Science in the Open - Latest Comments

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Mike Taylor — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:47:02 -0000

Hi, Alicia. We're having this discussion over on Twitter, too, but it's not easy to convey even the core points, let alone the nuances in 140 characters minus however many it takes to say @theOtherPersonsName!

Here's what I've been trying to convey over there. Pre-internet, publishers unambiguously existed to make work available as widely as possible. So their goal was absolutely in alignment with that of authors wishing to be read. To a first approximation, publisher revenue was in direct proportion to the number of copies made available.

One of the unfortunate (for publishers!) side-effects of the Internet is that they are no longer needed for dissemination. The cost of copies is zero, or so close that it can't be measured, so one the work has been done for one person to read, it's easy for seven billion to read it. Some publishers (those who have adopted Gold OA) have accepted this shift, and so they charge on the basis of how many works they publish rather than how many are read. Which is great because it means that the publisher's goal is again compatible with the writer's -- it doesn't hurt the publisher when more and more people read a given work (though note that even for Gold OA publishers, their goal is no longer perfectly aligned with the author's, since unlike the pre-Internet model they don't make more money with each distributed copy).

The real problem comes with publishers who are wedded to the old model, and who want to be paid for every copy distributed. For such publishers it is inevitable that they will want to restrict access to anyone who's not paying for access. However noble their hearts, however much they dream of universal access, the bitter commercial reality is that when they make money by selling access, they have to oppose access that people don't pay for. And for 99% of the world's population that means no access.

Again: that conclusion doesn't rest on the publisher being evil. I do believe that no-one goes into publishing with the dream of restricting access! But it is an unavoidable consequence of the pay-per-copy-distributed model that they end up wanting to avoid the distribution of copies that haven't been paid for.

Hope that's clearer (and less confrontational-sounding!)

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Jan Velterop — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:37:38 -0000

Alicia says:

"First, I would add that access is a value that unites academics,
funders, AND publishers. People write and/or become publishers in order
to be widely read, not to 'restrict access'. Publishers have to figure
out how to cover the costs of doing this, and we use a very wide array
of business models."

I thinks she's right. It subsequently comes down to the efficiency and the effectiveness of finding ways to cover the cost and at the same time achieving the widest possible availability. That's what distinguishes publishers. From what I know, it is OA journals that achieve a wider dissemination (the widest possible) at a lower cost per article published (by which I mean cost to the scientific community) than subscription journals, give or take one or two exceptions.

To me that means that, if peer reviewed journal publishing is the desired thing, the 'gold' model is the more efficient.

The objection that the model cannot apply to very selective journals as the article fee would be too high seems a realistic one – except that the PLoS journals seem to manage without such a high fee. But if any journal can afford to introduce a submission-based fee as opposed to a publication fee, surely it is the truly selective journals. A submission fee would eliminate the objection, as it would not load all the costs on the few published articles only since the rejected articles would contribute as well.

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Alicia Wise — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:51:05 -0000

Thanks, Cameron, for this thoughtful piece. I commented to you earlier on twitter, but a colleague suggested it would be nice to post here as well.

First, I would add that access is a value that unites academics, funders, AND publishers. People write and/or become publishers in order to be widely read, not to 'restrict access'. Publishers have to figure out how to cover the costs of doing this, and we use a very wide array of business models.

Second, it is great that funders are willing to cover the costs for research communication. When I asked earlier you signalled that you support "gold CC-BY OA, backed up by funder mandates and appropriate funding". That's clear, thanks. This leads me to wonder if the word 'mandate' is another thing of mutual incomprehension. The word carries a hint of force. Synonyms include dictate, fiat, order, command, and control. Would mandates still be necessary in a world where the enabling framework of gold oa funding was securely in place? And if so, why?

Thanks, Alicia

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Alicia Wise — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:32:56 -0000

Hi Richard,
Yes, the Wellcome Trust approach is really welcomed by publishers. At Elsevier we have a number of open access agreements with funding bodies. With the Wellcome Trust, for example, we have successfully blended gold and green oa models. Wellcome Trust reimburses its grant recipients for their gold open access publishing fees, and in exchange Elsevier deposits a final version of the article (without journal branding) into UK PubMed Central. We feel the Wellcome Trust model is a good one, and represents a win for author, funder, publisher, university, and science more broadly.

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Richard Sever — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:50:33 -0000

Great analysis. One thing that distinguished the Wellcome and NIH approaches was that Wellcome clearly acknowledged the costs involved and provided funds to researchers to pay publishers directly to make papers open access. NIH, by contrast, funded a publication infrastructure of their own (PMC) and then mandated papers be deposited there (without any form of payment). Is the former approach more conducive to the resolution you envisage and less likely to produce the kind of defensiveness we've seen from publishers?

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Irene Hames — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:44:09 -0000

Cameron, you’ve presented a very nice analysis and identified
what I also think are the key reasons for why things have come to a head now:

“So the environment
that set the scene for the Research Works Act revolt was a combination of
simmering resentment amongst researchers for the cost of accessing the
literature, combined with a lack of understanding of what it is publishers
actually do. The spark that set it off was the publisher rhetoric about
ownership of the work.”

Important too that you talk about ‘research communication’.
That already encompasses much more than actual research publication, and is set
to become even richer and more varied. Especially
when valuable contributions to the scientific effort that aren’t currently acknowledged
in any meaningful way (e.g. to data usability) become recognised, encouraged
and rewarded.

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Cameron Neylon — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:28:03 -0000

Mike, my point was more that most researchers don't understand or know much about what happens. I'm not saying that these are all things that need to happen but I think we're going to see a new wave of people setting up "free" journals which then fail due to a lack of appropriate technical and social infrastructure because people don't understand the issues. So trivial example, Arxiv articles don't get checked for accuracy of citations (you might argue that a bunch of journals don't do this well either but at least they should)

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Mike Taylor — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:51:35 -0000

Thanks, Cameron, that's a fascinating analysis with a very optimistic prognosis. I had to tweet this article three times, I kept finding such quotable quotes!

Only one quibble: "Researchers neither understand, nor appreciate for the most part, the
work of copyediting and curation, layout and presentation. While there
are tools today that can do many of these things more cheaply there are
very few researchers who could use them effectively."

Don't you think that arXiv gives the lie that assertion? The papers posted there have been copyeditied by their author; they are not curated, and none the worse for that; authors also execute layout and presentation. So far as I can see, the only significant respect in which arXiv'ed preprints are inferior to articles published in journals is that they have not been through peer-review.

Am I missing something?

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Jan Velterop — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:50:13 -0000

Hi David,

I don't think the cost of multiple rounds of peer review is the most important potential blocker.

There are a few things that militate against having a submission charge. 1) The existence of journals with free submission, which is the vast majority. (Contrast this with the non-existence of journals with free publishing: authors always pay, either by transferring their ©, or by transferring some money); 2) The need for publishers to justify the quality (or lack thereof) of the peer review performed; 3) The psychological hit that authors may feel upon rejection which leads them to conclude that they've thrown away their money (though they may have just pitched at the wrong journal level, or submitted substandard work).

Among the benefits of a submission charge is that authors are more likely to try and submit their article to the most appropriate journal, and not one, or several, levels higher, just in case. And that in turn would lessen the burden on the peer review system.

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

David Smith — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:20:28 -0000

Hi Jan,

back in the day BMC flirted with the idea of charging for peer review services but unless it happened after my time there, it was never implemented. I seems to recall an economic analysis about OA costs that also posited that paying for rejection was the only way to make the OA system sustainable on a per journal basis (sadly can't locate the paper anywhere). My question then, why has the idea of paying even if the paper is rejected, not taken off? A blocker might be the uncomfortable thought that taking a paper through multiple rounds of rejection might make the cost of publishing the research in question uncomfortably high...

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Jan Velterop — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:57:24 -0000

Researchers (and their funders) should stop paying for any publisher services with the coin called copyright (i.e. stop transferring their ©), and instead, pay with real money, for real, clearly understandable services (e.g. author-side paid OA). One flaw: OA journals mostly charge for publication, not for organising the peer review. That loads all cost onto the published articles only, including the cost of any work done on rejected articles.

Jan Velterop

Re: The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension

Jens Peter Andersen — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:43:15 -0000

Thank you for this very clear analysis of the situation. There have been some rants elsewhere, concerning the RWA and Elseviers support thereof, which have been close to hysteria, or at least haven't been so thought-through. In addition to including the funder-perspective and a very possible guess about the future, I think your post illustrates the cognitive/ideological gap between researchers and publishers quite well.
What I believe is important in the current events, and the reason why I signed http://thecostofknowledge.com/ is that we are trying to communicate now. Only by telling publishers what we think, instead of discussing it "when researchers meet", as you observed, can we hope to diminish this gap.

Re: Update on publishers and SOPA: Time for scholarly publishers to disavow the AAP

Clyde Davies — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:26:24 -0000

As an ex-research scientist now working on improving scholarly collaboration, I have no problems at all with several business models coexisting in research publishing. If, say a private consultancy conducts its own research at its own expense then it should be free to sell it as it sees fit. But by the same token, publically funded research conducted for the public good should be publically available, period.

As you pointed out at this week's meeting in Cambridge, there is a real chance for the current business models to evolve for the benefit of both publishers and researchers. The transition to a serviced-based publishing model where publishers can add value in ways other than distribution - for instance, by semantically marking up existing texts - is a real opportunity for growth and diversification but can only really come about through active participation by all involved.

All this act will do is polarise opinion. Researchers will actively oppose it, the AAP will embrace it and the two camps will end up at loggerheads and nothing will change. It is a squalid piece of legislation funded by producer interests that is entirely contrary to the public interest in general, not just that of the scientific community. And it simply goes to demonstrate that the US has the best political system that money can buy.

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Occupy Journal Club — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:05:27 -0000

Occupy Journal Club is all up for direct action aimed at publishers backing this bill, but we're just getting off the ground. We will be having a meeting in NYC soon to get organized. Watch this space: http://www.facebook.com/Occupy...

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:56:41 -0000

Actually slight more seriously. Rockefeller are on the list of AAP members and therefore notionally a supporter of RWA. You could ask them whether they were willing to put someone up as they appear to be supporter. Two possible results. One is that they do, so there's a win because you get the debate. The second is that they come out and say they don't support which would be a big win.

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:34:41 -0000

Surely you could find some local publisher and AAP member prepared to back their organisation to hilt because its fully supporting their agenda?

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Ben — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:25:54 -0000

Agreed. I went to Rep. Maloney's office yesterday and had a conversation with a staffer - it wasn't quite as thorough as your article, but I think direct interactions are a lot more effective than emails/tweets etc. At Rockefeller there is talk of hosting some sort of symposium/debate on these issues that we could invite her to. That would give us a chance to spell out the case in convincing detail. The only problem with a debate is that it would be difficult to find anyone to debate the other side.

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Cameron Neylon — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:17:25 -0000

That's great. Happy to spread the word on this. Direct action with the representative is the best way to get people to understand how misguided this is. And if you can persuade either of them or their staffers to actually _read_ this letter then even better!

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Ben — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:11:45 -0000

Thanks for writing about this.If anyone is interested in helping us organize the fight to retain public access by joining and sharing our Facebook community: http://www.facebook.com/Resear...
We are students and postdocs in Carolyn Maloney’s district, which encompasses Weill-Cornell, Memorial Sloan-Ketting Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, NYU Medical Center, and Mt. Sinai Medical School. Help us spread the word to pressure her to kill the bill.

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

brembs — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 03:33:25 -0000

That definitely is a possible scenario. However, I wonder if this is sustainable at all: those will be publishing costs and not access. This means only rich people will be able to afford in the GlamMag journals. That's almost worse than now: not only do you have connections and/or fudge your data to be published in GlamMagz, you also need extra cash: the less a journal publishes, the more they have to charge for publications, even if there were no profits involved.
I guess another point I'm implicitly trying to make is that you can't have "all else being equal". If you want full OA, it's going to be disruptive and not gently. If indeed all else remains equal, this system you imagine will be worse than what we have now - at least for researchers and science, if not for the public at large.

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:27:05 -0000

I take your point. But one of the key reasons that lets the publishers ramp up prices is the lack of direct price sensitivity. Librarians keep trying to buy because they know (or at least fear) that if they cut off access (by choosing not to subscribe) that faculty will go ballistic. But when it is faculty seeing those prices the dynamic will change a lot. If Professor X see's "Nature £25,000" and knows that PLoS Biology is only £2500 they are going to be wanting to get their hands on that extra £22k or so.

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Cameron Neylon — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:24:31 -0000

I live in hope that a staffer might read beyond that. The key thing is that the argument makes its way around so that people hear it in the right places. My experience is that persuading the principals in these kinds of cases is usually a waste of time - one can hope but its unusual to be successful. It's persuading everyone else that matters.
Cheers

Cameron

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

Graham Croucher — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:29:46 -0000

A great, well-thought out article. A pity that the Congresswoman/her office will only read the first line and mistakenly think you are supporting the Act.

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

brembs — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:12:50 -0000

My argument in full: http://bjoern.brembs.net/comme...

Re: IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa

brembs — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:30:24 -0000

Methinks this sounds overly optimistic.