Paul Coyne

Reblogged from the Scholarly Kitchen

As one former publisher, now consultant, told me, “a consultant is someone who steals your watch to tell you what time it is.” That is, a consultant is someone who tells you exactly what you already know, but want to hear again for reassurance sake.

In a particularly cogent article, Open Access 2.0, published in the June issue of the The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Joe Esposito lays out many things that we don’t know – or at least are not willing to admit – about publishing. This is not a collection of declarative diatribes loosely held together with non-sequiturs, or a pronouncement of how we’ve done good in our company/library. It is one of the few articles based on theory – in this case economic theory – and how it helps us to understand and predict the successes and failures of publishing.

The basis of Esposito’s argument is that the publishing economy’s limited resource is not access, but attention, and that the role of traditional publishing is to help readers decide what is worth their time reading. This job is done essentially through filtering (also known as gatekeeping).

And yet Esposito does not discount other forms of publishing that allows everything to come through the gate, and to filter and evaluate later. Thus he sees places for the role of Open Access and repository publishing, only he believes that these forms of publishing should occupy different market niches. In this sense, Joe goes beyond the typical rhetorical and binary argument of open or closed, but sees a plurality of publishing markets for reaching a plurality of reader communities. Similar to the argument of viewing the automobile as simply a horseless carriage Esposito writes:

One of the reasons that many open-access ventures have had a hard time financially is that they have been built on the mistaken assumption that they are replacing traditional publishing and thus have to re-create all of the services that traditional publishers now provide.

For pure OA publishing, he sees stripped-down models that attempt to minimize the role of human involvement and to maximize automation. For instance, he views a university librarian spending time coaching a faculty member on how to deposit a manuscript into the institution’s repository as both overly expensive (in the time of a highly-paid administrator) and unsustainable.

In spite of his insistence on avoiding the binary pro-against open access, Esposito creates another dichotomy between supporting readers (the traditional subscription market) or authors (the author-paid OA market). Part of this dichotomy may be used for rhetorical purposes and to strengthen the force of his argument. Nevertheless, this is one article from which both sides of the open access debate can read, agree, and learn.

Publishers allow authors more freedom to use their articles than authors currently believe, a recent study notes.

The report, Journal authors’ rights: perception and reality, was written by publishing veteran, Sally Morris, for the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC).

For both the submitted and accepted version of the manuscript, authors routinely underestimated what their publisher agreements allowed them to do. Moreover, the rights granted by publishers generally exceed authors’ wishes.

On the other hand, authors tend to overestimate what they can do with the published version of their article when it comes to self-archiving. Few publishers allow final PDF versions to be made publicly available through subject or institutional repositories, although more than half of authors believed that their agreements allowed them this right.

The strength in this report is not the introduction of new data — there have been several, well-conducted author and publisher surveys, which Morris amply summarizes in her report — but her analysis and interpretation. Morris focuses on why there is a systemic disjoint between what publishers offer and what authors believe they can do.

Finding a solution to this problem is clearly her purpose.

She writes:

Publishers need to ask themselves why it is that authors have such an inaccurate understanding of their copyright policies, particularly with regard to self-archiving [...] Clearly publishers have failed to get across the positive message about those policies which, contrary to authors’ and others’ belief, do meet (or even exceed) their wishes.

Morris believes that much of the misunderstanding about self-archiving can be explained by confusion over the term ‘postprint.’ Indeed, she doesn’t hold back leveling some of this blame on the RoMEO database and on open access advocates such as Stevan Harnad and Peter Suber, who all equate ‘postprint’ with the final draft of a manuscript and not the published version of an article.

Responding to the report, Stevan Harnad defends his use of the terminology:

the preprint/postprint distinction is perfectly coherent: a preprint is any draft preceding the author’s final, accepted, refereed version, and a postprint is any draft from the author’s final, accepted refereed version onward (including the publisher’s PDF).

This definition may be coherent for Harnad, but it seems to confuse more than clarify.

NISO’s proposal for Journal Article Versions uses less ambiguous terminology such as Author’s Original, Accepted Manuscript, and Version of Record. Morris believes that widespread adoption of standardized terms will avoid future confusion. It would also reaffirm that publishers are adding value at each stage of publication. Morris concludes,

Although a few academics and librarians may want to see the demise of established journals and their publishers, most do not; a clear explanation of why this could happen, if a critical mass of their value-added contents were freely available, needs to be reiterated at every opportunity.