Re: Sub-sidy/cription for ArXiv

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I will be interested to see how Professor Harnad revises this
post after the launch of Google Editions and the beginnings of
browser-based etexts.  The architecture of the Internet and
repositories described below does not align with the way the
Internet is evolving.

Institutions that invest in repositories (except for
preservation) may find that the money is not well spent.  In any
event, there is no harm in waiting six months to see what Google
has up its sleeve.  Put mandates on hold.

Joe Esposito

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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).
>
>> Also, users have said again and again that they prefer
>> discovery by subject, which will be possible for semantic docs
>> in local repositories or better indexes (probably built through
>> better collaborations), but not now.
>
> Search should of course be central and subject-tagged, over a
> harvested central collection from the distributed local IRs, not
> local, IR by IR.
>
> (My point was that central *deposit* is no longer necessary nor
> desirable, either for content-provision or for search. The
> optimal system is institutional deposit (mandated by institutions
> as well as funders) and then central harvesting for search.
> http://bit.ly/62M14a
>
>> I agree that it would be great if local repositories were more
>> used, and eventually, the systems will be in place to make it
>> possible, but every study I've seen still shows local
>> repository use to remain disappointingly low, although some
>> universities are doing better than others.
>
> "Use" is ambiguous, as it can refer both to author use (for
> deposit) and user use (for search and retrieval). We agree that
> the latter makes no sense: users search at the harvester level,
> not the IR level.
>
> But for the former (low author "use," i.e., low levels of
> deposit), the solution is already known: Unmandated IRs (i.e.,
> most of the existing c. 1500 IRs) http://roar.eprints.org/ are
> near empty (of OA's target content, which is preprints and
> postprints of peer-reviewed journal articles) whereas mandated
> IRs (c. 150, i.e.m 1%!)
> http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ are capturing, or
> on the way to capturing their full annual postprint output.
>
> So the solution is mandates. And the locus of deposit for both
> institutional and funder mandates should be institutional, not
> central, so the two kinds of mandates converge rather than
> compete (requiring multiple deposit of the same paper).
> http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/369-guid.html
>
> For the special case of arxiv, with its long history of
> unmandated deposit, a university's IR could import its own remote
> arxiv deposits (or export its local deposits to arxiv) with
> software like SWORD, but eventually it is clear that
> institution-external deposit makes no sense:
>
> Institutions are the universal providers of all peer-reviewed
> research, funded and unfunded, across all fields.
> One-stop/one-step local deposit (followed by automatic import.
> export. and harvesting to/ from whatever central services are
> needed) is the only sensible, scaleable and sustainable system,
> and also the one that is most conducive to the growth of
> universal OA deposit mandates from institutions, reinforced by
> funder mandates likewise requiring institutional deposit rather
> than discouraged by gratuitously requiring institution-external
> deposit.
>
>> Inter-institutional repositories by subject area (however
>> broadly defined) simply work better, such as arXiv or even the
>> Princeton-Stanford repository for working papers in the
>> classics.
>
> "Work better" for what? Deposit or search? You are conflating the
> locus of search (which should, of course, be cross-institutional)
> with the locus of deposit, which should be institutional, in
> order to accelerate institutional deposit mandates and in order
> to prevent their discourage adoption and compliance because of
> the prospect of having to deposit the same paper in more than one
> place.
>
> (Yes, automatic import/export/harvesting software is indifferent
> to whether it is transferring from local IRs to central CRs or
> from central CRs to local IRs, but the logistics and pragmatic of
> deposit and deposit mandates, since the institution is always the
> source of the content, makes it obvious that one-time deposit
> institutionally fits all output, systematically and tractably,
> whereas willy-nilly IR/ CR deposit, depending on fields' prior
> deposit habits or funder preferences is a recipe for many more
> years of the confusion, inaction, absence of mandates, and
> near-absence of OA content that we have now.)
>
>> Currently, universities are paying external middlemen an
>> outsized fee for validation and packaging services. These
>> services can and should be brought "in-house" (at least as an
>> ideal/ goal to develop toward whenever the opportunities can be
>> seized) except in cases where prices align with value, which
>> occurs still with some society and commercial publications.
>
> I completely agree that along with hosting their own
> peer-reviewed research output, and mandating its deposit in their
> own IRs, institutions can also use their IRs (along with
> specially developed software for this purpose) to showcase,
> manage, monitor, and measure their own research output. That is
> what OA metrics (local and global) will make possible.
> http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/c_6162/repositories
>
> But not until the problem of getting the content into OA IRs is
> solved. And the solution is institutional and funder mandates --
> for *institutional* (not institution-external) deposit.
>
>> To the extent that an arXiv or the inter-institutional
>> repository for humanities research which will be showing up in
>> 3-7 years moves toward offering these services, they are
>> clearly preferable to old fashioned subscription models (since
>> the financial support is for actual services) and current local
>> repositories which do not offer everything needed in the value
>> chain (as listed in Van de Sompel et al. 2004).
>
> (1) The reason 99% of IRs offer no value is because 99% of IRs
> are at least 85% empty. Only the 1% that are mandated are
> providing the full institutional OA content -- funded and
> unfunded, across all disciplines -- that all this depends on.
>
> (2) The central collections, as noted, are indispensable for the
> services they provide, but that does *not* include locus of
> deposit and hosting: There, central deposit is counterproductive,
> a disservice.
>
> (3) With local hosting of all their research output, plus central
> harvesting services, institutions can get all they need by way of
> search and metrics, partly through local statistics, partly from
> central ones.
>
>> I remember when I first read an article quoting a researcher
>> in an arXiv covered field who essentially said that journals in
>> his field were just for vanity and advancement, since all the
>> "action" was in arXiv (Ober et al. 2007 quoting Manuel 2001
>> quoting McGinty 1999) -- now think about the value of a
>> repository that doesn't just store content and offer access.
>
> This familiar slogan, often voiced by longstanding arxiv users,
> that "Journals are obsolete: They're only for tenure committees.
> We [researchers] only use the arxiv" is as false, empirically, as
> it is incoherent, logically: It is just another instance of the
> "Simon Says" phenomenon: (Pay attention to what Simon actually
> *does*, not to what he says.) http://bit.ly/cYwed6
>
> Although it is perfectly true that most arxiv users don't bother
> to consult journals any more, using the OA version in arxiv only,
> and referring to the journal's canonical version-of-record only
> in citing, it is equally, and far more relevantly true that they
> all continue to submit all those papers to peer-reviewed
> journals, and to revise them according to the feedback from the
> referees, until they are accepted and published.
>
> That is precisely the same thing that all other researchers are
> doing, including the vast majority that do not self-archive their
> peer- reviewed postprints (or, even more rarely, their unrefereed
> preprints) at all.
>
> So journals are not just for vanity and advancement; they are for
> peer review. And arxiv users are just as dependent on that as all
> other researchers. (No one has ever done the experiment of trying
> to base all research usage on nothing but unrefereed preprints
> and spontaneous user feedback.)
>
> So the only thing that is true in what "Simon says" is that when
> all papers are available OA as peer-reviewed final drafts (and
> sometimes also supplemented earlier by the prerefereeing drafts)
> there is no longer any need for users or authors to consult the
> journal's proprietary version of record. (They can just cite it,
> sight unseen.)
>
> But what follows from that is that journals will eventually have
> to scale down to becoming just peer-review service-providers and
> certifiers (rather than continuing also to be access-providers or
> document producers, either on-paper or online).
>
> Nothing follows from that about the value of repositories, except
> that they are useless if they do not contain the target content
> (at least after peer review, and where possible and desired by
> authors, also before peer review).
>
> Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review.
> Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and
> in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry.
> Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242. http://cogprints.org/1646/
>
>> Do I think the financial backing will remain in place? It
>> depends on the services actually offered and to what extent
>> subject repositories could replace a patchwork system of single
>> titles offered by a patchwork of publishers.
>
> At the moment the issue is whether arxiv, such as it is (a
> central locus for institution-external *deposit* of institutional
> research content in some fields, mostly physics, plus a search
> and alerting service), can be sustained by voluntary
> sub-sidy/scription -- not whether, if arxiv also somehow "took
> over" the function of journals (peer review), that *too* could be
> paid for by voluntary sub-sidy/ scription...
>
>> Universities could save a great deal by refusing to pay the
>> same overhead over and over again to maintain complete
>> collections in single subject areas (not to mention paying for
>> other people's profits).
>
> I can't quite follow this: You mean universities cancel journal
> subscriptions? How do those universities' users then get access
> to those cancelled journals' contents, unless they are all being
> systematically made OA? Apart from those areas of physics where
> it has already been happening since 1991, that isn't going to
> happen in most other fields till OA is mandated by the universal
> providers of that content, the universities (reinforced by
> mandates from their funders).
>
> Then (but only then) can universities cancel their journal
> subscriptions and use (part of) their windfall saving to pay
> (journals!) for the peer-review of their own research output,
> article by article (instead of buying in other universities'
> output, journal by journal):
> http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1
>
>> More importantly, more could be done to make articles useful
>> and discoverable in a collaborative environment, from metadata
>> to preservation, so that the value chain is extended and
>> improved (my sci-fi includes semantic docs, not just cataloged
>> texts, and improved, or multi-stage, peer review, or peer
>> review on top of a working papers repository).
>
> All fine, and desirable -- but not until all the OA content is
> being provided, and (outside of physics), it isn't being provided
> -- except when mandated...
>
> So let's not build castles in Spain before we have their contents
> safely in hand.
>
>> I think there's been plenty of 'chatter' to indicate that the
>> basic assumptions in conversations between universities are
>> changing (see recent conference agendas), so that we can expect
>> to see more and more practical plans to collaborate on
>> metadata, preservation, and , yes, publications.
>
> I'll believe the "chatter" when it has been cashed into action
> (deposit mandates). Till then it's just distraction and
> time-wasting.
>
>> My head spins to think of the amount of money to be saved on
>> the development of more shared platforms, although, the money
>> will only be saved if other expenditures are slowly turned off.
>
> All this talk about money, while the target content -- which
> could be provided at no cost -- is still not being provided (or
> mandated)...
>
>> Sandy mentioned in another post that she [he] would hope for
>> arXiv like support for university monographs...
>
> Monographs (not even a clearcut case, like peer-reviewed
> articles, which are all, already, author give-aways, written only
> for usage and impact) are moot, while not even peer-reviewed
> articles are being deposited, or mandated...
>
>> Open access and NFP publications which do offer the full value
>> chain have been proven to have much lower production costs per
>> page than FP publishers and they do not suffer any impact
>> disadvantages -- and these are still operated on a largely
>> stand-alone basis, without the advantages that can be gained by
>> sharing overhead.
>
> Cash castles in Spain again, while the free content is not yet
> being provided or mandated...
>
>> Maybe local repositories really are the way to go, since then
>> each institution has more control over its own contribution,
>> but the collaboration and the support will still need to occur
>> to support discovery (implying metadata, both in production and
>> development of standards and tools) and preservation.
>
> No, search and preservation are not the problem: content is.
>
>> I suppose another problem with local repositories, however, is
>> that a consensus is far less likely to unite around local
>> repositories as a practical option at this juncture -- the case
>> can't just be made with words, you need the numbers and arXiv
>> has them -- and while I am interested to see strong local
>> repositories emerge, there is greater sense in supporting what
>> can be achieved, since we need more steps in the right
>> direction.
>
> "The numbers" say the following:
>
> Physicists have been depositing their preprints and postprints
> spontaneously (unmandated) in arxiv since 1991, but in the
> ensuing 20 years this commendable practice has not been taken up
> by other disciplines. The numbers, in other words, are static,
> and stagnant. The only cases in which they have grown are those
> where deposit was mandated (by institutions and funders).
>
> And for that, it no longer makes sense (indeed it goes contrary
> to sense) to deposit them institutional-externally, instead of
> mandating institutional deposit and then harvesting centrally.
>
> And the virtue of that is that it distributes the costs of
> managing deposits sustainably, by offloading them onto each
> institution, for its own output, instead of depending on
> voluntary institutional sub- sidy/scription for obsolete and
> unnecessary central deposit.
>
> Stevan Harnad