Harnad, S. (2008) The
Postgutenberg Open
Access Journal. To appear in: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The
Future
of the Academic Journal. Chandos.
Chaire
de recherche du Canada
Institut
des sciences cognitives
Universite
du Quebec a Montreal
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada H3C
3P8
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/en/index2_en.html
Department
of Electronics and Computer Science
University
of Southampton
Highfield,
Southampton
SO17
1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad
/
Introduction. Some think the most radical feature of PostGutenberg
journals will
be the fact that they are digital and online, but that would be a much
more
modest development if their contents were to continue to be kept behind
financial firewalls, with access denied to all who cannot or will not
pay the
tolls. This chapter will show how the optimal and inevitable outcome --
for
scientific and scholarly research, researchers, their institutions and
funders,
the vast research and development industry, and the society whose taxes
support
science and scholarship and for whose benefits the research is
conducted
– will be that all published research articles will be openly
accessible
online, free for all would-be users webwide.
The Classical Learnd Journal. To understand the journal of the future, however, we
must first
understand the journal of the present. This chapter is exclusively
about refereed
journals, not about trade journals,
magazines, or
newsletters. These journals publish only peer-reviewed scientific and
scholarly
research. According to Ulrich's,
there are about 25,000 of them, publishing about 2.5 million articles
per year,
across all disciplines and in all languages[1].
Refereed journals have the
following
properties:
(1)
Peer
review: All articles published in these
journals
are first sent, by a qualified specialist editor or editorial board, to
experts
specialized in its subject matter. These experts are called 'referees'
or 'peers' and are invited to review the submitted manuscript,
determine whether
its subject matter and quality are potentially suitable for publication
in the
journal in question, and if so, to indicate what revisions (if any)
need to be
made so that it meets that journal's established quality standards for
acceptance. Both the referees and the authors are answerable to the
editors,
who select which referee recommendations are binding, and who judge
whether a
revised draft has satisfied the recommendations. The editors and the
journal
title are in turn answerable to the journal's usership in establishing
and
maintaining the journal's quality standards. In most fields there are a
number
of journals, varying horizontally in terms of their focus and subject
matter,
and vertically in terms of their selectivity and quality standards, as
maintained by the rigor of their peer review (Harnad 1998a).
(2)
Document
production: All articles that a journal
accepts for
publication are copy-edited (to varying degrees) and then marked up for
publication -- formerly only as print on paper, but nowadays most
journals also
generate a digital document online.
(3)
Access
provision: The journals provide access to
their
products, the journal articles, by selling (and in various ways
delivering
access through) annual subscriptions to the print edition or licenses
to the
online edition. Journals often also sell single issues, online or on
paper, or
even single articles (which is then called 'pay to view'). Although it
varies
by field, most journals make ends meet through institutional
subscriptions and
licenses. Individual subscriptions exist too, but they are not what
sustains
the market for most journals.
(4)
Archiving: Both print and paper editions
have to be stored and preserved.
Individual subscribers do what they want with their personal copies,
but
institutional libraries (as well as national deposit libraries) are
responsible
for the archival storage of print editions of journals. For the online
edition
there is still some inconsistency about who owns and preserves what,
but both
the libraries and the publishers are currently involved in storing and
preserving both the print and the digital documents.
(5)
Copyright: Providing peer revew,
generating the
final document, providing access to it online and on paper, and storing
and
preserving it, all have costs, most of them borne by the publisher. The
customers – the libraries – also bear some of the storage and
preservation costs for the paper and online edition they have
purchased, but we
will focus on publisher costs. The peers referee for free, but we will
be
focusing particularly on the costs of implementing peer review (vetting articles, selecting referees,
adjudicating the
referee reports, and adjudicating the revisions, including any
editorial
input). In order to cover all their publishing costs (1)-(4), many
journal
publishers require the transfer of copyright from the author to the
publisher
to make it the exclusive vendor. This means no rival publisher can sell
the
same articles, and even the authors have to request permission from the
publisher to re-use their own published writing in their own further
publications.
Four of these five properties
(2)-(5) are
also shared with other forms of publication; peer review, however, (1)
is
unique to scientific and scholarly journal publishing (although some
scholarly
and scientific monographs may sometimes also be refereed by consultant
specialists as rigorously as some journal articles). There are online
editions
of books, but they have not yet become as prevalent and as widely used
as
online versions of articles. The essential common point is that
copyright is
transferred to publishers so that they can recover their costs and make
a
profit.
Publishing for Income vs.
Publishing for
Impact. Now what, besides peer-review
itself,
distinguishes the 2.5 million articles published every year in the
world's
25,000 peer reviewed journals from everything else that is published?
It is the
authorship of those journals. The authors are all scientific and
scholarly
researchers, and none of them publishes their articles for the sake of
earning
royalty income or fees from their sale. They publish them for one
reason, and
one reason only: So that their work will be read, used, applied and
built upon
by their fellow-researchers worldwide. This is called 'research
impact'. It is
for the sake of research impact that researchers publish their findings
instead
of just putting them in a desk drawer (or not doing research at all).
It is for
the sake of research impact that their institutions and funders mandate
that
researchers should 'publish or perish'. It is for the sake of research
impact
that citizens support research with their taxes. And it is research
impact that
drives scientific and scholarly research progress (Harnad 2001a).
Trade Publishing. It is useful to contrast the special case of refereed
research
journals with most of the rest of the printed word: The authors of
trade books
do not write for research impact. Nor do the authors of
newspaper article and magazines. They
write for fees or royalty income. Even the writers of scientific and
scholarly
textbooks – although they are often the authors of journal articles
wearing other hats – write for royalty revenue rather than research
impact. Some scholarly monographs -- in fields where the
publish-or-perish
mandate puts more weight on publishing books than on publishing journal
articles -- have a mixed agenda and will probably follow the same
pattern as
journals, eventually; but for now, because of the true costs of
print-based
publication and distribution, scholarly monographs are still reliant on
the
trade publishing model.
And what is the trade
publishing model?
That the publisher tries to recover costs and make a fair profit by
selling
access to the joint product: the author's writing plus the publisher's
editing,
quality control, copy-editing, mark-up, and the generation and
distribution of
the text as print on paper. That is why copyright is transfered to
publishers:
so they can make good on their investment, sharing their profit with
their
authors.
Gutenberg Toll-Access. That, at least, was the picture in the Gutenberg era:
The true
costs of print production and distribution required a toll-booth to be
erected
between the document and the user. Access was sold, with publisher and
author
taking a share of the price of admission. Writing, after all, was a
trade, a
way of earning a living, and so was publishing. Writers and publishers
were no
more interested in giving away their products than any other producer
of any
other good or service ever was.
How has the PostGutenberg era
of digital
documents and online access changed that? In principle, authors can now
give
away their writing, if they wish to (and
can afford
to). That's presumably what bloggers are doing. But despite all we are
hearing
about Open Source, Open Content, Open Access and Creative Commons
Licensing,
both the writing and the publishing trades are still proceeding apace,
pretty
much as they had before. And that's largely because there's still bread
to be
put on the table, The fact that it has newly become possible to give
away their
writing in digital form on a global scale does not mean that most
authors wish to do so (Harnad et al
2000).
Reprint Requests and Author
Give-Aways. Except for one kind of
author: the authors of peer-reviewed journal
articles. For not only did they never seek or receive income from the
sales of
their articles, but even back in Gutenberg times these special authors
had had
the practice of mailing, at their own expense, free copies (reprints)
of their
articles to any would-be user who requested them. The reason, again,
was
research impact. Researchers do not earn their revenue from selling
their
articles but from having them widely read, used, and cited. The
publish-or-perish reward system of academia is not based merely on a
publication count. Measures of impact are counted as well, chief among
them being
citations: For scholars and
scientists, their
employment, salaries, promotion, tenure, funding, prizes and prestige
all
depend on the degree of uptake and usage of their research findings.
Access Barriers and Impact
Barriers. For this special kind of author
(the would-be give-way author) the
access-barriers of Gutenberg publishing -- having to transfer copyright to the publisher and to let him deny
access to those who could not or would not pay -- were always anathema,
because
access-barriers are impact-barriers.
Yet these
give-away authors had no choice but to enter into this Faustian Bargain
(not
with the devil, but with Gutenberg's costly mechanism of
access-provision and
its resulting cost-recovery needs) as the inescapable price of having
any
research impact at all (beyond what they could manage by hand-mailing
manuscripts).
The PostGutenberg Galaxy. Impact-barriers were inescapable -- until the
PostGutenberg era of
digital documents and online access provision (Harnad
1990,1991). For as soon as it became technically possible,
these give-away authors began making their research papers (before and
after
refereeing) accessible free for all, first through email, then by
'self-archiving' them online
(Harnad 1995, 2001b) in order to make them Open Access (OA) in
'anonymous ftp' archives, then on personal or central websites, and
most
recently in their own research institutions' interoperable,
OAI-complaint Institutional
Repositories (IRs) (Tansley
& Harnad 2000) so they can be harvested and jointly searched
through search
engines such as OAIster, Citeseer, Citebase, Google Scholar and Google
(Hitchcock et al 2002). Studies have now repeatedly demonstrated that
making
articles OA doubles their research impact (in terms of citations)
(Lawrence
2001; Harnad & Brody 2004; Hajjem et al 2005; Brody et al 2006).
Open Access (and Almost-Open
Access): The status quo in 2008 is that
about 15% of the 2.5 million
peer-reviewed articles published annually are spontaneously being made
OA by
their authors. This will soon be changing, however, as universities and
research institutions as well as research funders worldwide are
extending their
publish-or-perish mandates to mandate that the access to and the impact
of
those 2.5 million published articles should be maximized through author
self-archiving (Harnad et al. 2003). Over 42 universities and funders
worldwide
(including Harvard and NIH) have already mandated OA self-archiving
(see ROARMAP).
Over 60%
of journals have already adopted a 'Green OA Policy', endorsing the
immediate
self-archiving by their authors, of their final refereed drafts, in
their own
OA IRs (see ROMEO)
(Harnad et
al. 2004).
For the 38% of journals that
embargo OA
(for 6-12 months or more) or who do not endorse their articles being
made OA at
all, immediate research usage and impact needs can nevertheless be
fulfilled
almost instantly. For any IR deposit that is inaccessible (because
access to it
is set as 'Closed Access' instead of Open Access owing to publisher
restrictions), the IRs have a button
that allows any would-be user to click to send an instant 'email eprint
request' to the author, who need only click to have the eprint
instantly
emailed to the requester by the software. This is not yet 100% OA: only
62% OA
+ 38% almost-OA. But as OA and OA mandates and the resulting usage and
impact
grow, author and user pressure will ensure that the optimal and
inevitable
outcome -- 100% Green OA -- will soon follow.
Once all articles are made OA
through
author self-archiving, and all journals are Green on OA, what next?
What has
been described so far has either already happened or is about to happen
with
high probability. But beyond that point – the point that provides the
barrier-free access, usage and impact that research and researchers
need
– we enter into the realm of speculation about the future of journal
publishing, copyright and peer review. Although it is not possible to
predict
the outcome with any confidence, it is possible to anticipate the main
contingencies:
Universal Green OA May
Eventually Make
Subscriptions Unsustainable. In and of
itself,
universal Green OA self-archiving simply means that any researcher
whose
institution cannot afford subscription access to the publisher's print
or
online edition of the journal in which a particular article happens to
appear
can henceforth access the author's refereed final draft for free
online. No one
knows how long the demand for the print edition, or the publisher's
proprietary
PDF will continue to cover the costs of journal publishing. It has to
be noted,
however, that producing a print edition and the publisher's PDF itself
costs
money, so that if and when the demand for publisher's print and PDF
vanishes,
so will all the costs associated with print and PDF: The author's
peer-reviewed, accepted final draft, self-archived in his institution's
OAI-compliant IR, will become the official, canonical draft, and
expenses
(2)-(4) above (document production, access provision and archiving)
will either
have vanished or been offloaded onto the author and the distributed
network of
OA IRs. As a consequence, there will no longer be any need to transfer
copyright to the publisher (5), nor to block access, usage, and re-use.
Journals will have eliminated products and services for which there is
no
longer a demand, cutting costs and downsizing so that their only
remaining
expense will be the cost of implementing peer review (Harnad 2001a).
Gold OA Publishing. How much does it actually cost to implement peer review?
The author
provides the text and the revisions for free. The peers review for
free. But a
qualified editor must select the referees and adjudicate the referee
reports
and the revisions, and the online correspondence must be managed and
coordinated. Currently, the cost per paper of implementing peer review
has been
estimated to be between $200-$500 per accepted paper (if one factors
the cost
of rejected papers into the cost of accepted papers) (Doyle 2001).
There is a
model for recovering this cost. It has already been tested for much
higher
costs – in fact the full gamut of costs of current journal publication,
from $1500 per paper for publishing online-only to $3000 or more if the
print
edition is included: Instead of the user-institution paying the
publisher a
subscription fee for a product – the
incoming journal – the author-institution pays the publisher a
publication free for a service –
publication – per outgoing article. This is called the 'Gold OA'
publishing cost-recovery model (Harnad 1997a, 1998b, 1999).
There are already over 3000 Gold OA journals – journals that
make their own articles freely accessible online. Not all of them
charge for
publication – in fact, the majority still make ends meet through
subscriptions or subsidies. But a significant subset are sustaining
themselves
purely by charging author-institution publication fees. The problem is
that
with over 90% of all 25,000 refereed journals still being
subscription-based,
the funds for paying institutional Gold OA publication fees are
currently
committed to paying for institutional subscription fees. But if and
when the
availability of universal Green OA were ever to eliminate the demand
for the
publisher's official version, on paper or online, making subscriptions
unsustainable, then simple arithmetic shows that institutions would
have at
least three times as much annual windfall savings from their incoming
journal
subscription cancellations as they would need to pay the publication
costs for
their outgoing articles – if all they had to pay for was peer review
(Harnad 2001).
In other words, there is
currently already
enough institutional money changing hands to sustain current
publication costs
through subscriptions. If journals downsized to become just peer review
service
providers, institutions would have saved more than enough money to pay
for it.
Would Pay-to-Publish Lower
Peer-Review
Standards? Some have expressed the
concern that if
author-institutions pay to publish, then peer-review standards will
decline, as
journals lower acceptance standards in order to have more papers to
publish. To
a degree, something like this is already the case with subscription
journals.
There is a quality hierarchy: On the high end are the journals with
high
standards of quality and high selectivity, and on the low end are
journals that
are virtually vanity presses, accepting almost everything submitted.
These
quality differences are known to all researchers, on the basis of the journals' track records (and often also
their citation impact factors): Hence publishing in a journal with low
quality
standards not only has less prestige – hence less 'publish-or-perish'
value for the author's career (e.g.,
in
performance evaluation). But users
too know the
journals' track records for quality, and avoid the journals whose
contents are
not reliable, which again is not good for authors, shopping for a
journal that
users will read and cite.
None of this will change with
the journal's
cost-recovery model. With Gold OA publishing, the author-institution
pays for
publication instead of the user-institution, but it is the peers who
referee.
Hence the journals that authors will most want to publish in, and that
users
will most want to use, will continue to be the journals with the
track-record
for high peer-review quality standards (and high usage and impact
metrics).
Improving the Efficiency of
Peer Review. Moreover, the cost of peer
review will, if anything, go down once
OA prevails. Not only will more and more authors be making their papers
available even before they are refereed, as preprints (the way many
physicists
and computer scientists have been doing for years), allowing
pre-refereeing
commentary to improve their quality and thereby reduce the burden on
the
referees, but the online medium will also make it easier for editors to
pick
referees and to distribute the refereeing load more evenly (Harnad
1996, 2008).
Peer Feedback After Posting
Instead
of Peer Filtering Before
Publishing? Some have made even more
radical
predictions, suggesting that refereeing (hence journals) will disappear
completely
once OA prevails, and that ad lib peer commentary will replace
answerable peer
review as the means of quality control. Having umpired a peer-reviewed
Open
Peer Commentary journal for a quarter century (Harnad 1978, 1982), I am
quite
familiar with the difference between advance peer review,
and post-hoc peer commentary, and I am
skeptical that the latter can replace the former (Harnad 1997b, 1998a).
The critical difference is answerability: An author is answerable to the editor for meeting the
referees'
recommendations. With post-hoc commentary, whether or not to meet
commentators'
recommendations is entirely up to the author. Not to mention that it is
not at
all clear whether self-appointed commentators are likely to be the
qualified 'peers' in the way the editor-selected and answerable journal
referees are. Nor
is it clear whether raw, unfiltered drafts, along with self-appointed
vetters'
comments will yield a literature that researchers can navigate and use,
judging
what is and is not reliable enough
to be worth investing their finite time in order to read or risking
their even
more precious time and effort in trying to use and
build upon. Not to mention that it is not clear what will
play the role of the journal's name and prior track-record for tagging
quality
in a world with just self-posted preprints and self-posted comments.
The PostGutenberg Journal:
Optimal and
Inevitable for Research and Researchers.
PostGutenberg peer review will be far more powerful and efficient, but
it will
still be the natural, answerable, expert-based quality-control system
for
research fundings that deserves to retain the name 'refereed journal'.
What
will really distinguish PostGutenberg Journal publication will be that
it is
openly accessible to all users webwide and an integral part of a global
Open
Research Web, on which research data, research papers before and after
peer
review, open peer commentary, research metrics, and data-mining will
allow
scholarly/scientific collaboration, interactivity and productivity at a
speed,
scope and scale that were unthinkable in the Gutenberg era (Harnad
2003/2004;
Shadbolt et al. 2006).
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[1] Bjork, Roos & Lauri (2008) make a lower estimate of 23,750 journals and 1.35 million articles. There are some uncertainties about Ulrich's classification scheme and about the average article-count for journals that are not indexed by ISI. (ISI journals average somewhat over 100 articles per year.)