Re: The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition/2

[Ann Okerson <aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu>]

The second message in the series from the SCIENCE discussions on the list
amsci-forum.  Dr. Bloom is the editor in chief of the journals of the
American Physical Society, among the most prestigious in their field.  
Ann Okerson

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1998 13:56:16 -0400
From: Arthur Smith <apsmith@APS.ORG>
To: SEPTEMBER-FORUM@AMSCI-FORUM.AMSCI.ORG
Subject: Re: The Urgent Need to Plan a Stable Transition

So I find myself in the unexpected position of agreeing somewhat more with
Bloom (who I've argued with in the past) than Blume (who I work for). Such
is life...

Harnad's first quote (on goals and motivations in comparison with
"professional authors") we have discussed previously - in brief I believe
the "professional authors" comparison is a straw man argument, and the
vast majority of so-called trade authors have motivations quite similar to
scholarly authors, although there is in truth a wide spectrum for both.

My major complaint with the "Transition from Paper" working group article,
however, is the scant mention it makes of the importance of the peer
review process. This, the actual main intellectual work of a scholarly
publisher, around which any change in copyright policy should be focused,
is discussed only in a caveat paragraph:

    The precise form of this publication policy will require careful
    crafting, because it is important to preserve the rights of
    publishers to protect the value-added journals they create and to make
    them available as they wish. These journals, after
    all, require expert editing and are themselves intellectual
    achievements, in no way simple "sweat-of-the-brow"
    compilations. Journals will continue engaging referees, and can
    require authors to cite references to publications as a
    condition for publishing; this not only advertises the journal but
    ensures the integrity of the text. At the same time, open
    commentary of the sort now common on the Los Alamos "xxx" e-print
    server (http://xxx.lanl.gov) will provide a new,
    added form of critical discussion.

And I don't know where they got that last statement from - the only form
of commentary on the Los Alamos e-print server that I've ever seen is the
same form any scholarly journal has: new articles (that may or may not be
called "comments") referring to older ones. And "xxx" doesn't even
interlink these very well (except in the High Energy areas where it can
make use of the SLAC citations database). Did Science actually have
referees go over this paper?

As Floyd Bloom points out, there are two possible clear intellectual
owners of a scholarly work; the author who writes it (or the author's
employer) and the editor (employed by a journal, owned by a publisher) who
evaluates, places, and in many cases helps shape it. The contributions of
both are inextricably intertwined in the final product. The publisher
spends up to $1000 on the editing process for each scholarly article
published - this is in many cases more than the author has spent in time
on the actual article, although the research reported in the article could
have cost tens, hundreds, or thousands of times more. Ideally both
publisher and author (or author's employer) should share in copyright
ownership - is this possible, and would this be a useful middle ground?
Right now, either through current schemes or the proposal under
discussion, sharing is done by ownership on one side and licensing without
ownership on the other. The fact that the license in the proposal is
nonexclusive is potentially very damaging to the publishers' rights. Is it
a revocable license? Could publishers be forced to pay authors for
continued use of a license? (Oops that would make scientific authors paid
for their words...)

On Fri, 4 Sep 1998 16:15:13 +0100, Stevan Harnad
<harnad@coglit.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

>(2) Is the only choice really that between free papers, with no quality control,
>versus quality-controlled papers in exchange for copyright transfer and
>S/SL/PPV?
>
>    "...A paper submitted to Science will undergo extensive review and,
>    upon acceptance, extensive revision for clarity, accuracy, and
>    solidity. A paper published in Science will be seen throughout the
>    world by our 160,000 paid subscribers and perhaps two or three
>    times more readers as issues are shared. More than 30,000 readers
>    will be alerted to the new reports within hours of the appearance
>    each week of Science Online...."
>
>(3) How many journals reach 160K subscribers (or even 1/100 % of that)?
>
>(4) Free posting on the Web can reach all 160K (and 100 times that).

Science magazine is an extreme case, but with cheap internet distribution
every journal publisher should be shooting for at least 10's of thousands
of subscribers. That's the incentive they have BECAUSE they are paid
through subscriptions (S/SL/PPV). Free posting on the web could reach 16
million people, sure - but why would even 16 people have any reason to
think it's worth reading? That's Bloom's argument, and mine iterated here
earlier as well.

> [...]
>(6) Do we need this degree of investment? Is it worth the consequences
>(S/SL/PPV, fire-walls)?

Let's be clear: $1000 per article means several billion dollars a year,
worldwide. This is a lot of money. It is definitely a good question to ask
if it is worth it - and if the answer is no, we want to cut that in half,
or by a factor of 10, then scholarly publishing will have to be radically
changed. The most likely consequence will be a situation such as in some
of the humanities, where only 10 percent of articles are accepted for
journal publication. The rest could certainly be distributed free on the
internet with no quality checking - is this what we want? If so choose it,
but choose it consciously, not by following blindly arguments such as
those put forth by the "Transition from Paper" working group.

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