Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > Well, the "open" in open source causes much rejoice.  I think my point
 > is that if we're familiar with the first term, the "level of rejoice"
 > isn't the same for open access journals.  The "open" in open access
 > journals has other issues hidden behind it, where copyright is one of
 > them.

That's what you said, but I don't understand what they are.  In
particular I argue that copyright is not one of them.

 > Yes, perhaps it *is* related to copyright in a way.  With open
 > source, it means that others can look at, critique, and improve the
 > software.  Open access journals really means just open read-only
 > access.

Sure, but my point is that on the one hand, journal publication
carries a copyright but *not* a patent -- you have "open source"
levels of access to the *ideas* as long as you rewrite them in your
own words.[1]  On the other, copyright is hardly a restriction, since the
main "open source" right of redistribution is restricted by academic
ethics regardless of copyright.

 > Hmmmm, at least in my field, I haven't heard of one yet.  How do these
 > open access journals stay financially afloat?

Same way as many open source projects do: they have no finances, and
depend on contributed resources for the web site (usually a
university, eg, Berkeley Electronic Press has over 100 titles by now,
I think) and editorial functions (which are currently mostly
contributed for most journals).

 > Yes, that is true.  I think what I meant was that publishers have a
 > reputation to maintain.

Sure, but the cost of maintaining reputation is refusing exactly those
papers that would be your revenue source, plus high cost distribution
(especially high-quality printing).  This is killing them, except for
maybe those top journals that even graduate students are (well, used
to be) willing to fork out for.  And even those are seeing prices go
up as libraries stop ordering them in favor of electronic aggregators
like ScienceDirect.

 > Though it's perhaps not worth a mention, but even disagreements
 > between authors can cause papers to be retracted.  Disagreements in
 > authorship or ownership of data can also cause a publisher to retract
 > a piece of work.

Sure.  I think those are different issues from quality of journal, though.

 > The web has made print articles readily available.  And this actually
 > facilitates some kind of accountability through retractions (see,
 > [1]).

My point about retracting print is that if you're reading in print,
you are highly unlikely to see a retraction in a timely fashion.  You
don't have the search facility etc at your fingertips.

 > You can be an author who has written something and then
 > self-publish it on the web.

You can do that in print too.  Are you aware of the racket that
printers have in Japan, because at many universities Ph.D. candidates
are required to publish books?  So the Ph.D. with boring work pays to
have their thesis bound and registered with an ISBN.

 > You can even allow others to comment below it but there is no third
 > party who will take care of that work and be accountable.

Yet somehow the blogosphere has taken off.  Sites like GrokLaw even
have substantial academic credibility among academics (though not the
status of a "publication", and I don't expect that to come any time
soon).

 > Perhaps such an organization doesn't have to be a publisher.  It could
 > be some generic third-party entity.  But my point is that the web
 > doesn't necessarily make publishers obsolete.  My comment was in
 > response to Simon's comment:
 > 
 > >>> Or, just possibly, it's a racket run by publishers trying to
 > >>> shore up an old business model made obsolete by the web.

But this is precisely the point.  Copyright was a device to protect
printers/publishers far more so than authors.  Here, quality control
is provided by editorial boards, not publishers.

 > Yes, perhaps when I said "some generic third-party entity", it could
 > mean some properly organized subset of the web.  But, for now,
 > publishers and the editorial boards that they help form (but who they
 > don't necessarily pay) do serve a purpose and the web as it currently
 > is doesn't replace it.

But that's precisely Simon's point.  The editorial boards stay with
the publishers only through inertia, and in many fields they are
defecting to efficient, timely electronic media en masse.  You simply
can't justify associating "publisher" with "editorial and production
quality" any more -- it's always been quite possible to have high
editorial quality without a publisher (consider the process of
producing Ph.D.s), and now production quality requires support of a
publisher in a rapidly vanishing subset of academic fields.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Note that neither "free software" nor "open source" requires that
you license patents as currently defined, although the FSF claims that
a patent license is implied (other lawyers disagree), many licenses do
explicitly provide a patent license, and some copyleft licenses (eg,
GPLv3) require a patent license and even non-enforcement of unrelated
patents.