Lancet on open access

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

The Lancet article by Wiley excec Brian Crawford raises one of the
stranger arguments I've seen in contra open access, i.e. if the author
pays, why there's more incentive to publish the paper. And maybe quality
will drop too.

That is hilarious, roll on the floor laughing from Wiley or any other
commercial publisher. It implies a total unawarness of the modus operandi
of large commercial publishers for the last 40 years or so on the part of
everyone engaged in this discussion. Or maybe just an insult to the
intelligence of the readers of the article.

Surely Mr. Crawford knows that "more papers published means higher
subscription prices" has been a publisher mantra more than any other
single argument -over the last 30 years by publishers, followed of course
by its inflation stupid. Turns out now inflation is low, why it isn't
inflation stupid. Oh, it must be the number of papers then. Wait, that's
why we can't have open access. Does your head begin to spin?

MOST commercial publishers- until quite recently raised their captive
library journal subscription rates annually, citing "increased pages" or
increased articles as the justification. The modus operandi of commerical
publishers is a reason against open access, ie. the possibility more will
be published resulting in lower quality?? I wonder if Mr. Crawford
recognizes the irony of a Wiley excec making that argument. Has he looked
at how rapidly Wiley has been increasing its journals costs lately and
why?? (because they can is the answer)

And of course, this anti argument is an insult to all the academic and
research fields where page charges have been the standard for generations.
Are those using this argument suggesting those literatures--which have
always relied on page charges are somehow substandard, and that there wass
quality peer review going on?

I think one argument against commercial publisher dominance in the
sciences at one point was, if authors don't contribute financially then we
will see a glut of papers of lower quality flooding the system. They will
submit any olde thing. (and maybe that's why we have salami publications)  
Is the shoe different on the other foot? There acutally is some substance
to that argument and we have as an industry watched quality disappear in
some commercial STM journals that published anything they could get their
hands own-and charged outrageous prices to libraries. If authors had a
contribution to add to the overall cost, indeed there might have been
higher quailty.  They might only submit what they thought was best and
most important? Now what a concept that is!

Another example of money from authors for part of the process are the
Elsevier Economics journals where authors must pay at submission, in order
to pay peer reviewers-- why surely that would corrupt the system right?

The lengths publishers will go in creating straw arguments is pretty
amazing. Too bad they dont stick with the simple answers. Well, we see
this as a threat to our way of making money. End of discussion.

My understanding from a talk that Karen Hunter gave in Charleston the
first week of November is that Elsevier no longer increases prices based
on number of articles or pages published, a rationale that they and many
others had used for several generations to justify increasing prices. I'm
glad to see the most prominent commercial publisher in the world
indicating that what we all believed all along, ie. that more pages do not
absolutely mean higher prices, might have had some validity--Of course if
this is true then the arguments about getting bigger which means we can do
it cheaper (another favorite we should be bigger argument from
commercials.., the bigger the journal the chaper the article) would have
been false in the past, but now its true??

But its nice to see the biggest publisher saying they don't need to raise
prices based on number of papers published anymore.  Gee, what an amazing
concept.

AS far as I can tell the Nature article has little explication of any real
reasons open access won't work. Of course it will work, and the underlying
economic model, or some combinations, ie. author pays (page charges), or
author pays (for color separation or half tones), or author pays (for peer
review), is alive and well has never disappeared even under the dystonic
give us your copyright and we will publish it without cost to you system
of the commercial publishers -now that was a real incentive to flood the
system with crap wasn't it??

I heard again last week from another commercial publishing exec, but our
authors don't LIKE the idea of paying--well, yeah-so? If its built into
grants, etc. it isn't going to hurt them is it? and it just might help a
system survive the next round of growth that otherwise means continued
degradation of access worldwide.

There are exceptions in the author pays something schemes, (although I'm
not sure about the elsevier economics journals) if the authors, their
institutions or their grants can't pay, I believe.

My concern continues to be if libraries aren't "purchasing" the open
access journals, will libraries and their institutions rush to not only
embrace them, catalog them, but also make plans with the publishers on how
to preserve them long term?

Because as I said before publishers do not have a long term history of
preserving their own publications--they have to go to libraries to get
copies of what they published. In spite of Elsevier's recent response I
haven't had a publisher yet indicate all copies they digitized for back
files came exclusively from the publisher's in-house archives. Pergamon
MIGHT have been the exception.

Chuck