This message is forwarded to the list at the request of Stevan Harnad.
Elizabeth

>> Here are some comments on the CalTech Proposal:
>> 
>>     Scholar's Forum: A New Model For Scholarly Communication
>>     Anne M. Buck, Richard C. Flagan and Betsy Coles California Institute of
>>     Technology, Pasadena, CA, March 23, 1999
>>     http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum
>> 
>> All the objectives are right. Most of the pieces are there. But
>> unfortunately they are put together into an incoherent pattern. Only a
>> few pieces need moving, but that changes substantially the path we should
>> take in order to reach the objective we all agree on and share.
>> 
>> First, a quick reminder of the objective:
>> 
>>     It is easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for
>>     scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically
>>     interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable
>>     from any researcher's desk worldwide, for free.
>> 
>> That is the optimal outcome, and what proposals like this one are meant
>> to do is to help get us there.
>> 
>> I believe this one would fail as it stands, but with a little
>> rearrangement, it could succeed.
>> 
>> As it stands, this proposal is trying to create an ALTERNATIVE to the
>> current peer-reviewed journal literature, because it is held hostage by
>> tolls despite having been freely contributed by the authors, us.
>> 
>> The alternative is based on the correct step of decoupling the 
>> quality-control component (peer review) from the rest of scholarly
>> journal publication and attempting to provide that in the form of
>> an alternative service (in place of the toll-based existing journals)
>> while providing access and archiving for free for all.
>> 
>> This is all very commendable, but it has almost no chance of
>> succeeding, for the simple reason that it is attempting to compete with
>> the existing journal corpus for authors, and there is no reason
>> whatsoever for authors to prefer submitting their papers to a new,
>> untested quality-control "board" when the existing labels are the ones
>> that carry the confidence and prestige. The proposal asks authors to
>> switch, but there is no good reason for authors to switch: The refereed
>> journals are doing the job of quality control well. It is not their
>> quality control function that is amiss. It is the fact that they must
>> fund themselves by putting toll-based barriers to those who wish to
>> access those papers.
>> 
>> The way to change this is not to try to lure authors away from their
>> trusted journals. That is like starting not one, but countless new
>> journals, all unknown commodities, with the usual handicap of new
>> startup journals that must find their own niche -- except that in this
>> case they are taking on the entire existing corpus (at least 14,000
>> refereed journals)!
>> 
>> It is unrealistic in the extreme to imagine that authors can be enticed
>> away from their known and effective brand-names in favour of a generic
>> "board" of some sort. With the endorsement of a Consortium of
>> university associations and learned societies (if those can be persuaded
>> to give it), the chances are a little better, but still tiny. The
>> authors risk too much in moving en masse to a brand new, untested,
>> quality-control authority, even if they are assured that as a reward,
>> they will get a lot more readers for it. And a mere trickle of authors
>> would quickly make this whole approach fail, with some residual
>> disrepute for the whole undertaking, thereby putting us even further
>> away from the optimal outcome we are all seeking.
>> 
>> Yet with just a few parametric changes, it could work. 
>> 
>> First, although journals depend for their pages on authors, they depend
>> for their wages on readers, and the
>> Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) access fees that they
>> pay or their institutions pay for them. There is little hope in
>> competing for the authors, if this means asking them not to submit
>> their work to known, prestigious, high-impact journals, and instead
>> to submit them to an unknown new entity, be it ever so heartily endorsed.
>> 
>> What we CAN compete for, however, is the journals' READERS, and we can
>> count on the authors' support in this, as long as we do not ask them to
>> give up submitting their papers to the traditional journals of their
>> choice.
>> 
>> Here is the LOGICAL (and pragmatic) role that can now be played by the
>> very feature that makes this literature -- the refereed learned serial
>> literature -- so anomalous among literatures: Its authors give it away for
>> free, to both their publishers (in the form of their submitted
>> manuscripts) and to their readers (in the form of preprints and
>> reprints).
>> 
>> Let them continue to give their papers away to publishers to sell, but
>> let them also archive it online, for free. That is all it will take!
>> Readers will vote with their eyes. They will of course prefer to access
>> the literature for free online -- Los Alamos has already proven that.
>> 
>> Once this happens across enough fields and at a sufficient scale, the
>> library serials budget crunch will be the ally in the next logical step:
>> With hard-pressed budgets, and authors all accessing online for free,
>> S/L/P terminations are absolutely inevitable. The journal publishers,
>> feeling the pressure from this will have to find an alternative, and the
>> only alternative will be to scale down to online only, with their
>> providing the only remaining service that is needed of them: quality
>> control (peer review).
>> 
>> The result will be precisely the outcome the CalTech Proposal seeks,
>> namely, a decoupling of peer review from archiving and access, with the
>> publishers continuing to provide the peer review, with the traditional,
>> prestigious journals, and their known and reliable editorial boards and
>> referees -- but without the need of ever trying to compete with them
>> using new, unknown, generic boards. 
>> 
>> See: <http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/nature.html>
>> 
>> There is only one issue, however, that the CalTech Proposal did not
>> consider directly, and that is the cost of quality control. It is true
>> that referees referee for free; and that many editors also devote their
>> time for free or only a modest honorarium. But implementing peer review
>> is nevertheless not entirely cost-free (nor is the minimal copy editing
>> that still needs to be done by way of quality control for the form of
>> papers, just as peer review quality controls their content). These
>> residual costs of quality control (per published "page," say) are
>> minimal compared to the costs of S/L/P, but they are non-zero: Andrew
>> Odlyzko has estimated them as being as low as $10 per published page.
>> Let us be conservative and say they might be, at most, 30% of the cost
>> per paper page, recovered via S/L/P.
>> <http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/economics.journals.txt>
>> 
>> The obvious way to pay that small residual cost is up-front, so that
>> everyone can then access the paper for free. The natural source for
>> this up-front page-cost is of course not authors' own pockets, but
>> just 30% portion of the annual 100% their institutions save from the
>> termination of S/L/P.
>> 
>> So now we know both what the optimal solution is, and the natural way to
>> pay for it. The only thing that remains is to find a way to get there
>> from here. The CalTech Proposal as it stands will not get us there,
>> because it tries to go off in an untested direction which depends on
>> authors making risky decisions that they do not really have the
>> incentive to make, abandoning their known-impact journals for brand new
>> generic ones of uncertain provenance and destiny. (Besides, it has
>> not explained how the "Boards" will be financed: if by S/L/P then 
>> that's self-defeating!)
>> 
>> Make the following parametric changes, however, and it will fly: Don't
>> put an AAU Consortium's weight behind rival generic editorial boards,
>> put it behind author online self-archiving (in both local institutional
>> archives and global disciplinary or multidisciplinary ones, like Los
>> Alamos -- indeed why LIKE Los Alamos, why not Los Alamos, which is
>> already well funded and could easily scale up for the full load, with
>> mirror sites worldwide?). If this step were taken at a sufficient scale,
>> the optimal outcome would also become the inevitable one, and very soon.
>> 
>> The only other concern is to make sure there is a stable transition
>> strategy to prevent chaotic points from materializing as publishers
>> experience the S/L/P cancellation crunch. So the second thing a
>> Consortium could do, besides endorsing and encouraging author
>> self-archiving, is to provide transitional support for publishers who
>> explicitly commit themselves to scaling down and moving from S/L/P-toll
>> based cost recovery to up-front page charges. If this is not done,
>> quality control could break down, as known, experiences publishers pull
>> out and nothing is in place to take over their function.
>> 
>> Well, that's it; it should be familiar to some of you as my "subversive
>> proposal" of a few years ago, updated to take into account some of the
>> further evidence and experience that has accumulated since then.
>> 
>> I now proceed to quote/comment mode for some of the specifics:
>> 
>> > In the meantime, pressure to enact regressive copyright legislation has
>> > added another important element. The ease with which electronic files
>> > may be copied and forwarded has encouraged publishers and other owners
>> > of copyrighted material to seek means for denying access to anything
>> > they own in digital form to all but active subscribers or licensees.
>> 
>> Precisely. And this is why the main function (as Steve Koonin correctly
>> perceived) of "endorsing and encouraging self-archiving" on the part of
>> the Consortium will be to make sure that authors are not intimidated
>> into signing copyright agreements that deprive them of the right to
>> self-archive online. That's all they need to retain. Publishers can
>> have full and exclusive rights to SELL it, in either medium, paper or
>> online. The author need only retain the right to give it away for free
>> online. THAT is what needs the weight of an AAU and Learned Society
>> Consortium, NOT an alternative quality-control board!
>> 
>> > II. A NEW MODEL
>> > 
>> >   1. Support peer review and authentication 2. Support new models of
>> >   presentation incorporating network technology 3. Permit "threaded"
>> >   online discourse 4. Adapt to varying criteria among disciplines 5.
>> >   Assure the security of data 6. Reduce production time and expense 7.
>> >   Include automated indexing 8. Provide multiple search options
>> 
>> This is all unrevolutionary and uncontroversial. I would add only the
>> importance of CITATION LINKING of the entire refereed journals corpus
>> (which can be readily done in a global Archive like Los Alamos, as well
>> as an interoperable integration of the local Archives). Citations are
>> the seamless pathway that links the entire literature. Publishers are
>> planning to provide them as an "add-on" to the online version, in order
>> to hold it hostage to S/L/P (mainly L/P), with a kind of "click-through
>> monopoly" uniting their respective proprietary data bases through a
>> network of toll-booths. 
>> 
>> The self-archived literature can provide this for free, without the
>> firewalls, and this may prove to be a critical incentive to
>> self-archive.
>> 
>> > III. TRILATERAL PARTNERSHIP
>> > 
>> >    * CONSORTIUM OF UNIVERSITIES
>> > 
>> >    * PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES
>> > 
>> > 	  Within the various disciplines, professional societies,
>> > 	  committees, and working groups continue to establish journals
>> > 	  with editorial boards that are commissioned to review and
>> > 	  validate work submitted by authors for final publication.
>> > 	  Societies retain the power to publish and sell their journals
>> > 	  in print or non-networked electronic formats such as CD-ROM
>> > 	  or DVD-ROM; for the foreseeable future, many readers are
>> > 	  likely to prefer receiving subscriptions as they do now.
>> 
>> As long as online (networked) access is free of S/L/P, this is fine!
>> 
>> >    * AUTHORS
>> > 
>> > 	  Supported by easy-to-use inputting protocols and standards,
>> > 	  authors perform their own technical writing, copy editing,
>> > 	  document formatting, etc., or else contract for these
>> > 	  services from technical writing consultants (see Section V,
>> > 	  Document Preparation Services). They may submit preliminary
>> > 	  findings or preprints to the preprint database, or finished
>> > 	  work directly to an editorial board for formal review.
>> 
>> There is a fallacy here: Copy-editing occurs after a paper has been
>> refereed, revised and accepted. Whatever stylistic help an author gets
>> before that is very important and welcome, but not the real thing.
>> Quality control for FORM begins after quality control for CONTENT,
>> and it will continue to be the responsibility of the publisher
>> (quality-controller); that is part of what the journal "label"
>> attests to; the author cannot be his own quality-controller.
>> 
>> > IV. DOCUMENT DATABASE
>> > 
>> > The centerpiece of this proposal is a document database that
>> > incorporates and builds on important features derived from Paul
>> > Ginsparg's highly successful physics preprint server. Begun in 1991 and
>> > today comprising nearly 100,000 records in physics and related
>> > disciplines, xxx.lanl.gov demonstrates the viability of a large
>> > electronic archive that supports alerting services, automated hyperlink
>> > referencing, indexing, searching, and archiving. The proposed model
>> > also incorporates Ginsparg's recently developed plan to create an
>> > "intermediate buffer layer" overlaid on the raw preprint database and
>> > containing papers that have been subjected to a formal peer review.
>> 
>> > Such refereed papers may be aggregated into one or more journals that
>> > may exist at the buffer level.
>> 
>> The possibility of authenticated journal overlays for a Global Archive
>> is NOT captured by this rather naive and unrealistic last sentence.
>> Archives can be sectored, and sectors can have "certification" tags
>> that are officially controlled by journals. But there is a confusion here
>> between self-archiving and refereed publication again. An author can
>> self-archive both unrefereed preprints and refereed reprints, but he
>> cannot CERTIFY that the latter have been published by Journal X; only
>> Journal X can do that. THAT is what the journal overlay on the archive
>> can provide.
>> 
>> This notion of "aggregating" archived papers into one or more
>> "journals" is nonsense: We don't need aggregations. Even online
>> journals will stop aggregating issues and will instead publish single
>> articles at a time. The rest will be done by intelligent search engines
>> (especially guided by certification tags authenticated by the Journals)
>> as well as citation searching. Gather readings together for a course,
>> if you like, but there's no need for the notion of recombining them
>> into different "journals." That's obsolete and useless.
>> 
>> > This heterodoxical approach opens the
>> > possibility for authors to establish their reputations simultaneously
>> > in a variety of related fields. 
>> 
>> Nonsense, again, I'm afraid. The way to establish reputations in a
>> variety of fields in the online medium is not by doing "virtual
>> multiple publication" with spurious collation "journals," but via
>> links, index words, and interdisciplinary contents and mailing lists.
>> This sort of thinking is still papyrocentric.
>> 
>> The only residual function of journals is providing quality control.
>> Referees are a scarce, over-used resource. Multiple submission is
>> already an abusive drain on the system (rightly outlawed by most
>> journals -- except Law journals, where student review rather than peer
>> review prevails, and student labour comes cheap). Once a paper has been
>> refereed and accepted ones, it need not appear in further journals. It
>> is already there on the Net! It can be linked to; it can be reviewed by
>> review journals; but there is no point whatsoever in having it re-appear
>> in still further "journals."
>> 
>>
<HTTP://AMSCI-FORUM.AMSCI.ORG/scripts/wa.exe?A1=ind99&L=september-forum&F=lf
#4>
>> 
>> > Further value is added by shortening
>> > the reader's path to the certified version of a paper and by using
>> > links to point the reader back to the database of preprints.
>> 
>> One (suitably backed up, mirrored, distributed and protected) certified
>> version is enough. The rest is just about tags and links.
>> 
>> > V. UNIQUE FEATURES
>> > 
>> >      EDITORIAL BOARDS
>> > 
>> >      Editorial boards obtain permission from the Consortium to create
>> >      and support a journal on Consortium servers. Following the
>> >      tradition of confidentiality, a board determines whether a paper
>> >      merits inclusion; it recommends revisions to authors; it considers
>> >      authors' responses and rebuttals to referees' critiques; and
>> >      ultimately accepts or rejects the work. An editorial board may
>> >      also establish standards for document preparation. Revised
>> >      versions that are placed in the preprint server receive a "version
>> >      stamp". Eventually a "watermark", indicating final acceptance, is
>> >      applied to the certified version that will be retained in all
>> >      permanent archives maintained by the Consortium.
>> 
>> What has been described here is precisely what will be left of the
>> established refereed journals once they become online-only. It is not a
>> "new alternative" in any respect except that it pertains to journals that
>> are NOT established. Hardly an advantage in itself...
>> 
>> >      Consortium editorial boards are not granted exclusivity, i.e., any
>> >      paper may be accepted for inclusion in multiple "journals". 
>> 
>> Nonsense again, alas, and extremely naive about what a scarce resource
>> peers' finite refereeing time is. One (successful) peer-review per
>> article is enough; the rest is just linking.
>> 
>> >      In addition, the editorial boards may not exclude a paper based on
>> >      "prior publication" in the preprint server or elsewhere.
>> 
>> This, in contrast, is an important and substantive point, for the
>> Consortium must encourage authors to self-archive preprints in defiance
>> of arbitrary and counterproductive strictures like this. (They are
>> probably also unenforceable strictures: How many changes do I have to
>> make in a self-archived preprint before it is no longer the same draft I
>> submit to a journal that endeavours to exclude papers that have already
>> been archived as preprints? And how are journals to enforce this? Be
>> constantly trawling the Net for lookalikes for every paper submitted?)
>> 
>> <http://trauma-pages.com/harnad96.htm>
>> 
>> This regressive policy must be attacked head-on. 
>> 
>> >      DOCUMENT PREPARATION SERVICES
>> > 
>> >      Authors may require considerable assistance in preparing
>> >      manuscripts that meet editorial boards' submission standards. In
>> >      this model, the Consortium supports a directory of independent
>> >      technical writers and editors with expertise in a variety of
>> >      fields. These consultants may apply for inclusion or be
>> >      recommended by an editorial board. The Consortium may also devise
>> >      a procedure for certifying those who offer to provide document
>> >      preparation services on a contract basis to authors.
>> 
>> Fine, but don't confuse presubmission stylistic help with
>> post-acceptance editing and copy editing. The former can come from
>> colleagues and institutional writing assistants under the author's
>> solicitation and control, but the latter comes from the quality
>> controller/certifier.
>> 
>> >      COPYRIGHT
>> > 
>> >      Authors or universities retain copyright according to institution
>> >      policies.  A mechanism at the input level requires authors to
>> >      grant a limited, non-exclusive license to the Consortium. This
>> >      agreement grants the right to provide unlimited access to all work
>> >      in either preprint or archival servers for non-commercial purposes
>> >      for the term of the copyright. Authors may grant limited-use
>> >      licenses for their work to other not-for-profits or commercial
>> >      entities, for which they may receive compensation, as long as such
>> >      agreements do not infringe upon any rights previously assigned to
>> >      the Consortium.
>> 
>> This is critical: Authors must be protected, and feel protected, from
>> any need to give up self-archiving rights. THAT'S ALL!
>> 
>> <http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/science.html>
>> 
>> >      THREADED DISCOURSE
>> > 
>> >      The model supports threaded discourse based on the work of
>> >      researchers from Rand and Caltech to create a HyperForum.
>> >      Colleagues may participate in dialogue on findings, however,
>> >      anonymous comments will not be accepted.
>> 
>> Open Peer Commentary is my specialty, and the above component is
>> well-intentioned but again naive. Nothing critical hinges on it, 
>> however, so I will pass over it.
>> 
>> >      The preprint server with its threaded discourse permits editorial
>> >      boards not only to follow comments from the field, but also to
>> >      identify important work and invite submission for review leading
>> >      to inclusion in a journal. 
>> 
>> One thing to consider is sorting commentary into (1) comments on
>> unrefereed preprints and comments on refereed reprints and (2) refereed
>> vs unrefereed comments.
>> 
>> >      Of particular value is the opportunity
>> >      for an editorial board to incorporate into their journal work
>> >      usually associated with another field but of special interest to
>> >      theirs. 
>> 
>> Nonsense, if thought of as further collation-journals. All that is
>> needed is citations and links!
>> 
>> >      Concomitantly, this feature overcomes the need to require
>> >      authors to prepare a new version of existing work.
>> 
>> Updates can be archived and linked too, both refereed and unrefereed
>> ones.
>> 
>> >      RESOURCE DISCOVERY
>> > 
>> >      Subjects and names as well as other metadata and full text will be
>> >      searchable using the best available technology, including keyword
>> >      and phrase searching, Boolean operators, proximity, truncation,
>> >      and relevance ranking.  It will also be possible to browse the
>> >      archive by subject term, author name, or chronologically.
>> 
>> And one of the best ways of all: via citation links.
>> 
>> > VII. NEXT STEPS
>> > 
>> > The success of this model depends critically on winning the support of
>> > "champions" from the research community and attracting participants in
>> > initial experiments who are likely to come from emerging areas of
>> > research that have not yet had their journals published either
>> > commercially or by professional societies. Partnering benefits such
>> > groups by allowing them to leverage Consortium resources to announce
>> > their findings economically and to a broad audience.
>> 
>> The only thing that needs championing is self-archiving. Once that is
>> practised, everything else will follow suit. To champion forfeiting the
>> established journals and turning to an untested new generic journal is,
>> in my opinion, Quixotic; nor is it motivated, if the new journals are
>> still supported by S/L/P.
>> 
>> > Before this is accomplished, research universities must assemble a
>> > Consortium to support the development and implementation of this model.
>> 
>> There is no model yet. Why should universities back the abandonment of
>> the established journals for generic newcomers? And how are the newcomers
>> to be funded? Through S/L/P again? But that just defeats the purpose.
>> 
>> > The Consortium must assign lead participants from university IT
>> > departments, libraries, and faculty; identify and define elements of
>> > cost and develop a budget; establish a production schedule; develop
>> > underlying systems, standards, and protocols to enable champions,
>> > editors to create new journals; and attract funding from within the
>> > Consortium and from external sources.
>> 
>> This sounds like getting busy planning new online journals. But we don't
>> need new journals, online or otherwise. We need to free the existing
>> journal literature. That requires a realistic plan, and a careful
>> transitional strategy. So far, this "Model" can be misinterpreted as
>> just a lot of hoopla about establishing new online-only journals. But
>> that's not the point! Most of the established journals are or will soon
>> be available online too. What is needed is a way to free them from all
>> access barriers.
>> 
>> > CONCLUSION
>> > 
>> > A growing number of researchers and information professionals recognize
>> > that scholarly communication is at a crossroads; many are seeking
>> > innovative solutions on their own to the wide variety of technical
>> > challenges that networked alternatives present. While much visionary
>> > work has emerged, the absence of any significantly new prototype for
>> > exchanging and preserving research results beyond xxx.lanl.gov suggests
>> > the advantages that may accrue from a more broadly-based, collaborative
>> > approach.
>> 
>> But local and global (xxx.lanl) self-archiving IS the new prototype; 
>> you need only put the pieces together slightly different to see that.
>> 
>> > A Consortium of universities, committed to developing and maintaining
>> > an integrated platform supporting all aspects of the scholarly
>> > communications process, also provides a basis for conducting meaningful
>> > experiments.  Universities have the necessary critical mass of
>> > participants from varied disciplines. University faculty are already
>> > well represented on present editorial boards and include many editors;
>> > strong representation of university faculty on the new editorial boards
>> > established under the auspices of the Scholar's Forum continues this
>> > tradition. Universities have close ties to professional societies, have
>> > expertise in information technology, and have a large pool of creative
>> > student programmers who can contribute to the infrastructure
>> > developments that will be needed. Since universities are responsible
>> > for most of the work that appears in the scholarly literature,
>> > well-defined, committed administrative support can take advantage of
>> > major economies of scale to curtail costs as access to the scholarly
>> > literature is enhanced.
>> 
>> A Consortium will certainly provide the clout, but it won't do any good
>> until the game-plan is made into a coherent one.
>> 
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Stevan Harnad                     [log in to unmask]
>> Professor of Cognitive Science    [log in to unmask]
>> Department of Electronics and     phone: +44 1703 592-582
>> Computer Science                  fax:   +44 1703 592-865
>> University of Southampton         http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
>> Highfield, Southampton            http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
>> SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM           ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
>> 
>
>
Elizabeth Graham
Development Co-ordinator: eLib Programme Office
University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL
Tel: 01203 572521			Fax: 01203 524981
email: [log in to unmask]	http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/


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