Re: Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I'll keep my reply much shorter this time, Stevan, so as not to try
the patience of others on this list or hog more than my fair share of
time in this ongoing discussion.

I'm afraid I don't share your "serene confidence that there are 
plenty of available OA hosts, big and small, ready to take on the 
implementation of peer review for migrating established journal 
titles and ed-boards, scaled down to OA publishing." Partly I 
don't because I think, to work most efficiently, there needs to 
be more structure to the system than self-archiving or IRs 
themselves can provide, even with pretty good federated 
searching. The editors of single journals would need to find a 
way to join together with editors of other journals in their 
disciplines, or related disciplines, so as to form a group of 
journals that could serve a whole discipline, or special area of 
interest, well. That is typically what scholarly societies have 
done, and maybe some of them could take over the journals 
abandoned by large STM publishers-if they don't continue to feel 
just as threatened by OA as the commercial publishers do! An 
ideal structure would be something like what CIAO and 
AnthroSource represent, respectively, for International Relations 
and Anthropology in the social sciences, which encompass not only 
journals but also monographs, working papers, conference 
proceedings, and grey literature. As director of a press that 
worked with our library and SPARC to help set up such a structure 
for another social science discipline, rural sociology, I can 
tell you that this is no trivial or inexpensive task!

Sudden change is very difficult to plan for, and my worry is that 
if such a scenario were to happen, no really adequate structures 
would be in place save for a few like the ones I've mentioned to 
provide for an organized environment of knowledge. Possibly, yes, 
some individual editors would immediately try to keep their 
journals going by setting up their own self-publishing OA 
operations. But who would pay for the editorial support services 
that the major STM publishers now provide? Departmental budgets 
can be stretched only so far, and these might be tapped already 
for supporting their own authors publishing in other OA journals. 
(This is part of the "free rider" problem that university presses 
have long suffered from, because they do not publish for their 
own university faculty primarily but provide a service to the 
system as a whole. Universities like to fund their own faculty 
first, their presses second, and the same would likely be true 
for editorial offices of journals.) Academic editors would need 
to spend more of their time doing the kind of work that 
professional publishing staff now do, at a cost to the university 
that would overall be greater (because faculty are paid, 
generally, better than professional publishing staff). 
Universities would do well to start creating these structures 
now, but I don't see that as likely to happen because most 
administrators, I suspect, share your view of gradual change and 
will think there is plenty of time to prepare. Sure, library 
funds once used for purchasing STM journals could be diverted, 
but this is not so straightforward a process as you seem to 
assume, as many libraries now share the burden of subscription 
payments whereas I suspect that the distribution of editorial 
offices will be more highly concentrated in the most-research 
intensive universities where the leading scholars reside-and I 
can't see Ball State contributing its savings from library 
subscriptions to supporting Yale faculty's editorial offices!

We at Penn State are doing our small bit by serving as a test 
site for the DPubs "open source" software that is designed to 
provide a platform for managing the editorial and production 
processes not only for journals but also for conference 
proceedings and, ultimately, edited volumes and monographs in 
electronic form. But there should be many other efforts like this 
going on if we are to avoid a very messy transition period if my 
hypothesized scenario of sudden change comes true.

-Sandy Thatcher

Sanford G. Thatcher, Director
Penn State University Press
University Park, PA 16802-1003
e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu
http://www.psupress.org