Re: OA - What cost? What value?

["Armbruster, Chris" <Chris.Armbruster@EUI.eu>]

I would like to thank Sandy very much for engaging with this 
particular analysis and the recommendations on scholarly 
communication and scientific publishing. For the benefit of this 
list I will do my best to address the queries:

1. 'Trade' publishing: I was looking for a concept that would 
convey that guild publishing (repositories) and trade 
(commercial) publishing (journals and books) could be 
complementary elements of scientific/scholarly publishing. If 
trade publishing is a bad choice due to its set connotations, 
then I would use the term commercial publishing. That said, I am 
also open to further advice on how to conceptualise and describe 
these two proposed (complementary) elements and to designate the 
value-adding provided when (commercial, university, society) 
publishers focus on certification and navigation services.

2. Books: Sandy is right that I was thinking mainly of research 
articles. I think that the system may be adopted without much 
further ado for book chapters when we are dealing with an edited 
volume. In fact, I am doing this with colleagues - i.e. the book 
chapters will be posted as working papers initially and then we 
proceed to edit the book, with revisions, introduction and 
conclusion. But that does not fully answer Sandy's query and his 
concerns about the 'two cultures': Would other subscribers of 
this list think that it is possible to disseminate books from 
guild publishers (repositories)?

3. Certification: Certification processes for books and journals 
and different types of books and journals may well be different 
and diverge. I have some observations on this: a) When research 
articles are posted to guild publishers and thus distributed to 
colleagues, 'double-blind peer review' is not really any longer 
sensible (most competent peer reviewers will have seen the 
piece). Large communities in the natural and social sciences seem 
to be happy with this; b) Some guild publishers employ metrics to 
track and rank publications, these are interesting measures for 
authors, readers and peers, and potentially raise the bar on the 
quality of formal peer review (does it tell me anythig I cannot 
already observe from a guild publisher?); c) If dissemination 
were organised from guild publishers (repositories) and licensing 
to commercial publishers non-exclusive, then - so my strategic 
reflection - there would be more competitive pressure to improve 
and diversify certification ! and navigation services. In sum: I 
think we can already observe pressures to innovate with 
certification and navigation and commercial publishers are 
experimenting with new kinds of peer review and new kinds of 
navigation services that are meant to principally serve readers.

Chris Armbruster

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Wed 28/11/2007 05:08
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: OA - What cost? What value?

I have, belatedly, read two of Chris Armbruster's papers in which 
he elaborates the view underling his comments below:

*Cyberscience and the Knowledge-Based Economy, Open Access and 
Trade Publishing: from Contradiction to Compatibility with 
Nonexclusive Copyright Licensing 
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=849305

*Society Publishing, the Internet and Open Access: Shifting
Mission-Orientation from Content Holding to Certification and
Navigation Services?
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=997819

These indeed offer a very different perspective from what one 
usually hears on this list, questioning whether Green OA and Gold 
OA really make any sense and suggesting a new use for existing 
copyright law rather than arguing for its reform. The gist of 
Chris's argument, as I understand it, is that the logic of 
scholarly communication recommends an approach that supports the 
natural tendency of scholars to use disciplinary or 
subject-specific channels for exchanging ideas. So, in his terms, 
"guild publishing" makes the most sense, in contrast, say, with 
larger aggregations of disparate materials collected in most 
institutional repositories.  His models are arXiv, the Research 
Papers in Economics (RePEc), and the Social Science Research 
Network (SSRN), which has recently added a Humanities 
counterpart.

His argument turns on separating dissemination from 
certification. Dissemination would occur immediately upon the 
submission of a paper to such a guild-supported repository whose 
contents would be openly available to everyone in the world. The 
basic functions of such a repository would be to register a work 
(which is important for establishing priority claims), archive 
it, and disseminate it "open access." The process of 
certification would extend over a considerable period of time and 
involve a variety of different modes of validating quality and 
value: "not just publication in prestigious journals, but also 
keynote speeches, research grants, scholarly awards and, 
ultimately, the Festschrift, the lifetime achievement award and 
the Nobel Prize (or its substitutes)."

This system would require that nonexclusive licenses be used 
instead of outright transfers of copyright as under the present 
system. In this way, value-adding businesses could be built to 
provide a variety of types of certification and to bundle 
certified materials for use by other audiences outside the guild. 
Chris calls this "layered certification."  It would provide an 
avenue for publishers, both commercial and nonprofit, to continue 
offering services that would be valued in the marketplace and 
therefore could be the basis for a viable business. Current 
societies might, I suppose, do both: provide the basic "guild" 
repository and support that cost from either membership dues or 
value-added certifying services.

I think this approach makes a lot of sense, and it certainly 
provides an interesting alternative to the other alternatives 
that have dominated the debates.  But I do have a few questions:

First, I am puzzled by Chris's use of the phrase "trade 
publishing" to designate the value-adding type of business that 
he foresees arising from a regime of guild publishing and 
nonexclusive licensing. In the U.S. "trade" publishing has a 
specific meaning, and it would appear not to be the kind of 
business Chris really has in mind. Perhaps he can provide a 
definition or use a different term that would not involve this 
potential confusion.

Second, while I see this as an excellent model for the publishing 
of articles, I am wondering how it applies to books. Chris at 
various points seems to place book publishing outside of this 
model, treating it as a realm where exclusive copyright transfers 
still make sense. But then we end up with the bifurcation of 
knowledge between books and journals that, ultimately, I do not 
believe to be viable and runs counter to the very logic of 
scholarly discourse that Chris has used to justify his preferred 
model. What we would have here is another version of C.P. Snow's 
"two cultures"--instead of the sciences and the humanities, the 
divide would be between book-based and journal-based knowledge.

Third, I would be interested in Chris's views of how 
certification for books might, or might not, differ from 
certification for journal articles. I see a danger in relying 
exclusively on peer review for the former as carried out by 
"experts" within any given scholarly society, as it would tend to 
bias certification in favor of established paradigm-supporting as 
opposed to paradigm-challenging knowledge. The system of 
certification that is employed by university presses employs peer 
review as only one among several components; others include the 
roles of the acquiring editor and the faculty editorial board, 
which both bring distinctive "value added" to the process. This 
cannot be replicated solely from within the confines of a 
scholarly society. But I do applaud Chris's wide vision of what 
can count as certification, and perhaps it could readily 
incorporate this particular kind of value added as a unique 
service that university presses perform (unique in that,. even 
though some commercial academic publishers may employ peer 
reviewers as part of their decision-making process, they do not 
have faculty editorial boards advising them).

I apologize for this lengthy post, but it reflects my genuine 
enthusiasm for Chris's special contribution to our debates, which 
I am only now finally coming to appreciate fully.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press