Re: October issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter

[Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com>]

Peter's long discourse on the quality of OA and TA journals leads 
to conclusions with which few could disagree: OA journals can be 
high quality and TA journals can be low-quality. Whether one 
model or the other tends to lead to higher quality is best 
answered with actual data over the coming years, not by further 
duelling list serve posts and email.

For now, however, one can probe further how quality would be 
sustained in an OA model, because much of what has been written 
is I think based on a false premise: that, in the face of 
mandated OA, nonprofit and for-profit publishers would continue 
the work of traditional peer review, the products of which must 
then be then made freely available.

In short: Ain't going to happen. No rational organization is 
going to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year 
needed to operate, sustain, and upgrade traditional peer review 
systems for a major journal, when sales of the products that 
sustain those operations are undermined by free distribution.

Thus OA must realistically entail new mechanisms of peer 
review--perhaps the open, democratic peer review system that PLoS 
has launched with PLoS One. It may work. After all, the Wikipedia 
may not be quite as authoritative as the Encyclopedia Britannica, 
but it is already more complete, more rapidly updated, and, one 
might argue, far more broadly and savagely reviewed. Moreover, 
open peer review might foster the kind of social and intellectual 
networking that traditional publishing does not tend to create.

If PLoS One's model does prove the wave of the peer review 
future, though, it raises issues that must be addressed, just a 
few of which are:

--Versioning. A manuscript becomes less like an inanimate object, 
frozen in time, than a living organism, constantly being modified 
by the author in response to criticism. There should be some way 
of tracking the evolution of the author's ideas.

--Determining the canonical version. One of the traditional 
functions of publishing is determining and certifying the 
canonical version of a manuscript. Will there be such a function 
in the future, and, if so, who will be responsible for it? Will 
scientific authors adopt the model of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 
revising manuscripts from cradle to grave? Will we sing the body 
of literature electric?

--Synchronizing versions. The paper may exist in many places, in 
PMC, in institutional repositories, at the publisher's site. Is 
there, or should there be, some mechanism of synchronizing these 
versions with what the author considers to be the up-to-date 
version?

--Liability and safety. Should papers in clinical medicine be 
made freely available, as PLoS seems poised to do? Patients do 
crazy things even with reviewed literature. Is there liability if 
someone is injured by inappropriately modifying treatment or 
self-care on the basis of an unreviewed article? Of course, one 
could make the argument that patients themselves are in the best 
position to offer real-world feedback on the safety and efficacy 
of drugs, since they themselves take them.


All of these questions are solvable...and maybe PLoS has, or 
will, address them, if not now, then in time. The challenges are 
great, and will require the insights of librarians, publishers, 
authors, and others. The soaring promises of OA do have some 
down-to-Earth consequences.

Whatever the solutions, it seems clear that the promised 
cost-savings of OA are rather quickly gnawed away at when one 
begins to attack problems such as those above.

Peter Banks
pbanks@bankspub.com
www.bankspub.com


On 10/3/06 12:38 AM, "Peter Suber" <peters@earlham.edu> wrote:

> * Announcement (cross-posted) *
>
> I just mailed the October issue of the SPARC Open Access 
> Newsletter.  This issue summarizes the state of OA legislation 
> in the just-ended session of Congress and takes a close look at 
> the indirect ways in which access might affect quality.  The 
> Top Stories section takes a brief look at the university 
> administrators supporting and opposing FRPAA, the continued 
> expansion of the hybrid journal model, an NIH-publisher 
> agreement that hurts researchers, a new policy at the NEH (not 
> NIH) to favor OA projects, and a statement by a Vice President 
> of the Association of American Publishers that it's in the 
> national interest to limit access to publicly-funded research 
> to those who can afford to pay.
>
> October issue
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-06.htm
>
> How to subscribe and unsubscribe to the newsletter and discussion forum
> http://www.arl.org/sparc/soa/index.html
>
> The archive of back issues is open to non-subscribers
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm
>
> Peter Suber
> Senior Researcher, SPARC
> Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
> Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
> Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
> Author, Open Access News blog
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
> peter.suber@earlham.edu