Stevan, you seem averse to speculation, but I'd like to
propose
that speculation-at least, informed speculation-has an
important
role to play in planning. "Worst case scenario"
planning is
frequently used in business, in the military, etc., and for
good
reason, especially for those who are risk-averse. It appears
that
the Bush administration didn't do enough of this kind of
speculating when it ordered the invasion of Iraq, confident
that
its assumption of controlled change to an orderly democratic
society was correct. We all know what happened as a result!
What
I am hypothesizing for the transition to OA is more the kind
of
short-term chaos that has transpired in Iraq than the smooth
transition to a functioning new system that you are counting
on.
I'm urging university administrators not to make the same
mistake
that the Bush administration did!
As for the conflation of costs for supporting OA journals
and
costs for supporting editorial offices on university
campuses, I
admit that I wasn't thinking so much of BMC, PLoS, etc., as
being
the model for the future as you evidently are. Given the
steep
increases in fees that those two OA publishers have recently
instituted, it isn't clear to me that they are viable models
for
the long run, or will be around for many more years.
(Foundation
funding is usually short term, and PLoS has survived largely
on
that kind of funding so far.) I also suspect-though I do not
know- that the vast majority of 2,500 OA journals listed in
the
directory are "mom and pop" operations run out of
editorial
offices based on campuses, rather than parts of larger
BMC-type
operations. It was these journals I was thinking about, and
supposing that the migration would mainly be handled by
individual editors of journals abandoned by commercial
publishers, who most likely would turn to their own
universities
first for support before seeking out a BMC (if any still
exists
at that point in time).
Many of the large commercial publishers now provide
substantial
funding for the operation of editorial offices on campus.
This is
the funding that will disappear and need to be replaced. It
is
not just for administrative support. Editors are also paid
for
their work. Will all of them be willing to continue
dedicating
their time when they are not being paid? And what about
copyediting? You nowhere mention this as a cost, and it can
be
significant. In my experience, very few academic editors are
able
to do line editing very well (nor should they spend their
valuable time doing so anyway), and very little of academic
writing is not in need of editing. (I understand that the
British
have a different attitude about copyediting, but in the U.S.
it
is generally valued a lot, and expected, by most authors.) I
speak from experience here, as I did copyediting full-time
for
the first three years of my publishing career and continued
it
part-time for another twenty years. If you abandon
copyediting,
you will have a significantly degraded product. Good
copyediting
comes at a cost, though, at about $25 an hour.
Yes, author fees can cover this cost, too, but your model
for
transferring costs from libraries to on-campus editorial
offices
or BMC-type publishers assumes a smooth transfer. Have you
had
any experience in university administration? Nothing works
that
smoothly in universities, I assure you. A one-to-one
transfer of
library serials expenditures to faculty publishing fees is
no
simple matter, nor is there any guarantee that the funds
freed up
by cancelled subscriptions would migrate directly to author
fees
anyway. There are plenty of other uses to which such funds
might
be put. Libraries have multiple needs, and supporting
faculty
publication may not immediately be at the top of their
lists.
Even today, when costs might be seemingly passed on easily
to
faculty who avail themselves of library e-reserve
operations, it
doesn't happen because the administrative costs of such
transfers
are perceived by some libraries as steeper than the costs of
paying for all e-reserve permission fees themselves.
Your model also assumes that subscription savings will
balance
out author fees at any given university. That is a very big
assumption to make. Yes, the most active authors are
probably at
the most research-intensive universities, but I doubt there
is
any one-to-one correspondence. Some universities may find
that
they have to spend much more in author fees than they save
in
subscriptions, whereas others may find the reverse. Also, I
suspect that, to the extent this correspondence exists in
science, it exists much less so in the humanities and social
sciences. Over time we have found in university press
publishing
that there has been a very significant dispersion of talent
to
non-ARL campuses, such that we are publishing many more
authors
from second- and third-tier universities and colleges than
we
did, say, twenty or thirty years ago. The savings from
subscription cancellations on those campuses may well not
come
close to covering author fees for their faculty, who will
thereby
be disadvantaged in getting their writing published unless
their
universities can tap some other source of revenue for that
purpose.
Now, you might say, OA journals will take these inequities
into
account and charge lower fees to such authors, or waive them
altogether. But then you introduce a whole new level of
administrative cost into the system because there has to be
some
way to verify "hardship" cases, especially if you
are dealing
with authors in this country and not from some very poor
developing countries. If all this is done on the
"honor" system,
you open the system to a significant level of corruption and
free-riding. Moreover, the costs still have to be paid, and
this
scenario would mean that the wealthier universities would
again
be supporting the cost of the whole system that benefits
everyone, as they do now for university presses.
You're also assuming that library fees would be readily
transferred outside the university to publishers like BMC or
society OA publishers through author fees. That would
introduce
yet another level of complexity into the system, as I do not
share your assumption that universities would as readily
allow
transfer of funds to such an entity as they would to another
university-based publisher. Procedures would no doubt be
instituted for evaluating such "external"
publishers, similar to
procedures that already exist to vet bids from faculty who
need
publication subventions for their monographs. I should also
point
out that the subvention system for monograph publishing,
despite
a clearly understood and documented need, is very fragmented
and
scattershot. Many large and wealthy universities will not
provide
such subventions at all, whereas some small colleges do. And
at
some universities that have no centralized funds, some
individual
departments will subsidize their faculty whereas others will
not.
There is no rhyme or reason to the "system" as it
exists today,
and I wouldn't expect it to be any different with respect to
supporting faculty who need to pay for journal articles to
be
published. If you want "evidence" of what exists
today in order
to predict the future, here it is, and it doesn't lend any
credence to your scenario!
So, my message boils down to this: assumptions matter, and
they
need to be examined carefully, and planning done accordingly
to
avoid the worst possibilities that could ensue. My
observation of
efforts by universities to change the tenure-and-promotion
system
over four decades in the face of obvious dysfunction doesn't
make
me optimistic that universities can bring about even gradual
change very easily, let alone swift and comprehensive
change!
--Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press
>On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
>
>> I'm afraid I don't share your "serene
confidence that there are
>> plenty of available OA hosts, big and small, ready
to take on
>> the implementation of peer review for migrating
established
>> journal titles and ed-boards, scaled down to OA
publishing."
>
>That's fine. It's all speculation anyway, on both of our
sides:
>speculation that self-archiving will or won't lead to
>cancellations, and if so, speculation about when, and
how much;
>and speculation that, if much and sudden, current
publishers will
>or won't jettison their titles rather than downsize; and
>speculation that, if jettisoned, there will or won't be
OA
>publishers happy to take over the titles.
>
>What's sure, because already tested and demonstrated, is
that
>self-archiving is highly beneficial to research and
readily
>feasible, right now, through mandated self-archiving.
Hence
>self-archiving can and should and will be mandated at
this time.
>The data-free speculation and counterspeculation about
its
>possible eventual effects on publishing has been going
on for
>over 10 years now, so the data-based practical step is
already
>well overdue.
>
>One point, though, is a point of logic rather than of
>hypothetical conjecture: In your reasoning about your
>hypothetical scenario that you consider the most
probable one
>(catastrophic cancellations, abandonment of journals by
their
>non-OA publishers, and failure of the abandoned journals
to
>migrate to OA publishers because OA costs could not be
met and
>there were not enough would-be OA publishers able or
willing to
>meet the demand) you have inadvertently conflated two
very
>different factors: One is the current cost to
universities of
>hosting their journals' editors' offices, and the other
is the OA
>publication cost to universities for their own research
article
>output.
>
>These are two entirely different things. Journal hosting
costs
>have nothing to do with OA, or OA publishing. Whatever
journal
>hosting universities are doing today, in the non-OA era,
for
>non-OA journals, while paying journal subscriptions for
whatever
>journals they subscribe to, the only change in the OA
era, if
>subscriptions were indeed all cancelled suddenly, as you
>hypothesize, would be (1) sudden, substantial windfall
savings
>for universities, and (2) sudden, substantially lower
publishing
>costs for journals (because, ex hypothesi, they no
longer sell
>texts, paper or online, but only perform peer review).
>
>Those lower publishing costs would (again, ex hypothesi)
be paid
>in the form of OA publishing charges, for each
university's
>article output, out of each university's subscription
savings.
>This has nothing at all to do with a university's
journal hosting
>costs!
>
>(Perhaps what you were doing was conflating the
university as a
>journal subscriber, the university as a research
article-provider
>[with its associated OA publishing costs] and the
university as a
>potential OA publisher itself! None of this, except
possibly the
>last, has anything to do with the free resources many
>universities currently provide for hosting the journals
-- OA or
>[mostly] non-OA -- of publishers other than themselves!)
[SNIP]
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