Re: j' insiste

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Name an argument that is not financial?  How about the orthopedic 
surgeon who now spends his or her day giving the equivalent of 
classes on biology 101 to every patient who happened to read an 
article somewhere on the Internet?  Some people's judgments are 
more valuable than others except at the polls.  There is a reason 
Harvard and Yale do not have open admissions.  Filter, filter, 
filter.  Does that mean that every filter is foolproof?  Of 
course not.

This is not the real gripe with open access, though.  OA can be a 
very good thing in certain instances.  BMC, for example, has 
developed a fascinating model.  I don't know their financials, 
but I hope they are making buckets of money, and they are OA 
across the board.

The real gripe is that OA for the most part only adds value at 
the margins. Let's take PLoS, another exemplary OA service. 
PLoS is OA, and that's terrific.  But the articles in PLoS are 
reputed to be outstanding, which raises the question, Would any 
of these articles not have found a publisher if the OA PLoS were 
not around?  No, almost certainly they would all have been 
published in traditional venues.  So OA does not add value for 
high quality work on the publishing side.

But how about the access side?  Here again the OA effect is 
marginal. Librarians (who are smart, I insist, though OA 
advocates seem to think otherwise) purchase the best journals. 
Researchers are disproportionately affiliated with major research 
universities.  Therefore most researchers already have access to 
the high-quality "toll-access" journals.  What OA does is 
potentially provide access to lower quality articles.  This does 
emphatically NOT mean that all OA articles are of poor quality. 
It simply means that for high-quality work, OA is irrelevant.

To return to PLoS.  Let's imagine a superior article in PLoS that 
instead was published in a toll-access journal. We imagine that 
this article becomes part of the collections of virtually all 
research libraries because it is a high-quality article and 
librarians purchase the finest materials.  Let's further imagine 
that this article finds a readership of 1,000.  Now the same 
article in an alternative OA universe is published.  The 
readership has risen, from 1,000 to, what?  to 1,005 perhaps? 
So all of the benefits of OA for high-quality work accrue to the 
marginal readership, and the full cost of the entire OA 
publishing enterprise is aimed at capturing the marginal reader. 
This (I am repeating myself) is the law of diminishing returns.

Joe Esposito


On 3/30/06, Richard Feinman <RFeinman@downstate.edu> wrote:
>
> The question I was discussing was the unique feature from the
> perspective of potential authors where the unique reputation of a
> journal is based on previous publications and the reputation of
> the editorial board.  My point was that the editorial board of a
> subscription journal has to decide if a committment to wider
> availability of information includes a consideration of the cost
> to libraries and whether they can take the chance of moving to a
> new or existing journal that helps in providing wider access and
> relief to libraries.
>
> But as long as you mention it, these are the people that will be
> called on to take risks.  Similarly, the start-up editors of OA
> journals who take time away from their research to try to improve
> things put a certain amount on the line.  Nobody doubts that the
> owners of Academic Press are wild and crazy guys but there are no
> bankruptcy laws to protect academics who redirect their careers.
> And my understanding of American business is that you don't
> really get rich until you are bankrupt.  Anyway, for companies,
> isn't BMC taking a bigger risk than big publishing houses but,
> again, this is not the question for authors and the ultimate
> reputation of the journal.
>
> Look, this is a unique moment.  Peter Banks and I agree on
> something: "more access to scientific information..." is a
> "...perfectly reasonable drive."  Part of his argument that this
> does not require open access is that 4 major diabetes journals
> successfully provide a high degree of access.  Peter has said
> this before but I have never been able to figure out whether this
> is an argument against or for OA.
>
> The advantage of open access is that it is not mutually exclusive
> with other forms of publication if they also provide a service.
> Everybody knows this.  You can say it will be hard to develop a
> way to make open access pay but after all the emails, name one
> argument that is not financial for providing availability of
> scientific information that holds water at all.  Capitalizing on
> this advantage will involve big changes, will demand difficult
> thinking outside the box and will be very risky indeed.  Surely,
> you agree with this, Joe.
>
> Richard Feinman