[campaigns] Free Online Scholarship
Volker Grassmuck
vgrass@rz.hu-berlin.de
Thu, 7 Mar 2002 02:53:55 +0100
The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/
sehr interessante Ressource, möchte bes. auf die Timeline der FOS Bewegung
hinweisen. Und hier ein Beispiel aus dem Newsletter. /v
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To: fos-forum@topica.com
From: Peter Suber <peters@earlham.edu>
Subject: Re: open access sells subscriptions
Date sent: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 14:04:34 -0500
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[Forwarding from Karyn Popham. I apologize for misspelling her first name
"Karen" in my earlier postings in this thread, February 14. --Peter.]
Peter seems surprised at the idea that librarians will not give up their
hard copy (paper) journals. Here are some of the issues involved, from
Kimberly Douglas and Dana Roth (librarians at Caltech) and David Goodman
(Princeton):
"How will Elsevier warrant that it owns the content in E-Choice or at least
owns the right to sell libraries irrevocable access and is, in fact,
selling us such access?
How will Elsevier guarantee that all the content will remain permanently
available, and that Elsevier will not:
sell to any third party any rights in such a way that it becomes
unavailable to customers without additional cost?
permit any third party, including even the society that sponsors the
journal, to withdraw material once published?
Without some legally binding permanent guarantee, of which contract law's
capacity is highly questionable, the transition to all-electronic journals
is not truly reliable."
This is from a discussion of Elsevier's latest "offer"; the full review is at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=f53
If librarians were negotiating with scholarly societies in a "we're all in
this together" context, they might feel differently on the subject. But
they are negotiating with Elsevier, infamous for its attitude towards its
customers, in an adversarial relationship. The bottom line is, Elsevier
doesn't care about keeping scholarship available. Its goal is to make
money. (Of which it makes a very, very great deal.)
One might start a discussion as to whether scholarship and capitalism are
fundamentally at odds. With respect to Keynesian economics, I suspect they
are.
Libraries will always have a basic question of any information-distribution
system: how do you guarantee permanent access? This is integral to the
raison d'etre of the library itself: the future's (as well as the
present's) access to civilization. The issue of permanent access is never
going to go away for librarians. (In this context, I am discussing the
librarians of academic research libraries. For the most part, those are
also the libraries who pay for subscriptions to scholarly journals.)
When what they are buying is a physical object which requires no further
equipment for use (e.g., a book or a journal), the issue of permanent
access becomes an internal problem for the library itself. Outside that
context, librarians are going to look long and hard at any proposal that
they switch to something that they will inevitably see as problematic in
the long term. Online access is for convenience; paper is for posterity.
To me, the "obvious" solution is to get capitalism out of the picture.
Elsevier and Thompson make billions of dollars of profits by monopolizing
access to research paid for by tax dollars. (You think I exaggerate? Check
out their annual reports.)
But imagine: Journals are published by non-profit entities. Institutional
subscriptions are a small multiple of individual subscriptions, which in
turn are priced to produce high volume. Online access is free and immediate
through a site hosted by the group that paid for most of the research to
begin with: in the U.S., the federal government. Governments of other
post-industrialized countries might pay posting costs for items from
journals published in their countries, or with lead authors who are their
nationals.
This approach would also help solve the incredible time lag to publication.
One of our researchers just got an acceptance letter from a journal. It
will take five years to get the article actually into print. Of course, if
she's willing to pay page charges (unheard of in her field) and order a
minimum of 100 reprints, well then, they can get it into print in 18 months.
The journal in question, in my opinion, needs to go from quarterly to 6 or
12 issues a year, and increase its price accordingly. That or it needs to
stop accepting manuscripts for review. Five years--this is archival
preservation, not publication. In the meantime, the Matthew Effect has yet
another referent.
I would be interested to know what publication lead times are in various
fields and for different journals, particularly in terms of their
publication schedule. The journal in question is booked 20 issues ahead.
How far ahead of itself should a journal be in accepting manuscripts for
publication? When I worked for a journal, we tried to stay 2 issues ahead.
That way, if something disastrous happened (the office was closed due to
natural disaster, someone had to pull the main article for an issue) we
would have time to regroup and still be in print on time. But 20 issues? I
would think that unacceptable for a weekly, much less a quarterly. Other
opinions? Does anyone keep track of this data?
Cheers,
Karyn Popham
Houston, Texas
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