tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post3373908957351347019..comments2024-03-17T08:30:21.129+00:00Comments on Open and Shut?: The Life and Death of an Open Access Journal: Q&A with Librarian Marcus BanksRichard Poynderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-43356425750760141812015-04-02T20:59:56.873+00:002015-04-02T20:59:56.873+00:00Hi Mike, of course I've heard of you! You are ...Hi Mike, of course I've heard of you! You are a frequent columnist and commenter on these matters, unafraid to go toe-to-toe with your opponents in the Scholarly Kitchen.<br /><br />Your enumeration of publisher services seems sound to me. But I would point you to Scott Plutchak's further enumeration of those services, which is in the first link Richard provided. As you well know, publishers are quite adept at articulating their unique value in the scholarly communications chain.<br /><br />Which is why I fear that arguments for open access that lead with cost savings cause more harm than good. This is always an easy claim for publishers to rebut...whatever degree of accuracy applies to these rebuttals, they do exist and carry weight among policymakers.<br /><br />But really you and I do not disagree. If you are right that market pressures make OA cheaper than the current system in the long run, that would be wonderful! But even if OA does not have this effect, it would still be better than what we have now. Marcus Bankshttp://mbanks.typepad.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-58931531779242402032015-04-02T14:37:52.418+00:002015-04-02T14:37:52.418+00:00[continued from previous comment]
Putting it all ...[continued from previous comment]<br /><br />Putting it all together, the legitimate costs of open-access publishing are much, much lower than the APCs currently being charged by legacy publishers -- which is why PeerJ is on course to be profitable within the next 12 months with its $99-for-life payment model, and why Ubiquity is self-sustaining on an APC of $500 (of which 16% is for the waiver fund).<br /><br />So you write "... which is why costs may not decrease and could increase." I just don't see it. The fact that legacy publishers are currently being allowed to get away with charging inflated fees is surely an accident of history. Born-digital publishers are something like an order of magnitude cheapers and -- crucially -- typically do an objectively better job, in terms of things like not imposing arbitrary limits on length on number of figures, allowing larger illustrations, providing XML as well as HTML/PDF, etc. Not to mention actually using genuinely open licences.<br /><br />There is simply no legitimate reason to keep paying legacy publishers $3000 for an inferior product.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-65506879226432055422015-04-02T14:37:32.185+00:002015-04-02T14:37:32.185+00:00Wow, thanks, Marcus -- I'm delighted and honou...Wow, thanks, Marcus -- I'm delighted and honoured that you've even heard of me!<br /><br />I'll be happy to chat by email or on Twitter, but for now I'll reply here, in the hope that these issues are of more general interest than just to us two!<br /><br />"I would love to see a fully OA world that costs a magnitude less than what we pay now. But first we need to define what the scholarly record is--simply a journal upload, or something that is curated and preserved and layered upon over time?"<br /><br />Yes, of course. Much as I love blogging, I would <i>not</i> want it to become "the scholarly record"! There are a bunch of quite separate services that journals have offered in the past, falling into several quite separate categories that remain intertwingled for historical reasons, to our great detriment. Sorting them all out will be very helpful.<br /><br />Here's a zeroth draft at a stab at categorising.<br /><br />A. Reproduction and delivery services. These have been made almost entirely obsolete by the Internet, so the cost to the publisher should be very small. (Although of course there's no reason that people who want to pay to have hardcopies delivered shouldn't be allowed to).<br /><br />B. Peer-review and its handling. This remains important, but has always been done by academics, working either unpaid or for a token stipend. The cost to the publisher should be very small.<br /><br />C. Editorial work in a sense of improving what the author has created. May include rewriting to improve language use, lower-level copy-editing, redrafting of figures, etc. Publishers talk about this a lot, but I've never seen it done to any of my own papers. I imagine this was a much bigger deal in the days of hand-written manuscripts and hand-drafted figures. It seems to have essentially gone away now, and its cost to publishers should by very small or zero.<br /><br />D. Typesetting, including formatting of references, preparing them for link databases, etc. This is a real service (although apparently not one required by mathematicians, physicists and astronomers, who all do their own typesetting using LaTeX.) Most publishers now outsource this to specialists such as River Valley, whose charges are very reasonable -- in the tens or low hundreds of dollars. So the cost to publishers should be small.<br /><br />E. Permanence. In the days of hardcopy journals, this was mostly the job of libraries, but publishers now like to talk as thought it's their job. In fact, real, reliable archiving happens primarily at third-parties such as PubMed Central, CLOCKSS and of course The Disks Of Millions. The cost to publishers should be minimal.<br /><br />F. Paywalling and authentication for tunnelling through the paywall. May be expensive to journals, but it's not an expense I have any desire to fund, since it harms rather than helps me (both as an author and as a reader). In any case, it's not needed for OA journals.<br /><br />G. Publicising research. Publishers talk about this, but I don't recall ever having seen it happen outside of Science and Nature. Certainly all publicity for my own papers has been the work of myself and my university. Cost to the publisher is near zero, since this is mostly a fiction.<br /><br />Did I miss any important services?<br /><br />[continued in next comment, as there is a 4096-character limit for some reason.]<br />Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-16995956737185453522015-04-02T13:45:26.475+00:002015-04-02T13:45:26.475+00:00Thanks for your comment Mike. I have admired your ...Thanks for your comment Mike. I have admired your OA advocacy for years, and would be happy to continue the discussion @mab992 or mab992@yahoo.com.<br /><br />And Richard, I was going to post my follow-up blog post but you beat me to it! Thank you.<br /><br />Mike, I would love to see a fully OA world that costs a magnitude less than what we pay now. But first we need to define what the scholarly record is--simply a journal upload, or something that is curated and preserved and layered upon over time? The latter seems more likely, which is why costs may not decrease and could increase. In any event, you and I would both agree that a fully OA world delivers better value for money.<br /><br /><br />Marcus Bankshttp://mbanks.typepad.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-86623355976998118362015-04-02T09:44:35.072+00:002015-04-02T09:44:35.072+00:00See also here and here.See also <a href="http://mbanks.typepad.com/my_weblog/2015/04/the-way-forward-for-scholarly-publishing-in-the-biosciences-more-thoughts-following-the-poynder-inte.html" rel="nofollow">here</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/marcus.banks1/posts/10153196368405883?pnref=story" rel="nofollow">here</a>.Richard Poynderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05433823131339077354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7961882.post-3027676171476503492015-04-02T09:16:14.350+00:002015-04-02T09:16:14.350+00:00Thank you for this superb and enlightening intervi...Thank you for this superb and enlightening interview. Although I strongly disagree with Marcus on how the eventual costs of open access will compare with those of subscriptions (I expect them to fall by an order of magnitude), we are very much agreed on the core issue. As I put it a couple of years ago at the very end of <a href="http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/open-access-where-are-we-what-still.html" rel="nofollow">my own Open-and-Shut interview</a>, "OA <i>is</i> cheaper, but that's not why it matters. What counts is not that it has lower cost, but that it has higher value. The real cost in all this is the opportunity cost of <i>not</i> having universal open access." Even if I turn out to be wrong about the costs, and Marcus to be right, that core observation remains the heart of this. OA may or may not be cheaper; but it's <i>better</i>.Mike Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06039663158335543317noreply@blogger.com