Another Poynder Eye-Opener on Open Access

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

Poynder, Richard (2011) PLoS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of 
Scholarly Publishing. Open and Shut. 7 March 2011. 
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/03/plos-one-open-access-and-future-of.html 
ABSTRACT: Open Access (OA) advocates argue that PLoS ONE is now 
the largest scholarly journal in the world. Its parent 
organisation 'Public Library of Science (PLoS)' was co-founded in 
2001 by Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. What does the history of 
PLoS tell us about the development of PLoS ONE? What does the 
success of PLoS ONE tell us about OA? And what does the current 
rush by other publishers to clone PLoS ONE tell us about the 
future of scholarly communication?

Comment:

Richard Poynder has written another timely and important 
eye-opener about Open Access. Although (as usual!) I disagree 
with some of the points Richard makes in his paper, I think it is 
again a welcome cautionary piece from this astute observer and 
chronicler of OA developments across the years.

(1) Richard is probably right that PLOS ONE is over-charging and 
under-reviewing (and over-hyping).

(2) It is not at all clear, however, that the solution is to 
deposit everything instead as unrefereed preprints in an IR and 
then wait for the better stuff to be picked up by an "overlay 
journal". (I actually think that's utter nonsense.)

(3) The frequently mooted notion (of Richard Smith and many 
others) of postpublication "peer review" is not much better, but 
it is like a kind of "evolutionarily unstable strategy" that 
could be dipped into experimentally to test what scholarly 
quality, sustainability, and scaleability it would yield -- until 
(as I would predict) the consequences become evident enough to 
induce everyone to draw back.

(4) Although there is no doubt that Harold Varmus's stature and 
advocacy have had an enormous positive influence on the growth of 
OA, in my opinion Richard's is attributing far too much 
prescience to Harold's original 1999 E-biomed proposal. [See my 
1999 criticisms. Although I was still foolishly flirting with 
central deposit at the time (and had not yet realized that 
mandates would be required to get authors to deposit at all), I 
think I picked out the points that eventually led to incoherence; 
and, no, PLOS was not on the horizon at that time (even BMC 
didn't exist).]

(5) Also, of course, I think Richard gives the Scholarly Scullery 
way too much weight (though Richard does rightly state that he 
has no illusions about those chefs' motivation -- just as he 
stresses that he has no doubts about PLOS's sincerity).

(6) Richard's article may do a little short-term harm to OA, but 
not a lot. It is more likely to do some good.

(7) I wish, of course, that Richard had mentioned the alternative 
that I think is the optimal one (and that I think will still 
prevail), namely, that self-archiving the refereed final draft of 
all journal articles (green OA) will be mandated by all 
universities and funders, eventually causing subscription 
cancellations, driving down costs to just those of peer review, 
and forcing journals to convert to institutional payment for 
individual outgoing paper publication instead of for incoming 
bulk subscription. The protection against the temptation to "dumb 
down" peer review to make more money is also simple and obvious: 
no-fault refereeing charges.

(8) Richard replied that the reason he did not dwell on Green OA, 
which he too favors, is that he thinks Green OA progress is still 
too slow (I agree!) and that it's important to point out that the 
fault in the system is at the publisher end -- whether non-OA 
publisher or OA. I continue to think the fault is at the 
researcher end, and will be remedied by Green OA self-archiving 
by researchers, and Green OA self-archiving mandates by research 
institutions and funders

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of 
Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 
16 (7/8).

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: 
Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. 
Chandos.


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
EnablingOpenScholarship