Re: Budapest Open Access Initiative (Stevan Harnad) Marcia Tuttle 16 Feb 2002 21:57 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2002 18:24:29 +0000 From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGPRINTS.SOTON.AC.UK> Subject: Re: Budapest Open Access Initiative (fwd) On Sat, 16 Feb 2002 [identity removed] wrote: > High quality publishing still requires real time and costs involved at the > editorial and production levels. The page printing and mailing costs may be > obviated, but that leaves a real kernel of costs that must be covered. The > alternative is a literature filled with unreviewed garbage, formatted in a > haphazard and increasingly chaotic way. > > There is nothing in this world that is free. Food, clothing, > transportation, shelter all cost money, and someone, somewhere has to pay, > even for these necessities of life. > > It is so much more reasonable, then, that non-necessities should be > recognized as having costs, and that the reasonable costs should be paid. > > You can argue that the costs should be paid by the users, or you could argue > that they should be paid by governments, but the undeniable reality is that > they must be paid. These costs run to about 30% of the budget of most > journals, and you cannot pretend that they do not exist. Dear Professor [identity removed]: I completely agree with you that there is a real kernel of costs that must be covered. The BOAI is fully cognizant of this, and is taking it fully into account in its initiative. It might help, though, to look very briefly at the arithemtic (on which our estimates appear to agree fully with yours!): The amount that the entire planet is paying, collectively, per paper currently (mainly in institutional subscriptions and licenses) is $2000-$5000 per published article. The cost of implementing peer review, again per article, is $200-$500. If and when institutions are no longer paying their annual 100% subscriptions/license fees, they will have plenty of windfall savings out of which to pay the 10-30% of them that went toward peer review -- but per outgoing institutional paper published now, instead of per incoming paper subscribed to. Does the "real kernel of costs" extend to more than the cost of implementing peer review (peers review for free)? That is for the market to decide. If institutions want to keep paying for more paper subscriptions and/or for publishers' PDF page-images, they can do so. And while they do so, there is no problem about covering the peer-review costs, for they are already wrapped into those subscription/license costs. But the test of whether or not there would still be a market for those added-values even if the peer-reviewed versions were accessible online (but not the paper edition, nor the publisher's formatted PDF) is to allow users the choice. That is precisely what self-archiving is intended to do: Researchers self-archive their own peer-reviewed final drafts (not the publisher's PDF) in their university's OAI-compliant Eprint Archives. That makes them openly accessible to all (and interoperable), and it allows users and their institutions to make the choice. If, as you predict, user-institutions find authors' peer-reviewed final drafts insufficient for their needs, then they will register this by continuing to subscribe to the publisher's print and/or PDF edition for a fee. If your prediction instead proves incorrect, and users are satisfied with the peer-reviewed final draft in the OAI-compliant Eprint Archives, then they will not continue to subscribe, and the peer-review costs -- the "real kernel" -- will be amply covered from 10-30% of their annual institutional windfall savings, per outgoing published paper (instead of as incoming access tolls on incoming papers, as now). http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2 So, as you see, there is no disagreement between us here. Sincerely, Stevan Harnad