Re: Harvard OA in NYTimes

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

My response to Robert Darnton follows:

Hi, Bob! I see you are quoted in this article as favoring 
Harvard's move toward open access. It will be interesting to see 
if the faculty buy into this. Here is what I told my staff this 
morning:

At 9:48 AM -0500 2/12/08, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> The assumption, of course, is faulty because it is NOT journals 
> in the humanities that are wrecking the budgets of libraries. If 
> humanists take this tack and post their articles online before 
> they are even peer reviewed and accepted for publication, the 
> policies of many journals will prevent them from being published 
> at all--which will ill serve the ambitions of junior Harvard 
> faculty to gain tenure. Oops, I forgot: almost no junior faculty 
> at Harvard get tenure there anyway! But if they want to get 
> tenure elsewhere,...
Many journal publishers these days, including us, allow 
authors--AFTER their articles are accepted for publication--to 
post them on their own or institutional web sites in their 
post-peer review but pre-final publication form. But I think many 
publishers will be wary of accepting for review articles that 
have already been mass-circulated in this way. Why fill their 
pages with already "published" articles? And these articles, as 
not yet peer reviewed, will not count for tenure and promotion 
anyway, unless that system changes in significant ways. ( I do 
understand that some senior economists have decided to bypass 
journals in their field and are "publishing" via the web without 
peer review, but they are already tenured and don't have to worry 
about career advancement anymore; their main aim is to get their 
ideas circulating more quickly, and their reputations alone can 
attract readers to their sites.)

If this practice were to become widespread, it would ultimately 
undercut Project Muse, the largest aggregated database of 
e-journals in the humanities and social sciences (with 400+ 
journals). Since our journals program now receives two thirds of 
its income from Project Muse, all of our journals, except the few 
that are membership-based, would go under. They include such 
leading journals as Chaucer Review, Comparative Literature 
Studies, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and the Journal of Policy 
History. How would that help anybody? And what would replace them 
as validators of peer review?

Open access is a complicated issue, and university presses are 
supportive of it--to a degree. I attach an article I wrote about 
it in Learned Publishing, which represents a more elaborate 
statement than the "official" AAUP position that I drafted.

Sanford G. Thatcher, Director
Penn State University Press
University Park, PA 16802-1003
e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu
http://www.psupress.org