Re: Cost of peer review

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

No, no, no, no, no.  What characterizes as the solution, I was=20
characterizing as the problem.  Harnad is hoping to replace the=20
small problem of access with the large problem of fiscal=20
recklessness.

But he is winning.

Joe Esposito

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 7:45 PM, Stevan Harnad=20
<harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> On Thu, 6 May 2010, Joseph Esposito wrote:
>
>> I agree with the entirety of Professor Harnad's comment except
>> for this:
>>
>> The institutions can and will pay for that, per paper refereed,
>> out of a fraction of their annual windfall
>> subscription-cancellation savings.
>>
>> Of course, we shall see when it happens, but I ask the members
>> of this list to look around them. =C2=A0Universities are high-cost
>> organizations. That is not to say that the costs are not worth
>> it. =C2=A0But the windfall? Doubtful.
>>
>> But I say I agree with most of what Professor Harnad says.
>> Libraries will cancel subscriptions (some already are). =C2=A0And
>> universities will (mostly) mandate deposits into repositories.
>> So the vision promulgated here seems to me to be directionally
>> correct. =C2=A0It's simply an expensive solution to a small problem.
>
> It's good to hear that Joseph Esposito agrees on the solution --
> but we don't seem to agree on the problem (or the cost!):
>
> The problem is needlessly lost research usage and impact, because
> it is not currently accessible to all of its intended users, but
> only those whose institutions can afford a subscription to the
> journal in which it happens to be published.
>
> The evidence that this problem is large, not small, is the OA
> Impact Advantage (the higher usage and citation rate of OA
> articles) and the small fraction of all peer reviewed journals
> that even the richest universities can afford to subscribe to.
> (There are at least 25,000 journals publishing at least 2.5
> million articles a year.)
>
> Universal Green OA will solve this problem -- not because it
> causes universities to cancel journals (it is not sure it will do
> that, since the Green OA version is just the author's refereed
> final draft, provided as a supplement, and it certainly has not
> done so already, when less than 20% of any journal's content is
> OA), nor because it lowers journal publishing costs -- but
> because universal Green solves the access/impact problem
> completely.
>
> It is, however, sure, that if universal Green OA does eventually
> cause universal subscription cancellation by universities --
> because the Green OA supplement is enough, and there is no longer
> a market for the print edition, the online edition,
> access-provision or archiving, but just for peer review -- then a
> fraction of the money universities save annually from those same
> subscription cancellations will pay for the "rump" costs of
> publishing its journal article output: peer review.
>
> Stevan Harnad
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