Incentives (RE: In the news (Georgia State)

["Rick Anderson" <rick.anderson@utah.edu>]

> Not wishing to split hairs, Joe, but Paul Ginsparg didn't 
> separate certification and dissemination - the high energy 
> physics community had done that already.  For years they had 
> shared preprints with the rest of the (fairly small) community. 
> What arXiv did was make that process faster, cheaper and more 
> convenient.  That's why it didn't take a government mandate to 
> force authors to use it.

Not to split a different hair, Ian, but I'm not sure speed, 
affordability and convenience add up to incentive.  What has 
attracted the physics community to the arXiv is the fact that it 
solves a problem for them: the need to get good (though not 
finished and formally branded) information out into the community 
where it can be used.  If the arXiv provided a solution to a 
problem they didn't have, it wouldn't have attracted any users no 
matter how fast, cheap and convenient it was.

It seems to me that one problem OA in general is that it doesn't 
solve a problem for many of the people on whom it depends for 
content.  If, as some argue, authors cared only about 
disseminating their work as widely as possible, then it might -- 
but really, under those circumstances OA wouldn't even be a topic 
for discussion, because a very good mechanism for free worldwide 
distribution already exists.  Any author who simply wants to 
distribute her work widely can just put it up on a website and 
let everyone have it.  The problem is that many authors care very 
much about how and in what forum their work is distributed and 
very little about how quickly and widely it's distributed (that's 
why they keep submitting their articles to slow-moving 
toll-access journals rather than putting them up on free 
websites).  For those authors, OA may be a neutral factor at 
best.  Remember that relatively few academic disciplines place 
much value on getting unfinished, unbranded scholarship out into 
the community as quickly as possible -- physics is somewhat 
unusual in this regard.

Here's my standard disclaimer: None of this is to say that OA is 
a bad thing.  Only that we need to put ourselves in authors' 
shoes, and remember that what seems on the surface to be an 
unalloyed good for the end user can have unintended consequences 
behind the scenes.  Authors are consumers of distribution 
services, and history suggests that when you force consumers to 
do something they don't seem to want to do, the result is often 
unsatisfactory.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
University of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu