[Open-access] An anti-RWA bill

Wed Feb 1 13:54:31 UTC 2012

Dear all,

below you find some detailed answers to some of the points
raised by Mike and Nick. For those of you who are not
interested in the details, here is my question:

I'd love to see/hear examples of markets without luxury
brands and a clear understanding of what makes these markets
different from those markets with luxury brands and how
these differences can be implemented in scholarly
communication. In the absence of such evidence, why should
we hope that scholarly publishing would somehow magically
turn out different from all the other markets and push for
universal author-pays?

All the best,

Bjoern

Mike Taylor wrote:

> The fundamental problem you're describing here is the absurd level of
> prestige assigned to getting a paper (or, I should rather say, an
> extended abstract) into one of the tabloids.

Now we're getting towards the point that seems to me to be
critical!

IMHO, this level of prestige will allow these publishers to
charge between 10-20k per article if we go universal OA
(uOA). If comparisons to other markets are permissible (why
shouldn't they be?), higher prices are even necessary to
emphasize the distinction between the luxury brands from the
main/lower brands. 

> How are you going to change that?  If we make the move to
> self-publication online, or putting everything in arXiv or similar,
> how will that change the predilection of hiring committees to start by
> counting the number of S&N papers candidates have?

IMHO that's exactly what we keep in mind when we need to
discuss when we plot a way on how to best achieve uOA!
I see now way how you can discuss one without the other.

IMHO, author pays uOA will make the current situation worse
for the junior scientists and is thus not sustainable.
Status quo is at least not making things worse, but it's not
uOA, so it's also not sustainable. We need a third way.

What needs to happen is an erosion of journal-rank. IMHO,
uOA can only happen without journal rank, or we make things
worse than now. I'd love it if someone could make a
convincing argument against that position!

As with everything in this discussion, journal-rank has two
perspectives: readers and authors (I'm only referring to
scientists for now, as our goal is uOA anyway).

As you point out, the author perspective is the most
difficult one, and I think can only be solved after the
reader perspective has all but lost any value in
journal-rank.

In the reader perspective, journals (-ranks) allow you to
cut down on the number of titles you need to scan in order
to find the relevant literature.
If we move every single paper in the archives up until 12
months ago as well as all later gold OA articles into a
semantic library-based database that also includes as many
data-repositories as possible, we can provide a reader
experience that easily is better than PubMed, GS, T-R WoK
and Scopus combined. Nobody will use anything else anymore,
because they find things there more easily, more quickly and
most of  it with a single click. And that doesn't even
include the features that few people use now: annotation,
metrics, social tools, bookmarking, etc. Imagine total
connection of all tools and features having to do with
papers and data onto a single platform. Even the most
luddite of scientists will immediately see the value in this
and use it. Ideally I would like to see this happen with
PubMed/PMC, maybe as a way to relieve them from costs (US
would be happy, I'm sure).
Thus, it is not difficult and requires only the cancellation
of a few expensive journals by a set of cooperating
libraries to build something, every reader will love,
because it cuts down on a valuable resource: time. We use
the profits from corporate publishers to buy something that
is precious to every scientist: time. And then we give it to
them 'for free'!
Searching for literature, however, is something that (for
me) happens not too often. What would be a much better time
saver to me is an IT-assisted newspaper service where 
every single paper of, say, the last week/24h has been
filtered and sorted by an intelligent algorithm that
learns and adapts to what I click on and do with each paper.
Upon my suggestion, F1000 is working on something like this
and has an early prototype in closed beta which I'm
currently testing for them. This service would easily save
me 5-8h per week in time, once it works.
Thus, for the reader, where the paper is published, becomes
irrelevant, because the relevancy of the research has been
determined by more objective criteria.
However, even in the best of cases, there will still remain
some who still adhere to journal rank as a useful tool. For
these, I'm currently preparing an article with so far one
co-author that presents the current empirical, peer-reviewed
evidence that journal rank is actually detrimental to
science, if one evaluates several measures of scientific
quality such as citations, retractions and estimates of
actual effect size.

Once nobody pays attention to journal rank in their
selection of papers to read and knows the data on the
pernicious nature of journal rank, the author perspective
will more or less automatically change: not immediately and
probably not even quickly, but slowly and eventually. There
would be quite a long period where most lo-rank journals
keep dying off (there is some evidence that this might
already be starting due to P1) until eventually so few
papers will be published in the last few remaining ones,
that these also become irrelevant. 

> It seems to me that you're conflating two rather separate issues: the
> crazy influence of a few journals; and the lack of free access to
> research.

I hope I've made clear how they're not separate and how the
impression that they are separate may lead to unintended
consequences.

> You're criticising solutions to the latter because it
> doesn't (you believe) offer solutions to the former;

No, I'm criticizing because there is evidence that author
pays uOA not only doesn't offer solutions, it will make the
effects of journal-rank worse, leading to an overall worse
situation than the status quo..

> Or is your plan just to keep the current S&N system,
> but make readers pay for it instead of authors?

I think I've always made it pretty clear that the status quo
is not an option other than as an intermediary step towards
a scholarly communication system that works for citizens and
scientists.

Nick Barnes wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:09, Björn Brembs
> <b.brembs at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Only having one Science paper made me not make the shortlist
>> on a number of my applications, I've been told.
>> How would that change?

> That would change instantly if - as you describe - publication in a
> top journal became an indicator simply of ability to pay, rather than
> of quality.  Hiring committees don't care about ability to pay.

Both the publishers and Rolls Royce claim their products and
services to be superior. In contrast to Rolls Royce,
publishers have their citations which they say back their
claims up. If anything, CNS should be more successful and
lasting luxury brands than Rolls Royce or Dom Perignon which
go by taste alone.

One could also say that graduating from Yale with a C, such
as GW Bush, reflects simply the ability to pay tuition. Do
you see anyone seriously dissing Harvard, Yale, etc. as
merely educating those "with the ability to pay"?

Neither Rolls Royce, nor Dom Perginon nor CNS nor Ivy League
schools are losing their status due to charging ridiculous
prices any time soon - on the contrary, being able to raise
such prices means there has to be something there people are
willing to shell out such sums for. Why should these market
forces not apply to publishing?

I'm sorry, but all this evidence seems to point towards CNS
actually raising prices in order to retain their status and
distinguishing themselves from the lesser journals,
especially if they have cheap, lesser journals themselves.
It's common practice by many manufacturers to have main and
luxury brands...

> This is what I mean when I say that top journals are terrified of
> losing their status.  They won't do anything which deters a
> significant proportion of authors.

lol! CNS only publish ~8% of all submissions. Which of those
8%, many of whom will get tenure because of this
publication, will get alienated, and will it matter if you
have so many new authors who just need to publish there? Or
do you mean those 92% which desperately need this CNS paper
to get a job and would rather publish their research
anywhere else, if only they could?

I'd like to see some evidence for a market that doesn't have
a luxury brand and why this would apply to scholarly
publishing.

> In any case, this is a ridiculous hypothetical.  Has it happened with
> the NIH mandate?  I don't believe so (although nobody has answered my
> request for first-hand experience).  So why are we even discussing it?

It's the same discussion we've always had: how to establish
uOA. I'm saying that uOA without simultaneously destroying
journal-rank will make things worse than they are now.
The NIH mandate hasn't touched the big publishers in the
least, because people need most papers within the first 12
months. An NIH mandate without embargo will lead people to
cut subscriptions and some on this list seem to believe that
the ensuing author-pays uOA is what we all want and should
push for. I disagree, author-pays uOA is most likely
pernicious, if the evidence from basically all other markets
in anything to go by.

That being said, I'd love to be convinced by examples of
markets without luxury brands and a clear understanding of
what makes these markets different from those markets with
luxury brands and how these differences can be implemented
in scholarly communication.

Does anybody have such evidence or does this discussion
have to go on using only wishful thinking and hope?

Best wishes,

Bjoern

-- 
Björn Brembs
---------------------------------------------
http://brembs.net
Neurobiology
Freie Universität Berlin
Germany