Re: On Parasitism and Double-Dipping

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 13 May 2008, Sandy Thatcher, President, American Association
of University Publishers [AAUP] wrote:

> > SH: And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall
> > savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.
> I wish I had as much faith as Stevan that the "of course" follows from his
> preceding argument. The cynic in me says that it is just as likely that
> universities will use the "windfall savings" to expand their football
> stadiums!
>
> Maybe universities in Britain act "rationally" in this way to move available
> funds toward supporting research as a top priority. The history of higher
> education in the U.S. suggests that this is not always the top priority that
> probably everyone on this listserv would wish it to be.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention. The plain fact is that 
there is no necessity for universities to face this question now. 
And (unless it is an oxymoron or some other mis-trope to say so) 
there is no necessity to pre-empt that necessity, by "committing" 
to anything at all, in advance.

The academic rule -- and for research universities, it definitely 
trumps football fields, otherwise we are talking about the forces 
that trump research itself, and that's beyond both our reaches -- 
is Publish or Perish. Today, in the non-OA world, publishing is 
paid for by the subscriber university, not by the author 
university (though they are largely the same university).

Hence, the only thing missing today is OA (and perhaps football 
fields), not the university's unnecessary advance commitment to 
pay (journal) publishers for anything else at all. Journal 
publishers are being paid in full for what they are selling 
today, and the universities are the buyers. Anything more would 
simply be double-dipping at this time.

Self-archiving mandates are providing universities, their 
researchers and research with exactly what they are missing 
today: OA. OA (in case it is not already evident by now) is 
simply the natural online-age extension of Publish or Perish: The 
reason universities already mandate that their researchers have 
their research peer-reviewed and published is that unpublished, 
unvalidated research is no research at all: it leads to no 
benefits to anyone, neither knowledge fans nor football fans. 
Unvalidated, unpublished research, sitting in a desk drawer, may 
as well not have been done at all. No one can access it, use it, 
apply it, build upon it.

And research that may as well not have been done at all may as 
well not have been funded at all, by either the university or the 
tax-payer.

So we have Publish or Perish, and in the online age, we have 
Self-Archive to Flourish, because unnecessary access-barriers are 
unnecessary barriers to using, applying and building upon 
research. Toll-access today is just a bigger desk-drawer.

Toll-booths were necessary in the paper era, to pay the essential 
costs of generating and disseminating hard copies. (That -- plus 
peer review -- was what "publishing" meant, way back then.) But 
today, in the online era, the essential costs of making research 
accessible to any would-be user webwide reduce to just the costs 
of implementing peer review -- and those costs (and then some) 
are currently being paid in full by university journal 
subscriptions, thank you very much!

So Ian Russell (Chief Executive, ALPSP) is quite mistaken to call 
his old Alma Mater, the University of Southampton, a "parasite" 
for having been the first university in the world to adopt an 
"unfunded" Green OA self-archiving mandate (beginning with the 
mandate of Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer 
Science in 2001, now university-wide).

What Southampton (and, since then, over twenty universities and 
departments, including, Harvard, twice) as well as over twenty 
research funding agencies (starting with the UK parliamentary 
Science and Technology Committee's mandate recommendation in 
2003, and lately including ERC and NIH) have done in mandating 
Green OA for their own research output is not parasitic by any 
stretch -- while universities continue to pay the costs of 
publication through subscriptions. Indeed, such mandates could 
only be "funded" if universities were foolish enough to fund 
double-dipping by publishers (which Ian rightly disavows).

So, as I said, things would only begin to be parasitic if 
universities elected not to pay for the costs of publishing their 
own research *once those publishing costs were no longer being 
covered by subscriptions* (from *other* universities).

For if (research) universities elected to build football fields 
out of their windfall subscription cancellation savings even 
after the (hypothetical OA-induced) collapse of subscriptions as 
the means of covering the (sole remaining essential) cost of 
peer-reviewed journal publishing (i.e., peer review), then 
research, researchers, and research universities would simply 
perish: Publish or Perish.

If this extinction is indeed fated to happen, please blame 
football, force majeure, not OA, or university parasitism! But 
until and unless football really does prevail in the Academy [I'm 
not claiming it couldn't!], trust that if push ever comes to 
shove, the Publish or Perish Mandate itself will see to it that 
the pennies from the universities' windfall subscription 
cancellation savings that need to be redirected to pay for the 
true remaining costs of peer-reviewing their own research output 
can and will indeed be so redirected. Necessity is the Mother of 
Invention.

But the point is that there is no Necessity -- hence no 
Parasitism -- *now*.

Just a pressing need for universities to put a long-overdue end 
to their needless daily, weekly, monthly, yearly research impact 
loss, cumulating, foolishly, gratuitously, and irretrievably, 
since at least the 1990's.

This will of course all be obvious -- belatedly but blindingly -- 
to historians in hindsight. To quote the wag (in 1999, in an 
"Opinion piece [that did]... not necessarily reflect the views of 
D-Lib Magazine, the Corporation for National Research 
Initiatives, or DARPA"):

     "I have a feeling that when Posterity looks back at the last decade
     of the 2nd A.D. millennium of scholarly and scientific research on
     our planet, it may chuckle at us..."
     http://dlib.ejournal.ascc.net/dlib/december99/12harnad.html

So the big lesson that still remains to be learned is the 
universities': it is they (not publishers) who needlessly delayed 
(by well over a decade) adopting the natural PostGutenberg 
upgrade of their paper-era Publish or Perish Mandates to include 
the self-archiving of their own peer-reviewed research output, so 
as to maximize its usage and impact.

The only lesson journal publishers need to learn from this is 
that they are -- and always were -- merely service-providers for 
the universities, who are the research-providers, and paying 
(through the teeth) for the publishers' service, until further 
notice.

OA is obviously optimal for research, researchers and their 
institutions. The publishing tail needs to learn to stop trying 
to wag the research dog. Adapt to whatever is best for the 
research-providers and the symbiosis (not parasitism) will 
continue, as it was always destined to do.

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/