RE: Sub-sidy/cription for ArXiv

["Nat Gustafson-Sundell" <n-gustafson-sundell@northwestern.edu>]

Thank you for your comments.  I suppose I could quibble here or 
there, but that could lead to an endless back and forth (such as 
about whether cancelled journal content remains available -- this 
will depend on the license, but for direct subs, old content 
should remain available in most cases, so they can indeed be 
cancelled if new content becomes available from another source on 
a going-forward basis -- now whether or not a publisher remains 
true to their word, even after, say, transferring a title to 
another publisher -- well , that's another matter and a good 
argument for your case about the content // another argument for 
your case is that many smaller schools don't have direct subs or 
have not purchased back-content).

I do see that we are largely talking past each other.  Since I 
studied under a journal editor, I can't conceive of peer review 
per se costing billions when peer review itself is 'free' and can 
be managed with little overhead and relatively few salaries (if 
that), since many editors working for a nominal fee or nothing 
will manage the open source software managing peer review, or 
they will be helped by grad students or others to do same.  I'm 
aware that there are all kinds of ways to make publishing 
expensive, though. Also, since my background is largely in 
entrepreneurial organizations, I think my tendency is to see 
opportunities, and to take with a grain of salt any argument to 
the effect that the way it has been done is the way it must be 
done (it may very well be true, but let's take a look around and 
see what might be possible...).  In any case, I'm more stuck on 
the actual services paid for.  I guess my best awkward metaphor 
is that we are building the car, sending it out for a paint job 
(and the painters are also from the university, though probably 
the managers aren't), and then we are buying it back at a 
premium.

The publishing value chain is central to the future I envisioned 
in my previous memo -- and as I said, I think the value chain can 
be provided more efficiently and it can be made better, both to 
fix weaknesses (peer review as it is now: both in terms of 
quality and as a service upon which to justify fees) and to offer 
more (such as better metadata -- which I think I value more 
highly than you, since it is central to discovery and more 
complicated than adding some subject tags), but I'll freely admit 
my line was science fiction, about a future that can be reached, 
and likely will in some ways be reached since it is based on 
current trends and practices.  You are talking about arXiv as you 
see it now, but I was talking about what could be two or three 
steps past the "synergies" (forgive me) that could result from a 
collaboration supporting arXiv, depending on the direction of 
'enhancements.' This is also why my discussion was expansive and 
speculative, including non arXiv subject areas and monographs.

One monstrous megajournal does indeed sound scary.  I was 
thinking more along the lines of mega platforms, not one big gray 
box for content.  One of the problems I mentioned a couple of 
times is that universities are paying redundant overhead for 
every publisher paying for its own silo of systems and staff. 
To some extent, some OA journal publishers are consolidated for 
efficiency already, sharing infrastructure, although they are 
separately run by autonomous editors of individual titles, but 
such collaboration is ad hoc.  Likewise, you'll notice that the 
big commercial publishers publish separate titles that have 
separate identities within the same fields.  The point is that 
overhead can be shared more massively and more purposively while 
title identity, editing, and governance could remain 
decentralized, though this particular scenario looks less like 
the arXiv that started the conversation.

Consortial/ cooperative systems exist in part so that the big 
universities can help the little guys.  If our basic assumption 
is that each institution is effectively on its own, I'd be 
worried about possible consequences to smaller institutions, 
especially given that central indexing as we know it now doesn't 
work perfectly (or even all that well - Google Scholar) -- but 
here again is why I'd want an improved value chain involving 
metadata and preservation that could result from better 
collaboration (and preservation, or the infrastructure and shared 
standards to support ongoing access, do matter: so that centrally 
indexed resources are not lost if individual institutions can't 
keep their IRs on).  Also, a distributed network of local IRs 
actually pushes up the price-tag of the whole system (overhead 
again), while other kinds of central systems are still needed 
(your indexers and harvesters, which may also, if commercial, 
exploit their dominance at some point).  On the other hand, many, 
many institutions do seem to have the money to support their own 
IRs at this moment, and local IRs can be implemented relatively 
cheaply...

The other issue, where we clearly see different futures, is that 
the cost of subs for current content might actually be pressured 
up in the cases where publishers lose the revenue they've made 
for providing ongoing access to back-content.  Or, in other 
words, universities probably end up with the same subscription 
budget-woes, but then they will also need to increase their IR 
support budgets (since, presumably, the IRs begin to be used and 
this has some effect on the expense of supporting the IR).  I see 
no reason at all to believe publishers will re-size fees under 
the scenario you provide, precisely because it is not just about 
content - it is about the other services in the value chain 
(specifically quality control and career effect due to title 
reputation, upon which those publishers that do profiteer can 
continue to profiteer).  {Of course, I'm presuming here that we 
might see mandates resulting in shortened embargos, but that 
embargos will remain.  I think your point has much more force if 
all content is mandated to become immediately available, but now 
I think we're really talking about Spanish castles in the air ... 
although, if immediate deposit mandates did become a reality and 
the scenario played out as you picture it, my guess is that we'd 
end up needing to build the peer review service providers you 
mention since I don't believe any organization could re-size to 
that extent without going under -- and we'd be better starting 
over again anyway, probably collaboratively, and we'd want to 
think about adding more value to the chain ... this sounds 
familiar.}

At the end of the day, though, I do think we're in different 
forests, which is why I didn't take the tree by tree approach. 
I don't see our thoughts as mutually exclusive, although I 
understand you're concerned that other approaches will delay 
progress on the approach you think will succeed best. I do hope 
that mandates have all of the good consequences you envision.  I 
think it's clear that more mandates are coming, at least for back 
content, so that's good.  More universal availability of back 
content will certainly give universities more wiggle room to 
build the future (since more options on a going-forward basis 
become more practical).

-Nat


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 5:22 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Sub-sidy/cription for ArXiv

On 26-Jan-10, at 7:15 PM, Nat Gustafson-Sundell wrote:

> I don't expect local repositories to ever offer quality
> control.

Of course not. They are merely offering a locus for authors to
provide free access to their preprint drafts before submitting
them to journals for peer review, and to their final drafts
(postprints) after they have been peer-reviewed and accepted for
publication by a journal.

Individual institutions cannot peer-review their own research
output (that would be in-house vanity-publishing).

And global repositories like arxiv or pubmedcentral or citeseerx 
or google scholar cannot assume the peer-review functions of the 
thousands and thousands of journals that are actually doing the 
peer- review today. That would add billions to their costs 
(making each into one monstrous (generic?) megajournal: near 
impossible, practically, if it weren't also totally unnecessary 
-- and irrelevant to OA and its costs).

[SNIP]