Re: Quality and mandated open access

[Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com>]

At this risk of sounding like that rascal Mr. Rumsfeld, my 
goodness! I had no intention to threaten or frighten anyone (as 
though I could--even my dog disobeys me!) It is not my purpose to 
turn anyone from OA, but merely to think through its execution.

Publishers do indeed provide peer review services, which benefit 
authors, readers, and the entire scientific community. When I was 
a society publisher, we rejected 75 to 80% of papers, but 
subjected most to outside peer review, with no return to us 
despite a cost of greater than $2000 per paper, not including 
editorial staff or overhead. We were able to do this because 
there was some return in subscription income.

My question was to ask how peer review, which OA advocates 
profess to revere, could be sustained if the offsetting 
subscription income were removed because of mandated OA. If you 
are truly serious about OA, you must come to terms with the fact 
that it little no sense for publishers to conduct peer review as 
we know it when the products it produces are pirated away. In the 
face of mandated OA, publishers should move toward a new business 
that has a positive ROI. This will probably involve providing 
context, rather than content. That is, under mandated OA, the 
business of publishing will no longer be creating quality 
content, but aggregating it and filtering it from what is freely 
available on the Web. It is separating the small amount of wheat 
from the great quantity of chaff.

I really don't think this is such a radical idea, and certainly 
should not be affront to OA. In fact, it is the logical extension 
of Dr. Harnad's thinking.

As for the idea that for-profit publishers are just fine and 
dandy with the direction things are going....well, you must be 
reading a different Elsevier report than I am.

I quote, " ... we are very concerned that many significant 
recommendations are based on mischaracterisations of STM 
publishing industry dynamics that follow from limited, flawed 
analyses and unsupported theoretical speculation. ..."

Do these really sound like happy people to you? To me, they have 
the tone of a family barricaded in their straw hut as hungry 
wolves claw at the door, hoping that if they toss out a bone of 
Wellcome compliance, the threat will disappear.

This is accommodation? Well, goodness, I think not.

Cheers.

Peter Banks
Banks Publishing
pbanks@bankspub.com
www.bankspub.com


On 10/10/06 7:33 PM, "Steve Hitchcock" <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> At 23:12 09/10/2006, Peter Banks wrote:

>> I did not, in fact, question "whether quality can be sustained 
>> with mandated open access." I asked how it could be maintained 
>> were nonprofit and for-profit publishers to cease providing 
>> traditional peer review services.
>
> Peter, I'm not aware of any publisher that provides 'peer 
> review services'. Most I know provide peer reviewed 
> publication, which is quite different and what the author 
> seeks. So who is peer review for? Not the author, but the 
> publisher. It's the publisher's means of selecting material to 
> maintain and enhance the quality of the journals. So why would 
> publishers cease to provide peer review? Seems rather an empty 
> threat if it's intended to frighten people from open access and 
> OA mandates.
>
> At 01:08 07/10/2006, Peter Banks wrote:
>> For now, however, one can probe further how quality would be
>> sustained in an OA model, because much of what has been written
>> is I think based on a false premise: that, in the face of
>> mandated OA, nonprofit and for-profit publishers would continue
>> the work of traditional peer review, the products of which must
>> then be then made freely available.
>>
>> In short: Ain't going to happen. No rational organization is 
>> going to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year 
>> needed to operate, sustain, and upgrade traditional peer 
>> review systems for a major journal, when sales of the products 
>> that sustain those operations are undermined by free 
>> distribution.
>
> They already have invested. Look at Elsevier's response to the 
> EC consultation 
> http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/elsevier. 
> pdf It looks like a business in robust good health, that has 
> accommodated the move to digital and, although you won't learn 
> of it here, increasingly is reaching accommodation on most 
> aspects of open access - Romeo green for repository 
> self-archiving, hybrid OA, Wellcome compliance.
>
> So I don't recognise Peter's view that there is reluctance to 
> invest and develop, nor his suggestion that publishers will 
> disown peer review to spite open access mandates.
>
> Steve Hitchcock
> IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
> University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
> Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk