishers won't need to maintain their backfiles on
> their servers -- these functions would be taken up by libraries instead.
> If so, the library community has a lot of work to do and and additional
> costs to incur.  But, even if libraries (or government organizations, as
> Mark observes) as sites for online journals become the norm... has anyone
> seen publishers walking away from the responsibility of maintaining
> backfiles (au contraire ... many societies have digitized all their
> backfiles and continue to enhance online functionalities)?

If libraries do not have to pay for as many subscriptions as they do now,
perhaps, just perhaps, they could find some money to help on the
preservation side.

As for publishers walking away from the responsibility to maintain
backfiles, let us remember the complex negotiations led by Reed-Elsevier
with the Royal Dutch Library (and, if I remember correctly, with Yale as
well) to try and unload this responsibility onto someone else. The moment
these backfiles cannot conceivably make money and/or the moment no subsidy
is available to digitize the backfiles, most societies will, I believe,
avoid that task. But there may be counter-examples to this claim. If so, I
would like to know about them, and what the motivations were.
>
> That the costs of storage continue to decline is only a part of the
> ongoing cost equation.  And, for those who mentioned it, LOCKSS, as
> presently conceived, is important, because it allows libraries to cache
> ejournals and volumes of particular interest to them, but, at least as
> conceived now, it's quite a ways from a long-term preservation system or a
> digital library system. (And I'm writing this as a great admirer of
> LOCKSS, in which Yale library is an early and enthusiastic member and
> participant).

The decreasing cost of storage is indeed only a part of the equation, but
it should not be forgotten. LOCKSS' ambition, as I understand, is to
provide long term preservations to the documents placed under its custody,
so to speak. The point of LOCKSS is not simply to cache documents; it is
to create an automatic exchange of subsets of designated archives between
participating institutions. Of course, this process meets with the fact
that various members of the network, at various times, will change
equipment, yet remain part of the network. Consequently, the exchange will
also entail refreshing the document on those particular servers - a task
done as a matter of course, as part of the general refreshing process made
necessary by the change in equipment. At the same time, it ensures that
these documents know how to exist within a wide variety of hardware cum
software environments. 

DNA metaphors come to mind here: various physical bodies harbor these DNA
strands and allow them to reproduces and multiply within varying
ecological conditions. In this context, it looks as if coyotes and human
beings are very good at adapting to just about any ecological system, thus
providing a robust, diverse base for the survival of coyote or human DNA.
Both are very complex documents and both have been maintained extremely
stable over a very long periods that dwarf anything that hardened writing
supports can demonstrate so far (if only because writing is only 5,000
years old and cave paintings reach perhaps back to 50,000 years at most).

What LOCKSS has to do is to demonstrate a growing ability to deal with
ever vaster quantities of documents and do so across an ever widening
variety of hardware and software environments. And, as I pointed earlier,
whatever happens, those asks will always be simpler with open access
documents than with those encumbered by DRM concerns. The consequence, if
LOCKSS or something equivalent should really take off (and I do hope it
does) is that open access documents will be a lot easier to conserve than
the other documents and, therefore, they will tend to be conserved better.
The result is that they will survive over longer periods of time.
>
> (Of course if the journals publishing system changes from today's peer
> reviewed bundle of XXX articles per journal to something else, more
> freewheeling, then all bets are off about... everything.  But so far, even
> with the newest online titles and most creative business models, the STM
> journal concept remains much the same.)

Peer review is easily preserved within OA. In fact it should be preserved
as a way to ensure the perpetuation of the notion of a specific scientific
territory and do so by playing its real role - not that of quality
control, for it fails too often in that capacity, but that of a passport
to science's land where open usage and open criticism will gradually
generate the best forms of judgment possible. "With enough eyeballs, all
bugs are shallow", Linus Torvalds famously said of the open source
movement in software. The same principle applies to science and
scholarship in general. The point is to allow as many good eyeballs as
possible to get down to work - a situation that toll gating patently works
against.

Bundles are not incompatible with OA although they would look a little
strange there - more like maintaining a familiar landscape than really
fulfilling any useful function.

As for the "more freewheeling" hypothesis, it is too vague. It also does
not apply to the more interesting OA experiments presently going on: the
rigor that accompanies these forms of experimentation is anything but
"freewheeling". OA is not an amateurish dream pursued by starry eyed
idealists; it is an objective that tries to reconcile the needs to make a
particular kind of communicational system economically sustainable with
the needs to make it intellectually optimal. Hinari, INASP, consortia and
the rest of it are but temporary band aids that try to fix a broken
communication device.

However, as Macchiavelli pointed out many years ago, many people prefer a
familiar, if imperfect, situation because they know how to navigate this
situations, to a better but unfamiliar situation where navigational
mistakes may generate a loss in material advantages and/or status.

Best,

jcg