RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

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

On Fri, 30 May 2008, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> I agree entirely that one is not likely to start with an IR to
> find the most important work in a discipline, unless one happens
> to follow the work of a particular scholar, in which case one
> would likely go to the scholar's own web site first, not the IR.

OA IRs provide free supplemental copies of published, refereed journal
articles. The best and most likely way to find and access them is via a
harvester/indexer that links to the item, not by directly searching the
IR itself. (Direct searching of the IR is more relevant for
(1) institution-internal record-keeping, (2) performance assessment,
(3) CV-generation, (4) grant application/fulfillment, and perhaps also
some window-shopping by prospective (5) faculty, (6) researchers or
(7) students.)

The main purpose of depositing refereed journal articles is (8) to maximize
their accessibility, so they are accessible to all would-be users, not
just those whose institutions happen to have a subscription to the
journal in which they were published. That way (9) the usage and impact of
the institutional research output is maximized (and so is (10) overall
research progress).

> But I do continue to question what the institution gains from its
> IR.

It seems to me that (1) to (10) above is quite a list of institutional
gains from their IRs.

> Does Harvard really need, or will it gain, any more
> "prestige" by having its faculty's work deposited there?

Prestige is only a small part of it. All universities want and need (1)
- (10) (and not all universities are Harvard for prestige either!).

> It seems equally likely that it will lose some respect if too many
> scholars post articles that are first drafts or occasional pieces
> that would never appear in any peer-reviewed forum. It could
> easily become a grab bag of miscellany that will not reflect well
> on Harvard's presumed reputation for quality.

What content an IR *accepts* is an entirely different matter from what
content an IR *mandates*. Harvard is mandating OA target content, which
is the refereed, accepted final drafts of peer-reviewed journal articles.

It does not seem to have done the prestige of high energy physics any
harm to have been (for over a decade and a half) self-archiving their
pre-refereeing preprints too, even before their refereed, final drafts. But
that is an individual and disciplinary choice, not one that the Harvard
mandate is making for its faculty, and not the primary purpose of an
OA IR.

> Harvard authors, on
> the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I would
> suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the
> institution.

That may or may not be a good argument against depositing unrefereed
preprints, but it has nothing to do with OA, OA mandates, or the primary
purpose of OA IRs.

> And, as for the general public, what members of that public are
> really going to bother spending their time pouring over esoteric
> scholarship when they can go to Wikipedia to get the information
> they need? This seems to me as false an assumption as the
> expectation that somehow members of the public are going to
> benefit greatly from reading the technical articles posted on
> PubMed Central under the new NIH program.

I think you are quite right about that, Sandy. I myself have been somewhat
uncomfortable all along with the heavy emphasis that some of the advocacy
for OA has placed on the putative need of the general tax-paying public
for access to peer-reviewed research journal articles.  The need is
there for health-related research, and perhaps a few other areas, but
I have always felt it weakens rather than strengthens the case for OA
to argue that its primary purpose and urgency is for the sake of lay
public access. It is not. OA is needed for researcher (peer to peer)
access. The lay public benefits indirectly from the enhanced research
productivity, progress, impact and applications generated by OA, not
from direct public access to esoteric, technical reports.

However, I have to admit that my worries may have been misplaced,
because the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (which I strongly support)
managed to get through to a lot more people (lay public, academics and
congressmen) with the message of taxpayer access than they would have
done if they had stressed only peer-to-peer access. So they perhaps
overgeneralized the special case of health-related research, suggesting
that it was a matter of similar urgent public interest in all
public-supported research. In reality, it *is* a matter of similarly
urgent interest for the public -- but an interest in maximizing
research progress and applications, by making research openly accessible
to its real intended users, namely, other researchers. That is the way
the tax-paying public maximizes its benefits from the research it
supports -- not by reading it for themselves!

This public access argument, however, applies more to the public funding
of research grants (such as those of NIH) than to university research
access policy. In the university case, it is clear that the
objectives of OA mandates are mostly peer-to-peer (or, if you like)
university-to-university access, rather than a burning need for public
access.

It is to be noted, though, that whatever is one's primary rationale --
public access or peer access -- the other comes with the OA territory.
So the outcome is the same.

      Harnad, S. (2007) Ethics of Open Access to Biomedical
      Research: Just a Special Case of Ethics of Open Access to
      Research. Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, 2 (31).
      http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14431/

> I imagine that very few
> members of the public are going to be able to understand the vast
> majority of these articles, let alone derive any useful lessons
> for life from them.  There seems to be a general fantasy that the
> whole world is somehow waiting breathlessly for access to all
> this highly specialized knowledge. I speak as director of a press
> that has a hard time selling books that we think to be of
> "general interest," compared with our monographs. The audience
> just isn't there, folks!  And institutions that believe their
> reputations are going to soar because of what their faculty post
> on their IRs are just kidding themselves.

I agree with most of this, as you see.

(But be careful, Sandy! Some might be tempted to say you have a hard time
*selling* books, but you might have less of a hard time giving them away
free (OA)! As you know, I do not make this argument for books in general,
because I know that there are true and unavoidable production
costs to cover there -- whereas with Green OA IRs, journal publication
reduces to just the costs of implementing peer review alone. Moreover,
book authors are more inclined to seek royalties than to pay production
costs and give their books away free. But for some esoteric monographs,
an online-only OA edition, with costs covered by the author's
institution, may very well turn out to be the optimal model, much as it
well probably end up for journal article publication.)

      Harnad, S., Varian, H. & Parks, R. (2000) Academic publishing in the
      online era: What Will Be For-Fee And What Will Be For-Free? Culture
      Machine 2 (Online Journal)
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j002/Articles/art_harn.htm

Ceterum Censeo: The notion of "provostial publishing" is utter nonsense:

      No Such Thing As "Provostial Publishing"
      http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/409-guid.html

Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/