Re: Just who is on the defensive?

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

On 28 Jan 2007, at 17:40, Stevan Harnad wrote:

> Jan, as a publisher, you are to be excused for being so 
> preoccupied with prices and your bottom line.  But I hope you 
> will in turn excuse the research community for being more 
> concerned with *access* -- for which there is no need to pay a 
> penny more or less at the moment! All that's needed is 
> keystrokes. And that is what OA, today, is about.
Isn't this a little simplistic and soundbiting, dear Stevan? The 
discussion would benefit from a more substantive approach. Most 
publishers are not "preoccupied with prices and bottom line" but 
have a genuine concern for access as well as for maintaining an 
economic underpinning of a stable and reliable formal 
peer-reviewed journal publishing system. Fortunately, most 
researchers are also concerned with having such a reliable system 
to provide them not only with access to other researchers' 
articles, but with a means to get their own articles 
peer-reviewed and formally published, for the scientific record, 
for their career prospects, and for communicating their findings 
and interpretations, in a validated form, to fellow-scientists. 
Were they, researchers, not concerned with having a reliable 
journal system, and only with access, they would make a bee-line 
for repositories and mandates wouldn't be on the agenda.

I advocate open access publishing, with its immediacy and no need 
for embargoes, now that the internet enables us to do it, because 
it is a fundamentally better way to publish research results than 
the traditional subscription model. I make the case to the 
scientific community and to publishers. Sure, apart from support, 
I encounter apathy, frustration, and sometimes hostility. On both 
sides. Solid arguments as to why it is not a better system are, 
however, lacking. Because it isn't the open access system per se 
that both publishers and researchers are worried about; it is the 
question of how to get from where we are now, with the prevailing 
subscription system, to such an open access publishing system, 
without getting from the frying pan into the fire.

Applying the bandage and salve of self-archiving is simpler than 
carrying out the complicated operation of changing the underlying 
condition, of course, and as palliative care its attraction is 
quite understandable. But it shouldn't be mistaken for a cure.

Jan Velterop