From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Sep 2 12:45:20 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] OA Working Group comment on the RCUK policy Message-ID: I suspect that Peter Suber had more than a small hand in this excellent, spot-on overview, endorsement and recommendation to the RCUK, from the Open Access Working Group (of which Peter is a member). This is from Peter Suber's Open Access News (today): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_08_28_fosblogarchive.html#a112566620063039785 The Open Access Working Group http://www.arl.org/sparc/oa/oawg.html has publicly released its August 23 comment http://www.arl.org/sparc/oa/RCUK.html on the draft RCUK policy. http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp Excerpt: "We believe that open-access research dissemination is an indispensable part of the overall remedy to the serious problems now facing the system of scholarly communication. Moreover, open access is a necessary ingredient in any plan to fully realize the social benefits of scientific advances. While these advantages are important no matter the source of the funding, it is particularly critical when the research is publicly funded and the resulting output is a public good....Implementation of [the draft] policy will result in taxpayers gaining immediate, full and direct access to the research for which they have already paid. Moreover, such a policy will increase the return on the government's investment in this research; as a result of deposit the research becomes more accessible, discoverable, sharable, and for these reasons, more useful, than toll-access research....We are particularly pleased to note that the Research Council's policy requires grantees to deposit final published articles, greatly enhancing the policy's chances for successfully achieving these important goals and ensuring maximum participation....To further ensure the success of this policy, we would suggest that the Research Councils consider revising the section of the policy that specifically relates to the timing of the deposit of research materials. [The current language in paragraph 14.b] language seems to allow publishers, in cases where they have become the copyright-holder, to object to deposit or to demand long delays or embargoes prior to deposit or public release. We encourage the Research Councils to close this loophole before the final draft is finished to ensure that deposit does indeed occur at the desired point, at or around the time of publication. We note that the draft policy exempts researchers from the requirement to deposit their research in instances where they do not have access to an institutional or disciplinary repository. We hope that the Research Councils will implement strategies to encourage the development of repositories in the U.K. in a manner that makes deposit available to all researchers." The OAWG members who signed this comment are the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL), the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Medical Library Association (MLA), Public Knowledge (PK), and the Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). I participated in the drafting of this comment. Posted by Peter Suber at 9/02/2005 08:54:00 AM. From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sun Sep 4 15:00:07 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] 3rd party retrodigitisation: important, but not OA self-archiving Message-ID: [Posted with permission] > On Fri, 2 Sep 2005, peter mazzoglio wrote: > > Dear Dr Harnad, > I read the article "Critiques and rebuttals continue in UK open access > debate" and wish to make a consideration: > > A national project sponsoring digitisation of historical documents > in national archives leads to the production of material that can be > offered online to any user. Dear Dr. Mazzoglio: Providing access to historical documents via retrodigitisation (like the digital preservation of current digital publications) is very important, but it is very different from Open Access, which is something a current author provides for current digital documents, either by publishing them in an Open Access journal or by self-archiving them in an Open Access Eprint Archive. > In Italy this does not exist yet, but we > are working to start the whole process and what we think is that, > as producing a single digitised document has its cost, anybody who > downloads the document should at least pay the cost of a photocopy, > say 0.10 Euros. In Sweden, national archives consider the payment of the > time one roams in their site, without caring of how much is downloaded. That's fine. Costs can and should be covered. No doubt once the initial investment in retrodigitisation is recovered it will no longer be necessary to continue charging as much -- or anything. > Presently, in Italy, as this service does not exist, handicapped people > have very little chances of visiting archives, who can, obviously visits > nearby archives and only during opening hours, waiting for the material > to arrive (a limited number of registers or documents) and for > photocopies (to be paid for, and if many, to be withdrawn a week later) > of what was selected. The cost to get to the archives is remarkable as > per time and travel. It is rather a medieval situation. Quite. And digital access will be a great help. > A project of digitisation needs funding. National Institutions, private > sponsors (and this means that the document lots must be sponsored and > the ad should be obvious when one visits that particular lot online) > and autofunding (coming from the income of the online service). The > latter point is essential in my opinion. > > What do you think of this? I have no idea about the true costs involved, how long it will take to recover them, and whether or not there exist sources of subsidy which might cover those costs on a one-off basis so that such a valuable service can be made available to users for free. What makes all of this different from the Open Access (OA) movement is that OA is essentially a *1st-party* movement: It is the OA *author* (necessarily still alive!) who elects to give away the digital version of his work (usually a text), and does so either by publishing it with an OA publisher, who does not charge for access, or by self-archiving it in a toll-free access site. The paradigm case is research journal articles, which the author does not write for sales-revenue but in order to maximise their access and usage, for the sake of research impact (which may then generate "impact income" in the form of research funding, employment, salary, tenure, prizes). There is alas no counterpart for most of this in 3rd-party retrodigitisation (nor in digital document creation in general). Wishing you success in your project, Cordially, Stevan Harnad > Thankyou for an answer. > dr Peter John Mazzoglio > Centre for Historical studies and research > University of Turin, Italy. From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 5 10:43:09 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 5 Sep 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > As I rather suspected, most people (with the exception of Stevan) think > that 'the problem' is access - that's why most presentations about OA (both > kinds) are usually prefaced by the standard ARL slide about the rate of > increase in journal prices and library budgets respectively. Access and impact are two sides of exactly the same coin: There can be no impact without access (pace Don Sannella, who points out that some "scholars" cite what they have not read). ttp://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-Journal-Publishing-and-Author-Self-Archiving-Peaceful-Co-Existence-and-Fruitful-Collaboration.html#c6 The reason to focus on impact, though, is that the only ones who can *provide* open access are authors: first, by being willing to give away their texts in the first place, rather than seeking royalties or fees from their sales, as most sane authors do; second, by either publishing them in an OA journal (if a suitable one exists) or by self-archiving their final author's drafts in an OA IR. So whereas the research community will be eternally in the debt of the library community for having helped to raise the hue and cry about the access problem, its solution can only come from the access-provider end, hence must address the needs and interests of the access-provider; it cannot come from the access-user end, even though the access-user is of course a co-beneficiary of OA, and invariably the author wearing another hat: the user of the access provided by other authors. There is a Golden Rule inherent in all that, but it is not sufficient. "Self-Archive Unto Others as Ye Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You" http://cogprints.org/3022/ What is missing is the direct appeal to impact, not access. Access is implicit in impact: The way I enhance the impact of my research is by making it accessible to as many of its would-be users as possible: optimally, *all* of them. Access is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for impact, but impact is a sufficient condition for access: a *cited* article is necessarily (pace Don Sannella's fine point about not-so-fine scholarship) an accessed *article.* This is why it is the 50-250% impact gap that is the relevant measure (for the researcher, the researcher's institution, and the research's funder, and the tax-paying public that has invested in the research by funding the funder) of the access gap -- not libraries' serials crises, nor publishers' journal prices. http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html > But if the problem is access, and we reach a situation where a large > proportion of the content of some journals (even, perhaps, if it's in a > less-than-final version) is freely and easily available, what responsible > cash-strapped librarian would not choose to cancel those journals in order > to retain the rest? I just don't see the logic in doing otherwise... The point you are missing, Sally, is that the problem is impact for authors and access for users, but the user's access problem is on an article by article basis, varying from user to user, as a function of the user's field and whatever journals his institution can afford. (This is the only link with journal affordability, and it is a very distributed one.) *If* an article happens to be published in a journal that that particular user's institution cannot afford, then that user will have to use the author's self-archived OA draft; otherwise, the user can and will use the publisher's value-added version. There is no basis for whole-journal cancellation in what I have just described. It is an anarchic author/article/user-based question of who uses which version of which article in which journal. There are no implications there for whole-journals and their potential cancelation. The role of the OA version is, as has been noted over and over, a supplement, not a substitute -- and a supplement anarchically distributed worldwide, depending on the article, journal, field, and institution of the author and the user. And that is without even reminding Sally that she also needs to add to her logical equation the fact that there is (a) still a robust demand for the print edition of the journal and (b) that, if, as she rightly stated, the publisher's online edition has many values added, those who can afford those added values will want to keep paying for them. So in second-guessing the logic of the "cash-strapped librarian," one should, in the service of seemliness, not portray the problem as that of continuing to bleed stones dry, but the more upbeat one that journals will continue to compete for librarians' limited available cash, and they should compete for it on the value-added end, not on the access-denial end. Journal budgets are and always have been finite, and well below the bounds of being able to afford most or even many out of the total number of journals on offer; it's always been about which among the small affordable fraction to keep or to swap, year by year, seriatim. So it continues now. Self-archiving does not advantage or disadvantage any particular journal in this regard. Even less so does a mere UK self-archiving mandate. But if and when the demand for the print edition should dry up, and if and when the online added values should no longer prove to be enough to sustain demand -- and all this may well be a long way off yet -- then there will definitely be ways to cover the costs of the irreducible and indispensable value that journals (with the free help of peers) always have and always will add, namely, peer review. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2 That contingency, however, has shown no sign of being imminent or even likely, even in the (few) fields where OA self-archiving has effectively been at 100% for a number of years now. What is certain is that 100% self-archiving is highly beneficial -- indeed optimal -- for research *now*, and that it is well within reach and already well overdue. To put it very baldly, the publishing community has absolutely no justification for asking the research community to defer maximising its research impact -- closing the 50-250% access gap -- for one moment longer. The interests of research are not to be denied in favor of the anxieties of publishers about the future course of research journal publishing in the online age. Evolution will prevail here, researchers will adapt, and publishers will adapt. There is a logic to that, and it is futile (and perhaps also less than admirable) to try to delay or divert it. Research publishing is done in the service of research, not vice versa. > The 'straws in the wind' that we reported in our letter to RCUK (which, > like STM's, was supposed to be private - we mistakenly made it free on our > site for about a day) Why mistakenly? Are arguments not to be answered? The research community's recommendations and critiques have all been made in the open, ready to meet criticism head-on: why not the publishing community's? And here is the publishing community asking the RCUK (privately, but for the grace of the godhead) to *delay* things still further, for still more debate (now going on for at least a half-dozen years, with every substantive and trivial point already aired many, many times over, on both sides) -- whilst deeming it a *mistake* to have aired their views and grounds openly! > are strong and worrying indications that this might happen; Repeating and raising the volume on the adjectives and gerundives does not make them truer the Nth time round. All the *indications* to date are of peaceful co-existence between journal publishing and self-archiving: no cancellations, no revenue loss. What is strong and getting stronger is merely the *worrying*, on the part of publishers. It is not that there are zero *grounds* for worry (there are always grounds for worry): there is merely zero *evidence* for worry, and some not insubstantial evidence for the contrary. > loss of usage for those physics journals most of whose content can > also be found in ArXiv would be worrying not because of citations, but > because clued-up librarians would rapidly work out that they don't need to > subscribe, since the journal site is not where the content is actually > being read. *Rapidly work out*? How rapidly? since some areas of physics have been at 100% self-archiving for a number of years now! Do you really think the "cash-strapped" librarians are that slow-witted, if they've a mind to cancel on these grounds? But it's not libraians, in any case, who have the last word on cancellations. It is institutional researchers. And physicists have no wish to cancel their journals, or journals in general. They use the prepublication preprint first, and because the preprints tend to be in the same central archive (Arxiv) as the refereed final drafts (postprints), they tend to use that same source even after publication too, even when their own institution has licensed online access to the journal version. (I have no actually stats on this, but it seems evident from what is known.) Nevertheless, if you ask these physicists, as either authors or users, whether the journals should be canceled, they will say no -- and they are right! As authors, they want the peer-review and certification for their work; and as users, they want to be sure there is an authoritative version-of-record to cite -- and to check in any cases of doubt about the self-archived version. They all quite naturally see the self-archived corpus, even if it is the one accessed most, as a supplement to the official journal version, not a substitute for it. Not to mention that it still does many of their hearts good to know that there's a print version of the journal sitting on their institution's book-shelves somewhere... (I personally believe that the days of central archives, like Arxiv, are numbered. OAI-interoperability and distributed OAI-compliant IRs make far more sense, are far more likely to generate the missing self-archived content (85%) and can easily be integrated with search and harvesting services that direct a user toward his own institutionally licensed official version rather than the poor man's supplement in those cases where it exists [even google scholar could do it]: This is just a simple and natural extension of the thinking behind reflink, OpenURL etc. Takes no imagination, but requires a much bigger self-archived database in order to make it worthwhile implementing. Download stats can be pooled and credited to the official journal version this way too, and citations consolidated and credited. It's all pretty obvious, once you fill that 85% content gap...) > I have yet to hear any confirmation from physics publishers > that the anecdotal 'evidence' reported by Alma Swan (the only shred of such > 'evidence', as far as I can tell), suggesting that ArXiv is not hurting > journals, is actually correct or the full story. I hope they will tell us? Even better, if the "evidence" -- of zero correlation between cancelations and self-archiving (controlling for the other factors affecting baseline cancellations across time) is merely "anecdotal," it would be very useful to see whether there actually exists qunatitative evidence of a nonzero correlation between cancelations and self-archiving (controlling for the other factors affecting baseline cancellations across time) -- for that is what Sally needs to sustain her (otherwise already refuted) hypothesis about what the "cash-strapped librarians" will/would do -- "rapidly".... > National licences would help to solve the problem - consider, for example, > the National Research Council in Canada which has made all its journals > freely available throughout Canada. Someone has to pay, of course (I think > most people have now grasped that journal publishing, in whatever form, > costs money) - in that case, the Canadian Government. An NRC National license is a splendid solution -- for the NRC journals, and their Canadian usership. What about all the non-NRC journals? And what about the non-Canadian usership of the NRC journals? What about all the rest of that lost impact and access? No, Sally, global licensing does not generalise to a solution of the problem of the 50-250% impact gap -- and (n.b.) it would not do so even if all journals were sold at-cost (zero profit). The world is simply too "cash-strapped" to be able to afford to pay, in advance, everywhere, for any product a vendor might offer, not even in the case of commodities for which there is a basic inelastic need, such as food, water, medicine, shelter. "Journal Publisher Click-Through Monopoly: A Trojan Horse" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0436.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0210.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0238.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci01/0447.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1507.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1525.html The solution is far more realistic and direct: The research community must plug up the 50-250% gap, now, instead of continuing to bleed needless weekly, monthly, yearly research impact. The publishing community will then adapt, as dictated by the actual course of events and evidence (not pre-emptive worries). No global oligopolies, no delays, no filibustering. To repeat: research publishing is done in the service of research, not vice versa. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 5 12:00:50 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Mandatory Deposit of Published Papers in Repositories (fwd) Message-ID: >Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2005 16:42:12 +0100 >From: Ken Lillywhite, Business Director, Institute of Physics Publishing >To: LIS-E-JOURNALS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK > >Ever since the launch of the physics e-print archive in 1991, authors >publishing in IOP Publishing journals have had the choice to post their >preprints to the service. However, we do note that article downloads from >our site are significantly lower for those journals whose content is >substantially replicated in the arXiv repository than for those which are >not, after usage statistics have been normalized to take account of >journal size. > >Usage statistics (e.g., ProjectCOUNTER) are now increasingly used as a >'value for money' measure in the library community and elsewhere. Clearly, >as usage statistics become more commonplace, it would be only natural for >cash-strapped librarians to conclude that subscriptions to low-use ? >albeit high-quality, peer-reviewed ? journals are no longer necessary. In >this situation subscription-based journals published by a learned society >such as ourselves would become economically unviable. This point has already been rebutted in the Open Letter to RCUK: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html but here it is again: (1) This will become a piece of evidence if/when subscriptions -- controlled for other time-dependent factors -- decline as a function of self-archiving. So far, in 14 years, they have not. (2) As self-archived content grows, both download data and citation data will be pooled. This is in the interests of the author, and the author's institution, to ensure that usage and impact of their research output is measured and credited. If there are multiple versions of the same work, downloads will be pooled, and if multiple versions are cited, citations will be pooled. It would be the most natural thing in the world to share those pooled download and citation statistics with the journal publisher's site, collaboratively (and automatically. The version on which the counts should and will converge in any case is the official, published version of record, not the various supplements. (3) Librarians don't cancel on the basis of COUNTER statistics, though they take them into account; they cancel on the basis of relative suggestions from their faculty, budget-multiple-constraint satisfaction. Researchers are not recommending the canceliation of good journals (amongst which both the IOPP and APS journals number, in physics), regardless of where they access their working copies. (4) If 14 years of concerted self-archiving in physics have not yet hurt the physics publishers, it is even less likely that the RCUK self-archiving mandate -- which is equally distributed across *all* journals, is based only on the UK fraction of their content, and not focussed on physics journals at all -- will have any such effect. I note also that IOPP is not recommending that physicists stop self-archiving because of IOPP's worries about what might or might not result from COUNTER statistics. A wise bit of restraint, lest the unfortunate impression be given that physics publishing is not done in the interests of physics, but vice versa. The fact is that research publishing will have to adapt to what turns out to be best for research in the online age, and not vice versa. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Sep 6 07:01:24 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, David Goodman wrote: > Stevan can only "second-guess" the logic, but I can specify a little > more knowledgeably about how libraries will think > when substantial journal content is available OA. As he recognizes, > at any given institution there will be some marginal journals that > have just escaped cancellation. Why does he not recognize that the > additional factor that first 25%, then 50%, then 75%, then almost all, > of the content is readily available elsewhere will be quite enough for > most librarians (and faculty) to justify their cancellation. Then next > year there will be the next stratum of lowest-value journals still > remaining, and again the percentage readily available otherwise > will be a factor. And, as he says "seriatim. " I assume that David is aware that self-archiving, being anarchic, means that, on average, all journals' percentage OA will be distributed about equally, and rising at the about same rate. So if the weakest journals are the ones at risk of being culled when we reach 25%/50%/75% OA, which are the ones at risk of being culled (and being culled) right now? Library serials budgets are finite; the choices have to be re-assessed annually (or whenever the subscription/license runs out); assuming no windfall growth in acquisitions budgets, one can expect that cancellations will simply proceed apace, exactly as they do now, with self-archiving and %OA not influencing their *direction*, merely their *urgency*: For as %OA grows, the concern about depriving one's usership of access to *any* journal shrinks (evenly).... > Like Stevan, I think it probable that this will not seriously affect the > high-quality journals, and for the reasons he cites, but we cannot > prove it, only wait and see. However I think it almost certainly will > affect the lower quality journals, but I cannot prove it, or he disprove > it. The point is that the lower quality journals are at risk already, and have been for some time, and this is not changed by a growing percentage of self-archiving. So why are we even speculating about all of this, either way? What hangs on it? What are the alternatives at issue? Should we not be going ahead with what has already been demonstrated to benefit research and resew archers with enhanced impact and access, instead of occupying ourselves with this open-ended and unavailing prognosticating, on which nothing hangs, one way or the other? http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html > There are ways of preventing or minimizing the loss of subscriptions, > and it is suggestive that physics, which has seen few cancellations, is > the area where many of the most important journals have had no > price increases for several years. If other publishers did the same, > perhaps their journals would survive. I see that a few are > not increasing prices for next year, so perhaps others > too will come to a clearer understanding of their basic interests. We are now back into the librarian's standard fare: pricing. Fine. But can you not see that this has nothing to do with OA or self-archiving, one way or the other? Cancellations will proceed apace, based on quality, price, and available funds, as they always did. Anarchic increase in % OA, distributed across all journals, will not affect the choice of what to cut, differentially, one way or the other; that will be determined by policy, price, and available funds, exactly as it always was. But meanwhile the increased % OA will be benefiting research and researchers more and more (and that we *know*, because it has already been empirically tested and found to do so -- in contrast to all this hypothetical and ineffectual guess-work about its notional effects on cancellations); and this increased % OA will also be making the choice itself (of which journals to cancel/renew this year) a less and less drastic matter, because more and more of author-drafts for *all* content will be there as a back-up for those who cannot afford the publisher's version. > Librarians are responsible to the students and the faculty > for getting the material that users need. > While publishers provide this most effectively, they will buy as many > journals as they can afford. To the extent that this is not > most effectively done by publishers, they will make use of other routes, > of which OA is the most obvious and the best. This, as far as I can tell, adds nothing to what is under discussion here. It is a tautology that librarians can and do make-do with what funds they have, to the best of their ability. Anarchic, distributed, across-the-boards growth in average % OA has no differential effect whatsoever on that, so I have no idea what David means by "make use of other routes" -- unless we are back to yet another red herring here, namely, OA journals (which is not what the RCUK self-archiving mandate or this discussion thread was about). But, yes, for the record, if -- apart from mandating self-archiving -- RCUK also makes some funds available to its fundees to help pay OA journal publishing costs, that will help (the few: 5-10%) OA journals, slightly; it will slightly weaken their competitors and slightly increase the likelihood that they will be cancelled. But, to repeat, that is not what we are talking about here! On the contrary, we are trying to *disentangle* the two things -- (1) the RCUK OA self-archiving mandate and (2) the RCUK funding of OA journal publishing -- because (2) and the slight help it may give to "publishing economic-model change" has been used by ALPSP and STM to try to impugn (1), which has nothing to do with OA publishing or economics. Please let us not play into this. > The authors and readers do have the last word, which they express > by what journals they publish in, read, or cite, all of which > librarians routinely measure. When price increases require cuts, > cuts there will be--the most the faculty will need to decide is which > particular titles shall be cancelled. It is not at all clear why are we being told all this: Who does David think is unaware that authors publish where they publish and readers read/cite what they read/cite? And that librarians measure costs, and cut when there isn't enough money to pay. And (most important) that faculty decides on what to spend the available money on and what not. This has all been said countless times before and it adds absolutely nothing to the discussion, one way or the other. (That faculty, not librarians, determine which titles are cancelled or kept has already been explicitly stated in the Open Letter, as a counter to the ALPSP claims about COUNTER statistics.) > The library budget is not set by the physics faculty. When prices > increase more than funds, if the faculty intend to keep all their > journals, they must contribute some money. > In twenty-five years as an academic librarian, I have know only one > instance of such contribution, and it was not in the sciences. I am quite perplexed as to why this Forum's time is taken up with truisms like this, which are of absolutely no informational value at all. It is not the library *budget* that is set by faculty, but the choice as to what is to be kept or culled within that budget's finite yearly size. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Sep 8 07:08:48 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Summary of Keynote Address, EDT2005, Sydney, Australia, September Message-ID: Summary of Keynote Address to be given at 8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Disstertations Wednesday 28 - Friday 30 September 2005 University of New South Wales, Sydney, Austrlia http://adt.caul.edu.au/etd2005/etd2005.html Maximising Research Impact By Mandating Institutional Self-Archiving It is a foregone conclusion that the next generation of researchers will self archive their research output in their own Open Access (OA) Insititional Repositories (IRs) for all potential users online, and they are already beginning now, with their theses and dissertations. But what about the present generation of researchers? Only 15% of the annual 2.5 million articles being published in the world's 24,000 journals is being self-archived today. Self-archiving has been shown to increase citation impact 50%-250+% by making the research available to those users whose institutions cannot afford access to the official journal version. The marginal dollar value of a citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986 to be $50-$1300 (US). Updating to 2005, converting to Australian dollars ($65-$1700) and using even the most conservative ends of these esimates (50% x $65) and multiplying by the 85% of Australia's annual journal article output of about 35,000 (according to ISI) that is not yet OA, this translates into an annual loss of $966,875 in revenue to Australian researchers for not having done the few extra keystrokes per article it takes to self-archive it. And that is without even considering the loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of Australian research findings in Australia and worldwide, nor the even more general loss to the progress of human inquiry. The solution is obvious, and Research Councils UK are on the verge of implementing it: a mandate to extend the existing universal requirement to 'publish or perish' to 'publish and also self-archive the final peer-reviewed author's draft in your OA IR'. Over 90% of journals already endorse author self-archiving and an international JISC author study (plus the actual experience of the two institutions that have already adopted such a requirement) show that over 90% of authors will comply. I will present the evidence, across disciplines and countries, for the 50%-250% OA citation impact advantage. Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Chaire de recherche du Canada Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC) Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al Montr?al, Qu?bec, Canada H3C 3P8 harnad@uqam.ca http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/ Professor of Cognitive Science Department of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Sep 10 06:08:26 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:46 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green Message-ID: In their press release http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2166 the UK Green Party announces that it will vote (among other things) to "require Open Access [OA] publishing for publicly-funded academies." Since one cannot impose a business model, but only encourage it, and try to create conditions favorable to it, this vote to *require* OA publishing (the "golden" road to OA) is at best only a symbolic token and at worst quixotic. It is also ironic that the Green party makes no mention of support for the "green" road to OA, which is OA self-archiving, by their own authors, of all articles published in non-OA (and OA) journals. This, unlike OA publishing itself, (1) *can* be required, (2) has been recommended as a UK policy by the UK Select Committee on Science and Technology (but not implemented by the government), (3) is now the proposed policy of the UK research funding councils, RCUK (Research Councils UK), with a projected implementation date of October 2005 if adopted, (4) would result in 100% OA for all UK research output, and (5) would serve as a model for the greening of the rest of the research world, as advocated by (6) the Berlin Declaration on Open Access and the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The publisher lobby (ALPSP and STM) is arguing for further delay in implementing this "green" policy on the grounds that (i) it may damage their revenues and (ii) it is an attempt to impose a change in business model on them. All objective evidence is contrary to (i); and (ii) is incorrect (gold is a business model, for publishers; green is merely a condition on receiving funding, for researchers). The Green Party should be voting to "require OA self-archiving for [researchers employed by] publicly-funded academies" -- an implementable green policy that will swiftly and certainly generate 100% OA -- rather than tilting (out of "gold fever") at imposed business models that will only lead to years more of delay and needless wrangling, meanwhile failing to achieve the desired and reachable immediate result. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Sep 10 10:05:29 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:47 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green In-Reply-To: <661F1A39-2D65-4652-BE7E-4AAFF27D0928@biomedcentral.com> Message-ID: Preface: I not in passing that my message about the irony of the Green Party supporting Gold while not supporting Green -- yet here we are again, debating the merits of Gold... On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Matthew Cockerill & Jean-Claude Guedon wrote: > MC: "Gold" - i.e. open access publishing, is not a business model, it is > simply a measure of the level of service provided by the publisher. Call it what you like: funders can tell their fundees what to do, but publishers are not their fundees. > MC: The research community (which, largely from its own public funding, > pays publishers for the service they provide) Libraries pay for books as well as journals out of whatever public funds they use: Are books to be given away online too? And all other digital products (software, for example)? No, Matt, the relevant give-away is only that of the author's own (funded) research. The author gives it away (royalty/fee-free) to the publisher, and can give it away (and be required to give it away) to all would-be users too, who cannot afford the publisher's version. Publishers cannot (and need not, hence should not) be forced to give it away, if they do not wish to. > MC: it is currently enforced by community standards in most disciplines that > journals must peer review the research they publish, if they are to > be taken seriously. It is entirely possible, and indeed likely, that > community standards will evolve to require that publishers make > research openly available immediately on publication. Given that the > research community is paying for the service from publishers - they > *can* call the tune. Researchers can call the tune through their choice of which journals to submit articles to and to purchase. But if they want OA for their articles so badly, yet cannot even be bothered to *provide* it by self-archiving them, it is unlikely they will stop submitting to or using journals that decline to provide it in their place. If the (failed) PLoS boycott -- in which 34,000 researchers pledged that they would stop submitting to, refereeing for, or using journals that did not make their articles OA for them by September 2001 http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml -- demonstrated one thing it is that trying to beg or bully publishers to give away their authors' give-aways for them is not the way to achieve 100% OA: Doing it for themselves (by self-archiving) is. And if researchers haven't the sense to realise or act on this, their funders and institutions can (and, one hopes, will) require them to do it (just as they require them to -- and reward them for -- publishing in the first place). > J-CG: Stevan claims that one cannot impose a business model to publishers. My > answer, and we should consider it very carefully, is that if a journal > is run with money that is public money What proportion of the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals does Jean-Claude think that corresponds to -- and what proportion of the budget of those journals does he think that covers? > J-CG: be it directly from the government or through some agency distributing > public money - this includes universities and their support in kind for > many journals, as this is ultimately paid up by public money Apart from subscribing to journals (with public money, discussed above in response to Matt), what I assume Jean-Claude means here is the time that academics and their institutions contribute to editing and peer-reviewing, sometimes even housing a journal's editorial office. Of course an (unpaid) editor, referee, or host can impose whatever (local) conditions they desire, but those are local decisions -- decisions that few, if any, are making at this time. And no wonder (and we should consider it very carefully), since the OA enthusiasts who are so eager for OA as to be willing to militate for imposing OA-provision on their publishers are not yet willing to impose OA-provision on themselves, by performing the few keystrokes it takes to make their own give-away articles OA for all those who cannot afford the paid access. We all reckon the odds according to our own perceptions, hopes and expectations, but I'm willing to bet that the likelihood that a research community that is not even ready to self-archive for the sake of OA is even less likely to do what the PLoS boycotters threatened to do for the sake of OA. As to their institutional employers and research funders: much the same applies to them, except that, whereas they *are* in a position to require that all of their employees/fundees provide OA by self-archiving, they are in no position to require that all their publishers provide OA (for the reasons already adduced): Institutions/funders have control over their researchers' budgets and doings but very, very limited input to, hence control over, publishers' budgets and doings (limited to the few institutions and/or funders that make a local contribution to a given journal's editorial or operational budget). > J-CG: then we should seek to have open access mandated. Easily said. And easily done in the case of mandating OA self-archiving. Bur mostly just empty hand-waving in the case of mandating OA publishing. (Ceterum censeo: We should not be wasting still more time, this late in the day/decade, with this idle shadow-boxing when on the one side we have a concrete, implementable policy proposal, RCUK, and on the other we have merely vague allusions to public funding and "support in kind.") > J-CG: There is no reason that public money supporting the publishing of > scholarly journals should then be the condition of possibility (as French > philosophers are wont to say...) for toll-gated research results, all > the more so that the research itself is also supported by public money. Apart from the (all-important) fact that article-authors give away their research royalty/fee-free to publishers and users alike (because they are writing for research impact, not text-sales income), all of this reasoning would -- if it were valid -- apply equally to books, textbooks, software, and any other digital (or, for that matter, analog) product produced by researchers or academics supported all or part by public money. Hence the implications are far from clear for the whole incoherent mass that fits the formula. If we separate the give-away authors from the rest, however, the rational resolution becomes quite obvious: These can and should give away their own give-aways in order to make them OA, by self-archiving them (and they should be required to do so, for their own good, by their employers and funders, if they are sluggish and/or foolish enough to *want* OA yet not to know how to go about providing it, or not be spontaneously inclined to do so, immediately). To tilt instead at fantasies about requiring publishers to do so in their stead has other suitable adjectives for describing it, but it is certainly no formula for reaching 100% OA any time soon -- or over, more likely. > J-CG: In conclusion, some form of mandating can be applied to both green and > gold; in the latter case, it would apply only to journals receiving any > form of public support. When you pay part of the bill, you are entitled > to having a say in the design of the business model. I agree. Strings can be attached to any purse: Now, what percentage of the planet's annual output of about 2.5 million articles in its 24,000 journals does Jean-Claude believe the "gold mandate" will cover? I reckon about 20% at most, whereas green covers 100% -- and already has that 20% covered too. > J-CG: Scholarly journals with public support should be forced to be OA. Let > them design their individual business model within that framework. Period! Scholarly journals (what percent of total 24,000 journals?) with public support (what percentage of their budgets?) should be forced (by whom?, how?) to be OA (what percent OA for each journal?) in accordance with their percent public support. Some of this is doable, in principle, but I can't imagine why we would focus on it now, in practice, when 100% OA is 100% doable simply by mandating OA self-archiving. The need to impose anything else on publishers may well vanish, once we all have the 100% OA that is all supposedly about (remember?). And the point of my posting was that the Greens proposed to mandate Gold, but not Green... Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Sep 10 13:47:24 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:47 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green In-Reply-To: <1126368729.7588.107.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Michael Eisen & Jean-Claude Guedon wrote: > > SH: funders can tell their fundees what to do, > > but publishers are not their fundees. > > M.E.: This is a ridiculous argument. If funders tell their fundees to > publish in gold open access journals they will do so. There are > plenty of them out there, and, should funders mandate authors publish > in gold journals, there would be many more. Unlike Mike, I don't find it at all ridiculous to want to (continue to) choose which journal I want to publish in. The JISC survey reported that 95% of authors would comply (81% of them willingly, 14% reluctantly) with a mandate to self-archive their articles (published in the journals of their choice). I don't recall their being asked how compliant they would be about giving up their choice of journal. Nor even about how many of them felt there were suitable gold open access journals in their fields. http://openaccess.eprints.org/beijing/pdfs/Swan_6-2.pdf I know I would not comply with a mandate dictating my choice of journal. Especially because it is so obvious that it is entirely unnecessary, if all I want is OA for my articles. I can keep my journals of choice and self-archive the articles I publish in them. PLoS has already misjudged research community behaviour: They elicited 34,000 pledges to boycott journals that did not go gold by September 2001. The journals did not comply, and the signees did not abide by the boycott. And no wonder, since PLoS had no plan B: There were almost no other journals to turn to in September 2001. Today there are about 1800 gold journals, including BMC's fleet of over 150 and PLoS's few but prestigious titles. But only about 8% of the total number of 24,000 journals is gold, and most of them are not yet among the top journals in their fields. http://www.doaj.org/ So there would be a good deal for researchers to resent and resist if it were mandated that their choice of journal was henceforth restricted to that 8%. All the more since there *is* a plan B, which is: If there is no suitable gold journal, publish in which ever journal you choose, and self-archive the article. That is 100% OA while retaining the freedom to choose one's journal. And it is precisely the policy that both the RCUK and Berlin 3 recommended: A self-archiving mandate plus encouragement to publish in a gold journal if/when a suitable one exists. http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp http://www.eprints.org/events/berlin3/outcomes.html Perhaps the reason I don't find this argument ridiculous is because I am just concerned with reaching 100% OA as soon as possible, at long last -- not with filling the pages of any particular journal -- or kind of journal. On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Jean-Claude Gu?don wrote: > J-CG: When governments financially support (directly or indirectly) scholarly > journals, these journals are governmental (i.e. public money) fundees. I agree. And I fully agree that in such cases the funder is fully within its rights to require that those journals go gold, if the funder wishes (and ends can still be made to meet). But my question stands: What proportion of the 24,000 journals that exist, or even the top 8000, does Jean-Claude imagine to be publicly funded in this way? (We are not disagreeing about these special cases: We are disagreeing about their representativeness, hence their relevance to the OA problem). > J-CG: In Canada, the Federation for the Social sciences and humanities manages > a half-million dollar fund to support the publishing of scholarly > monographs... publishers are being subsidised by public money (not libraries in > this case) to produce monographs they would simply not produce > otherwise. One may well wonder whether these books should not be added > to the OA concern... They can, and should. But again, they are minority exceptions, not the rule. Most (scholarly/scientific) books are not subsidised and many are not intended by their authors as give-aways. > > SH: What proportion of the planet's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals does > > Jean-Claude think that corresponds to -- and what proportion of the > > budget of those journals does he think that covers? > > J-CG: A lot more than you seem to think, Stevan. Take the case of > Canada alone, hardly a big player in the publishing world: SSHRC alone > subsidizes around 150 journals; the Quebec equivalent subsidizes around > 40 (the total is less than 190 as there is some overlap between the two > sets). NRC supports 14 scientific journals with a yearly governmental > grant that stands somewhere between 2 and 3 million CDN$. In France, > CNRS subsidizes over 200 journals. I repeat my question: What are the proportions? Absolute numbers do not convey proportions. It would also be useful to know where these nationally subsidised journals rank in quality in the full international arena of research journals. > J-CG: Research ought to be done on this topic to give a clearer picture of the > whole... Yes, by all means. But in the meanwhile, can we get on with mandating self-archiving, so we can have 100% OA? > J-CG: you constantly seem to reason as if the only important actors were the > scholars themselves. This is patently incomplete as a faithful picture > of scholarly publishing and its social environment. The authors are the primary content-providers -- the providers of the content that we are seeking to make OA. Moreover, the authors (unlike the secondary providers, the publishers) are not interested in earning revenue from the sales. Indeed, they are interested in reaching as many users as possible. Their institutions and their funders share the same motivation. And self-archiving their own articles has been tried and tested and demonstrated to be both feasible and as generating 50%-250% greater citation impact. And the two institutions that have already adopted them (CERN and Southampton ECS) have demonstrated that a self-archiving mandate successfully generates >90% compliance. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ So is it any wonder that I focus on the primary content-providers as the only important actors? Even the success of changes in "scholarly publishing and its social environment" depend on the primary content-providers being willing to choose to provide their content to gold journals. Anyone is free to focus on trying to reform the publishing system -- the secondary providers -- whether by cajoling or coercing. I just think that the fast track, and the sure one, is to focus on the primary providers (and their employers and funders), and their joint self-interest in the benefits (to them) of OA -- attainable by self-help/self-archiving. > JC-G: Mandating can be applied to certain categories of journals and publishers. > That is all I am saying. And that is all that the Green Party was saying too. And the point of my original posting was that something (green, and far more important) had been, ironically, left out. (To repeat: I completely agree that publicly subsidised journals can and should be required by their subsidisers to become OA journals as a condition for receiving further subsidy -- if they can still make ends meet that way). > For your part, you are not even able to obtain a self-archiving mandate > in your own university even though you are sitting on a committee > dealing with OA. Patience, Jean-Claude! It took a few years with my former university (Southampton), but now it is one of the first two institutions in the world that already have a self-archiving policy. UQaM will come through too, never fear... > Meanwhile, 20% here, and there, including the 15% of present > self-archiving, with a variety of parallel strategies may get us there > faster than just chanting the self-archiving mantra as the only possible > way to OA salvation. The 15% above refers to *actual* self-archiving today. (The corresponding figure for OA journals is 8%.) The 20% above referred to the *potential* for coercing journals to go gold by attaching conditions to support they receive from host institutions and research funders' subsidies. The tertium comparationis for that potential 20% is the potential 85% (77% if we adjust for OA journal articles) from a self-archiving mandate. Adding up, that means a gold mandate could yield the actual 8% plus about a potential 12% more to give 20% OA. A green mandate could yield the actual 15% + the potential 85% = 100% OA. Which is why (although I have nothing against parallel strategies) I keep chanting the self-archiving mantra as the fastest and surest and fullest road to 100% OA. I just don't like to hear the sound of one hand clapping (as in the Green gold vote, omitting green). Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Sep 10 19:53:49 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:47 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Before I reply to David Goodman, let me post here Jean-Claude Guedon's response to David's posting (not posted independently, because it is non-substantive and I have repeatedly made pleas for substantive postings only, as this Forum is for policy-makers, not cheer-leaders): "Hear! Hear! Common sense at last!" Jean-Claude Guedon On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, David Goodman wrote: > The obvious solution is for authorities to mandate publishing under > any form of OA, and provide the facilities and the funding for both > Green, and Gold, each of which exist to some extent, and need expansion. > The authors will choose. The reason the UK Select Committee recommendation, the Berlin 3 recommendation and the RCUK recommendation took the specific (almost identical) form they did was that what is being proposed above is too vague, and in several critical respects incoherent: All three recommendations took the form: (1) *mandate* OA self-archiving (green) and *encourage* (and support) OA publishing (gold). http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp This is not mandating any form of *publishing.* It is encouraging a form of publishing (OA publishing, gold) and mandating OA self-archiving (green). The reason is that a form of publishing cannot be mandated, either for the author or the publisher. Authors must be allowed to choose the journal they publish in and publishers (except if, like the author, they are subsidised by the mandator) must be allowed to choose their business model for making ends meet. I do agree, though, that it is foolish to make funds available for paying the much higher costs per paper of publishing in an OA journal while not making funds available for the far, far lower costs per paper of self-archiving. The UK Select Committee recommended helping with both, whereas Berlin 3 and RCUK only mentioned helping to cover OA publishing costs. Since self-archiving is incomparably cheaper per paper, the only reason for even mentioning this disparity is that there is currently a loophole in the RCUK policy which many of us have recommended plugging up, and that is an apparent opt-out clause, should the fundee's institution not yet have an IR to self-archive in. A modest per-paper contribution by RCUK toward the equally modest set-up and maintenance costs of an IR would plug this loophole. > [We] should discuss ways of helping them both. A plan that does not > make provision for all plausible alternatives is the plan of > an autocratic administrator, not of responsible scientists working on > questions of policy. Agreed, and please see the three versions of the policy recommendation above: All three propose mandating what can be mandated (green) and encouraging what can be encouraged (gold). And please try to recall what this thread was about, which was the Green Party's proposal to mandate gold while completely overlooking green. The rest of the discussion has kept devolving on the logic and feasibility of mandating gold. David's posting has said nothing substantive about that; it has merely collapsed all the substantive distinctions at issue into "mandate publishing under any form of OA," an incoherent proposal, to the extent that it can be assigned any meaning at all, and reminiscent of the first (equally incoherent) pre Berlin-3 version of the Berlin Declaration, which spoke of "publishing according to the OA paradigm," a near-meaningless descriptor that had in turn in turn been highly influenced by the Bethesda Statement, in which "OA" simply meant "OA publishing" (gold). The UK Committee Proposal, Berlin-3, and RCUK have since brought this into focus. Please let us not blur it again in the service of a diffuse ecumenism that looks cosy but in fact says nothing that actually makes sense, let alone something that can be concretely implemented as a mandate. I might add that one of the reasons the UK Select Committee proposal was rejected by the government was that its full-text was vague and wordy enough, despite the clear and coherent summary statement in the URL cited above, to be portrayed by the publishing lobby as a mandate for OA publishing (gold) (which it definitely was not), and thereby defeated as an unwarranted attempt to foist a different business model on them. Berlin-3, in contrast, is short and very clear on what is being mandated (green) and what merely encouraged and supported (gold). RCUK (though again far too wordy and rambling in extenso) is also very clear about what is being mandated (green) and what merely encouraged and supported (gold). David is here suggesting that we conflate them again, under the vague portmanteau "mandate publishing under any form of OA". This only invites the publisher's lobby to drub Peter (green) to pox Paul (gold) yet again. It would be much more helpful to think rigorously and critically about the concrete details and distinctions at issue rather than just championing superficial solidarity on incompatible matters of substance. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4151.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4158.html http://education.guardian.co.uk/higherfeedback/story/0,11056,1364556,00.html Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sun Sep 11 06:38:57 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:47 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Most of Jean-Claude Guedon's last posting consisted of long and interesting (but irrelevant) reflections on the sociology and philosophy of science (no science is involved or at issue here) along with some hermeneutics on the long, rambling (and mostly irrelevant) full-texts that accompanied the the three short and almost-identical versions (UK Select Committee, Berlin 3, RCUK) of the two very specific OA policy recommendations, each of which, despite J-CG's strained hermeneutics, still state, simply and concretely: (1) mandate OA self-archiving and (2) encourage/support OA publishing. J-CG makes no new points, merely repeating the point on which we have already agreed: that apart from being able to mandate self-archiving, an institution or funder *could* also mandate OA publishing under one exceptional condition (only): when it is that funder itself that is funding that journal (as Canada's SSHRC does for 150 journals). I agree fully, and point out only that this is not what the UK Select Committee, Berlin 3, or RCUK have actually recommended mandating -- possibly because such a small proportion of the world's 24,000 peer-reviewed journals are thus subsidised that it did not seem worth the bother. Funders could, however, certainly add this minor clause to their mandates, as long as they specified the journals in question, to make it clear that they were merely attaching conditions to subsidies that they are already providing (just as in the case of fundee self-archiving) -- rather than taking the incoherent and untenable step of mandating OA publishing in general, for the vast majority of journals that neither they nor any other funder or institution subsidises. (Please don't reply that to subscribe or submit papers to is to subsidise.) I now delete the philosophical, ideological and speculative passages and reply only to the few points that remain, because some of them have concrete implications: > when Research councils call for mandating depositing in an IR, the > actual IR used may... [be] within the research institution itself > (or... research Council...)... therefore... calling for mandating by > the authorities of... a given university cannot be done without some > discussion with the same authorities. In the course of discussing, > the need to provide the resources to create an IR will necessarily > emerge and will be part of the negotiation. (1) IRs are cheap to create and maintain: http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 Creating and maintaining them has never been the problem: *filling* them has been. The self-archiving mandate is meant to be the remedy for that. (2) For those (fewer and fewer) UK institutions that do not yet have an IR, there are several back-up OAI-compliant central archives available to comply with the self-archiving mandate. Again, the archive is not the problem, the filling is. (3) RCUK *should* offer some per-paper support for IR costs, rather than just offering support for per-paper OA publishing costs. Not only would the cost per-paper be incomparably lower, and the paper-yield be incomparably greater, but it would plug up a gaping and gratuitous loop-hole for opting out of the mandate (on the grounds of not yet having an IR to self-archive in). > Reading Stevan, it looks like a foregone conclusion: the opposition > between "mandating" and "encouraging" is cleverly set up to project the > impression that one is essential, the other, at best, ancillary. This > would be true if: > > 1. The IR's were filling pretty fast on the simple basis > that the impact advantages are convincing a strong > minority of scientists or even a majority to > self-archive spontaneously. We all know this is not > happening: we have only a minority of some significance > which seems to be located at about the 15% level if we > simply use the figures Stevan generally quotes. Here Jean-Claude is so completely misunderstanding the purpose of the self-archiving mandate that it takes one's breath away: If the objective evidence of the impact advantage had been enough to generate self-archiving, http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html the self-archiving mandate would not have been *needed,* and we would already be at 100% OA today. Rather, just as the JISC international survey evidence had indicated http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ and the two implemented mandates to date have confirmed http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Feprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk%2F http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdsweb.cern.ch%2F without a mandate: about 15% OA self-archiving; with a mandate: over 90% OA self-archiving. And it is not that OA self-archiving is essential and OA publishing is ancillary; it is that (1) OA self-archiving can be mandated, whereas OA publishing can only be encouraged/supported (except by the subsiders of subsidised journals, which are few) and hence that (2) mandating OA self-archiving can generate immediate 100% OA whereas encouraging/supporting OA publishing cannot. > we know indeed that journals that are subsidized by public money can > be mandated to provide OA. Stevan's only objection there is that he > wants to see how significant these journals are, but he had to admit > that it could be done. From that point the debate is about estimates of > relative efficiency. Agreed. And that is why we need to know not only where the subsidised journals rank in the journal quality/impact hierarchy, but, more important, what their true proportion is, among all 24,000 journals. Otherwise we are making a mandate out of a mole-hill. > Stevan himself... used to expound... his "house of cards" metaphor. That was *paper* house of cards, and concerned mostly when electronic publication would prevail over paper publication. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue8/harnad/ But never mind. I admit past mistakes: I wrongly believed for a while that publishers were the obstacle to OA. I now realise they are not, and never were: *Researchers themselves* are the only obstacle, for they are the only ones who can actually *provide* OA -- whether by choosing to publish in OA journals (where possible) or by choosing to self-archive their articles (always possible). Over ninety percent of journals have even given author self-archiving their blessing (although it was not really needed), the evidence of the 50%-250% OA impact advantage is on the table, researchers are signing petitions for OA in the tens of thousands -- but only 15% of them are as yet self-archiving. (Actually, the above-cited JISC survey reports that 49% of authors have dipped their toes in by self-archiving at least one article, but one is reminded of the old saying [please don't take this metaphor too seriously either!]: "once, a philosopher; twice, a pederast." The stubborn fact remains that only about 15% of annual article output is currently being self-archived spontaneously, and that rate is still not growing fast enough either. [OA publishing, of course, is growing still more slowly, but it cannot be accelerated by mandate -- apart from the subsidised subset.]) Which is why the self-archiving mandate was needed: Like "publish or perish," it is meant to require/reward researchers to do what is in their own self-interest (and that of their institutions and funders). > publishers are far from convinced by Stevan's assertions and, moreover, > his argumentative style is not terribly helpful in this regard. Publishers are not the ones that need the convincing: researchers (and their institutions and funders) are. I find myself arguing more these days with those (like Jean-Claude) who are recommending the (in my view) wrong policies rather than with publishers, who are largely irrelevant to research policy (though their 90% green author self-archiving policies were a welcome help). (And make no mistake about it: OA provision is first and foremost a matter of research policy.) Publishers are worried that self-archiving will reduce their revenues. I am not arguing with them, but merely pointing out that there exists no evidence of that, and that all existing evidence is of peaceful co-existence between self-archiving and journal publishing. I am also not arguing with publishers when I point out that the RCUK mandate is not an OA publishing mandate, as publishers wrongly suggest, but merely an OA self-archiving mandate. I am pointing out a fact. Jean-Claude's suggestion that funder-subsidised journals could be mandated to become OA journals is fine, but then it has to be made crystal clear that this is a very special (and almost certainly very minute) case that does not affect the vast majority of publishers, who are not subsidised by the funding bodies that are mandating the self-archiving. As to argumentative style: I plead guilty to sometimes losing my patience with (what I see as) foolishness, especially oft-repeated foolishness that is not attentive or responsive to repeated, detailed and painstaking critical replies. But, unless I am mistaken, for a number of years now it is no longer I who delight in picking fights with publishers, but rather Jean-Claude! A case in point: > As for the "publishing lobby", we can expect that they will grab any > handle language provides. That is what lawyers are trained to do... [No] > formulation, however precise, will stop a lawyer from building a case > that may sound convincing to a judge The case for the RCUK policy proposal is not a legal matter; hence it is being argued before the research community, not a court of law. If there is a conflict of interest between what is best for research and what is best for publishers, it is clear in which way this conflict of interest will have to resolved, for it is publishing that is being done in the service of publicly funded research, and not vice versa. I trust that that point at least is one on which Jean-Claude and I are still in agreement. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sun Sep 11 11:56:16 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:47 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Jan Velterop wrote: > "Do not say a little in many words; say a great deal in a few"?). Vide infra. > 1. Researchers do not 'give away' their articles, certainly not to > publishers, without anything in return. Other authors ask royalties/fees; researchers don't. > They seek something in exchange: recognition and impact: the 'brownie points' > they need for their careers. Not from their publishers, from their users. > These things do not just come from making their > articles visible, but to a large degree from citations and the > 'label' that is the journal title attached to their article. The label is the peer-review quality level. The reviewers are unpaid peers. The publisher implements the peer review: that's why he gets to sell the text (royalty-free). > Wanting something in return makes it a trade, commerce. Authors do not > 'give'; they 'pay' for what they want in return, either with > exclusive rights (to be converted by the publisher into money), or > with money. The author can and does give away his own drafts online; over 90% of journals (green) have explicitly blessed this (not that a blessing was needed). > They could, of course, 'give' their work away, to the > world. They don't need journals for that. But they won't get the > 'brownie points' without peer-reviewed journals. Authors need the peer review. Is that your point? So? > 2. "Being required to give away" is in conflict with being required > to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, as that implies a trade. The self-archiving mandate applies to the author's drafts, which are given to the publisher and also given to users (as in reprint days). > 'Giving away' here is of the same nature as being required to 'give > away' money to the taxman. There are plenty of verbs that could > describe such a transaction, but 'to give away' isn't usually among > them. I can't follow this semiotics... > 3. Self-archiving can, of course, be a supplement to formally > published articles. Rather in the way that a soup-kitchen is a > supplement to bakers, butchers and greengrocers, for those who can't > afford to buy food. These traders won't object to a soup kitchen and > may even donate their leftover loaves, pig-trotters and kale. But > don't ask them to lend their quality reputation, their brand, to the > soup kitchen's food. No one is asking. It is the author's draft that is self-archived. > Self-archiving could be a tool to put pressure > on publishers to provide open access. Self-archiving is a tool to maximise research impact, no more, no less. > But there is no denying that > there is the potential that it substitutes publishing when - not if - > it gets organised properly and offers the material with journal > 'labels' attached. Journals (i.e. their publishers and organisers of > peer-review) will vanish. There may or not be the potential, but there is today not a shred of evidence in that direction. > Unless they make the transition to viable > publishing models that make open access possible. Jan is a publisher, concerned about future publishing models. Researchers are concerned about present access and impact. > The Green Party seems to understand that, The Green Party understood nothing, and left out the crucial component (green). > but so did the HoC S&T Committee and the > RCUK, if one reads their reports in full, and many others. The Committee & RCUK mandated the crucial component (and also added a lot of needless word ballast with no concrete policy implications). See Berlin 3 for a streamlined version, minus the semiology. http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 12 07:23:33 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:47 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, David Goodman wrote: > DG: In responding to [Jan Velterop]: > >>> JV: "But there is no denying that there is the potential that it >>> substitutes publishing when - not if - it gets organized properly >>> and offers the material with journal 'labels' attached. Journals >>> (i.e. their publishers and organizers of peer-review) will vanish." > > DG: it is not "mere semantics" to say that the response > >> SH: "There may or not be the potential but there is today >> not a shred of evidence in that direction." > > DG: is misleading. It would be correct to say > > DG: "There is today not a shred of uncontested evidence either > in that direction or against that direction." I can only reply, in all sincerity, that if this is not mere semantics, I don't know what is. But to add a note of substance, from Alma Swan's research: "In a separate exercise we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- this in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)." [Note: IOPP too is now about to host a mirror-site of arXiv, the central archive for self-archiving in physics. SH] http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ > DG: Unless they are judged by citation counting, [researchers] do not > care if their papers are not read or cited by those in second-rate > institutions. (a) Who today is and is not judged by citation counting? (b) What is the evidence that the 50%-250% OA citation advantage comes from "second-rate institutions" (rather than simply from institutions that cannot afford the particular journal in which a particular article happens to appear)? (c) If researchers "do not care if their papers are not read or cited" by those [who cannot access them]," why should they care about OA at all? In order to solve librarians' budgetary problems? In order to develop "future publishing models"? The near-total dissociation between the library perspective on OA and the researcher perspective on OA could not be more transparent than in the above exchange. Yet the ineluctable fact remains: (1) *Researchers*, not librarians, are the only ones who can provide OA, whether by choosing to publish their articles in OA journals (OAJ) or by choosing to self-archive articles they publish in non-OA journals (OAA). The other ineluctable facts are: (2) The evidence of the 50%-250% citation advantage has not yet proved sufficient to induce authors to spontaneously provide OA either via OAJ or OAA (in anywhere near sufficient numbers). (3) Research funders and institutions cannot mandate that publishers become OA publishers (except for the small number of journals that are subsidised by funders). Only about 1800/24,000 journals (8%) are OA to date. (4) Research funders and institutions cannot mandate their researchers' choice of which journal to publish in. (5) Research funders and institutions *can* mandate that their researchers self-archive. > DG: If [researchers] were concerned about the longer term effects or > broader questions of access and ownership, we would have had OA long ago. This is a classical counterfactual conditional -- and, to boot, it is incorrect: Even if researchers had librarians' concerns rather than their own, they are not in a position to bring about OAJ, only OAA. And even researchers' own concerns are not enough to induce them to reach for the OAA that is within their grasp, so the inducement/incentive will have to come from their funders and institutions, just as the inducement/incentive to publish at all comes from their funders and institutions. > DG: Stevan has gone repeatedly on record about the difficulty of convincing > authors to routinely use OA. No, it is not getting researchers to *use* OA that is difficult, it is getting them to *provide* OA. > DG: He here provides the reason. They have mostly shown they will > not...[spontaneously follow the example of those who self-archive]. > It will take the development of "future publishing models" to > establish OA. David is caught in an illogical loop from which he cannot seem to escape: Researchers do not seek OAJ; and if they did seek OAJ, they could not provide OAJ; they can only provide OA (for their own articles), via either OAA, or, only where available, OAJ: only publishers can provide OAJ, and at the moment, they do not seem to be in a hurry to provide it. Researchers can be rightly said to be in not much more of a hurry to provide OAA either, despite its benefits to them, and despite their nominal clamouring for OA. This is where a mandate from the funders and employers will help break out of the loop (and researchers have already said and shown they will comply). So let librarians and publishing reformers continue to focus on their goal of "future publishing models" while the research community focuses on mandating the mandatable: OAA. The rest is just counterfactuals, conflated agendas and "mere semantics." Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 12 07:20:13 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:47 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Green Party Green on Gold but not on Green In-Reply-To: <1126450404.7197.88.camel@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: In the interests of convergence and closure I will try to respond to Jean-Claude Guedon as concisely as possible, and only on substantive points, not already raised and answered repeatedly before: On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Jean-Claude Gu?don wrote: > J-CG: the OA movement has not paid enough attention to the social sciences > and the humanities and... [P]ublishing in those fields is not exactly > the same as in science.... the social science citation index in SSH has > never acquired the importance that it has in STM. Monographs remain the > prestige unit of publication. By and large, journal prices in SSH are > much cheaper than in STM (1) Our data show that social sciences gain as much of a citation impact advantage as other disciplines. (For the humanities, stay tuned. There are some signs that the category "Literature" may be anomalous.) http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm (2) I don't know if citation impact is less important in SSH, but with OA it will no doubt become more important (everywhere). (3) Where monographs prevail, nolo contendere. (4) If SSH journals are cheaper, it still does not follow that all would-be users can afford access. The OA citation advantage in sociology seems to confirm this. > > SH: Jean-Claude is... completely misunderstanding the purpose of the > > self-archiving mandate... > > J-CG: Where do I misunderstand? Here: > > J-CG: "mandating" [would be] essential [if]... IR's were filling > > pretty fast on the simple basis that the impact advantages > > are convincing... scientists... to self-archive > > spontaneously. We all know this is not happening..." It is exactly the opposite: Mandating is essential precisely because the impact advantages are not convincing enough scientists to self-archive. > JC-G: How do you know [that subsidised] journals are few? Where is > your evidence? I think the evidential shoe is on the other foot. > JC-G: I also believe that a large volume of marginal science falls in > this category and I suspect Stevan thinks that this latter category fills > the whole section of subsidized journals. If that were the case, then > governments would have a problem: despite selection or competitive > processes, they would subsidise only the inferior and the marginal > publications? This seems hardly credible. I am afraid I cannot follow any of this reasoning. > J-CG: On the other hand, governments are not going to subsidise journals > on the unique criterion of excellence anywhere in the world. I cannot see > Canada subsidising an Elsevier journal merely because it stands at the top > of its specialty. Governments mix the quest for excellence with national > limits. They also add other considerations such as the need to distribute, > equilibrate, etc. The result is a system of subsidies that aims at > national excellence while paying attention to other local parameters. Nor can I follow any of this. The only relevant questions seem to be (1) what proportion of journals are subsidised by a funder in a position to mandate that they become OA journals? and secondarily, (2) where do these subsidised journals rank in the quality hierarchy? Unanswered questions. > J-CG: I wonder how you can claim that publishers are not part of the > problem and repeatedly mention how we must craft our messages carefully > not to be manoeuvred by the publishing lobby? Fair question: I should have said that publishers are a very minor part of the problem, in the following two respects: (1) Publishers are (wrongly) perceived by authors as obstacles to self-archiving. They are not. Over 90% of journals have already given self-archiving their blessing, and self-archiving can be (and is being) done, legally and effectively, with or without their blessing. Authors simply self-archive their own drafts, prior to publication, or even prior to submission, and make whatever corrections and updates they see fit. This author misperception needs to be corrected, and that is a problem, but a very minor one (compared to the problem of inducing authors to self-archive). Authors need to be made aware that self-archiving is completely within their own hands; it does not depend on their publisher. (2) Publishers are worried that self-archiving may pose a risk to their revenues and are trying to delay or deter self-archiving mandates on the grounds of this perceived risk. There is no evidence supporting this publisher perception and this needs to be made clear. This too is a very minor problem (compared to the problem of inducing authors to self-archive). The major problem is inducing authors to self-archive, in their own interests, and the interests of their funders and institutions. And the solution to that major problem is obvious: Their funders and institutions need to require their researchers to self-archive. > And I wonder why you argue so much with the likes of me. How about the > publishers' lobby once again? Because you write papers like this: Gu?don, Jean-Claude (2005) The "Green" and "Gold" Roads to Open Access: The Case for Mixing and Matching Serials Review 30(4) 2004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.005 And I have done my share of critiquing of publishers' attempts to delay or deter the RCUK mandate (and have even, to my regret, defended the NIH policy). > For starters, the 10% that is not green is directly in conflict with OA. Vide supra. > J-CG: (I am thinking about Springer's Open Choice in this regard). Springer is green. > J-CG: The recent row between The Lancet and Elsevier, although it deals with > issues that have nothing to do with this particular discussion, > nonetheless serves to demonstrate how divergent the values of commercial > publishers and scientific editors can be. > > So, does it make sense to choose to behave as if publishers were not > part of the problem? Yes. Stevan Harnad -------------------------------------------------------------- Posting on other topic thread; to save space, not posted separately: To: American Scientist Open Access Forum From: Subbiah Arunachalam Subject: Re: Leading academics back UK Research Councils on self-archiving Alma's reply to Sally Morris (on the impact of arXiv on physics publishers) is very clear. No polemics. Just facts and reasoned arguments. I like such postings. Arun From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Sep 14 12:43:43 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:47 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research Message-ID: Press Release: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/news/792 Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Professor of Cognitive Science Department of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM Chaire de recherche du Canada Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC) Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al Montr?al, Qu?bec, Canada H3C 3P8 harnad@uqam.ca http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/ The United Kingdom is not yet maximising the return on its public investment in research. Research Councils UK (RCUK) spend ?3.5 billion pounds annually. The UK produces at least 130,000 research journal articles per year, but it is not the number of articles published that reflects the return on the UK?s investment: A piece of research, if it is worth funding and doing at all, must be not only published, but used, applied and built upon by other researchers. This is called ?research impact? and a measure of it is the number of times an article is cited by other articles (?citation impact?). But in order to be used and built upon, an article must first be accessed. A published article is accessible only to those researchers who happen to be at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the particular journal in which it was published. There are 24,000 journals in all, and most institutions can only afford a small fraction of them. In paper days, authors used to supplement this paid access to their articles by mailing free reprints to any would-be users who wrote to request them. The online age has made it possible to provide free ?eprints? (electronic versions of the author?s draft) to all potential users who cannot afford the journal version by ?self-archiving? them on the author?s own institutional website. The online-age practice of self-archiving has been shown to increase citation impact by a dramatic 50-250%, but so far only 15% of researchers are doing it. A recent UK international survey has found that 95% of authors would self-archive ? but only if their research funders or their institutions required them to do it (just as they already require them to ?publish or perish?). The solution is hence obvious: After lengthy deliberations first initiated in 2003 by the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology, RCUK have proposed to adopt a policy requiring UK researchers to deposit, on their university's website, the final author's draft of any journal article resulting from RCUK-funded research. The purpose of the proposed policy would be to maximise the usage and impact of UK research findings by making them freely accessible on the web ("open access") for any potential users in the UK and worldwide who cannot afford paid access to the published journal version. How does this maximise the return on the UK public investment in research? It is not possible to calculate all the ways in which research generates revenue. A good deal of it is a question of probability and depends on time: Although everyone thinks of an immediate cure for cancer or a cheap, clean source of energy as the kind of result we hope for, most research progresses gradually and indirectly, and the best estimate of the size and direction of its progress is its citation impact, for that reflects the degree of uptake of research results by other researchers, in their own subsequent research. Citation impact is accordingly rewarded by universities (through salary increases and promotion) and by research-funders like RCUK (through grant funding and renewal); it is also rewarded by libraries (through journal selection and renewal, based on a journal's average citation "impact factor"). Counting citations is a natural extension of the cruder measure of research impact: counting publications themselves ("publish or perish"). If citations are being counted, it is natural to ask how much they are worth. The marginal dollar value of one citation was estimated by Diamond in 1986 to range from $50-$1300 (US), depending on field and number of citations. (An increase from 0 to 1 citation is worth more than an increase from 30 to 31; most articles are in the citation range 0-5.) If we convert from dollars to UK pounds sterling (?27-?710) and update by 170% for inflation from 1986-2005, this yields the range ?46-$1207 as the marginal value of a UK citation today. Self-archiving, as noted, increases citations by 50-250%, but, as also noted, only 15% of the articles being published are being self-archived today. We will now apply only the most conservative ends of these estimates (50% citation increase from self-archiving at ?46 per citation) to the UK's current annual journal article output (and only for the approximately 130,000 UK articles a year indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information, which covers only the top 8000 of the world's 24,000 journals). If we multiply by the 85% of the UK's annual journal article output that is not yet self-archived (110, 500 articles), this translates into an annual loss of ?2, 541, 500 in revenue to UK researchers for not having done (or delegated) the few extra keystrokes per article it would have taken to self-archive their final drafts. But this impact loss translates into a far bigger one for the British public, if we reckon it as the loss of potential returns on its research investment. As a proportion of the RCUK?s yearly ?3.5bn research expenditure, our conservative estimate would be a 50% x 85% x ?3.5.bn = ?1.5bn worth of loss in potential research impact. And that is without even considering the wider loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry. The solution is obvious, and it is the one the RCUK is proposing: to extend the existing universal 'publish or perish' requirement to 'publish and also self-archive your final draft on your institutional website'. Over 90% of journals already endorse author self-archiving and the international author survey -- plus the actual experience of the two institutions that have already adopted such a requirement (CERN and University of Southampton ECS ) -- has shown that over 90% of authors will comply. The time to close this 50%-250% research impact gap is already well overdue. This is the historic moment for the UK to set an example for the world , showing how to maximise the return on the public investment in research in the online era. How self-archiving increases citation impact: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html How much a citation is worth: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf How much time and effort is involved in self-archiving http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ RCUK self-archiving policy proposal: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp Directory of publishers' policies on author self-archiving: http://romeo.eprints.org/ JISC user survey on self-archiving: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Sep 15 17:23:19 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:48 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] OA advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA In-Reply-To: <1126799359.432997ff31872@fred.soi.city.ac.uk> Message-ID: Prior AmSci Topic Thread: OA advantage = EA + AA + QB + OA + UA http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3977.html Ian Rowland's observations, below, are spot-on. He is exactly right that the OA impact advantage (currently 50-250%) will shrink as we approach 100% OA. Right now we are at 15% OA, and the advantage is in part -- no one can say how large a part -- a *competitive* advantage of the minority 15% OA -- the head-start vanguard -- over the laggard 85% non-OA majority. That makes it partly a race; and clearly, the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. The competitive advantage is *more* reason for an individual, institution or nation (like the UK) to self-archive right now (as the RCUK will, we hope, soon be doing). http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html The OA impact advantage consists of at least the following 6 factors, three of them (2,3,5) temporary (), three of them permanent (1,4,6)**: 1. *EA*: EARLY ADVANTAGE, beginning already at the pre-refereeing preprint stage. Research that is reported earlier not only gets its quota of citations sooner, but the quota goes up, permanently. This is probably because earlier uptake has a greater cumulative effect on the research cycle. 2. (AA): (ARXIV ADVANTAGE) the special advantage of self-archiving specifically in Arxiv for physicists, because it is a central point of call: OAI-interoperable Institutional Repositories will supersede this, I am certain, and it will make zero difference which OAI-compliant IR one deposits in. 3. (QB): (QUALITY BIAS) from self-selection; noncausal: The higher-quality articles/authors are somewhat more likely to self-archive in these early (15%) days of self-archiving: this too will disappear self-archiving approaches 100%, of course). 4. *QA*: QUALITY ADVANTAGE, allowing the high-quality articles to compete on a level playing field, not handicapped by access affordability. A permanent effect. 5. (CA): COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, for self-archived papers over non-self-archived ones, in early (15%) days; this will disappear once once self-archiving nears 100%, of course, but it is an optimal extra motivator right now, for the low % self-archiving fields. 6. *UA*: USAGE ADVANTAGE: More downloads for OA articles. This too is a permanent effect. Of these, only EA, QA, and UA are operative in the few fields that are already close to 100% OA, such as astrophysics and High Energy Physics. http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ But everywhere else we are concerned with getting the 15% fields to climb to 100%, and for them the CA matters a lot too. http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm So I basically agree with Ian Rowland's comment, and have only two small replies to add below: On Thu, 15 Sep 2005 ir@soi.city.ac.uk wrote: > The flow of your logic is that open access increases the chances of an article > being downloaded and read, and hence a greater probability that it will be > cited, all things being equal. That's fine as a point of departure. > > If I am the first author to publish an open access article in an almost wholly > toll access environment, I can see that I would have an enormous comparative > advantage over the rest of my colleagues and might well expect to accrue > additional citations. Similarly the first research group or even nation to see > the light would have a great advantage. > > If, however, I am the one millionth author (or the 10,000th research group or > the 100th nation) to publish open access, that comparative advantage must > quickly decline, approaching zero as the last few laggards pile in: there would > be a completely level playing field. This is not an argument against open > access but it is a logical consequence of the mass migration to that particular > form of publishing in terms of citation advantage. Exactly: The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. And if the RCUK adopts its proposed mandate, this will give the UK a substantial competitive advantage. Once other nations follow suit (as it is to be hoped that they will do), the competitive advantage will shrink, but the the Early Advantage, Quality Advantage and Usage Advantage will remain, and all of research worldwide will be the better off for it. > Meanwhile, the measurement tools (and I'm thinking here specifically of ISI as > an example) remain constant. The only way for us all to get higher citation > counts within this frame of reference is EITHER for ISI to expand its coverage > to include more sources OR for ISI-indexed journal editors to reject fewer > papers or for authors to compile longer reference lists. I can't see the latter > happening. ISI will almost certainly expand. But there are other players on the field now too, including free ones, such as citebase, citeseer and google scholar, and paid ones, such as scopus. So there plenty of new ways to measure and compare the increased citations that come from OA: http://citebase.eprints.org/ http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ http://scholar.google.com/ http://www.scopus.com/ > If open access became near universal, all that would happen within the current > measurement regime is that we'd still all get the same number of citations, > they'd just be from open access rather than tolled sources. The logic of your > press release is fine, it's just there's an imminent sell by date before the > magic works off. The Competitive Advantage would be gone, but the Early Advantage, Quality Advantage and Usage Advantage would be going strong. Michael Kurtz has shown that although articles in a 100% OA field (astrophysics) do not have longer reference lists, hence do not cite more articles, they do have three times higher usage rates (UA). http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html And of course the composition of the references can now be determined by the merit and quality of the article (QA), not just the affordability of the journal in which it happened to be published. And whereas the competitive horse-race (for who self-archives to gain the CA first) will be over, the cognitive horse-race (for who finds what earlier: EA) will continue to favour the swift and the strong. It is fair to say, though, that if the annual 1.5 billion pounds-pounds worth of potential impact that the UK is currently losing because it only self-archives 15% of its research output will shrink as other nations' self-archiving policies catch up. How much it shrinks will then depend on the true merit of British research and not just the UK's head-start in self-archiving. Stevan Harnad > > From: Stevan Harnad > > Subject: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research > > To: SIGMETRICS@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU > > > > Press Release: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/news/792 > > Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research > > Full text: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Sep 16 17:13:09 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:48 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Belinda Isaac's article on Open Access in IC Wales (fwd) Message-ID: Lest AmSci Forum members conclude that all or even most of the press coverage of the RCUK is as botched as this and the preceding posting, do have a look at this one in the Guardian (and remember the next-but-one posting by Chuck Hamaker from The Register!). And there's more to come. Jimmy Leach, Open access failings 'cost UK ?1.5bn', The Guardian, September 16, 2005. http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,1571791,00.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:39:04 +0100 (BST) From: Stevan Harnad To: simon.newsam AT wme.co.uk Cc: belinda.isaac AT morgan-cole.com Subject: Belinda Isaac's article on Open Access in IC Wales http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0300business/0250features/tm_objectid=16130535&method=full&siteid=50082&headline=open-access-to-research---but-at-what-cost--name_page.html Dear Simon, Rarely have I read such an ill-informed article. Belinda Isaac seems to have managed to misunderstand just about every substantive point about Open Access, so much so, that one could answer each of her points by number (1-32), from the the self-archiving FAQ (of long standing, and openly accessible): http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#32-worries The long-suffering Peter Suber, of Open Access News, has, however, has had a go: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_09_11_fosblogarchive.html#a112672149592614039 You might also want to have a look at the somewhat more au-fe piece I wrote on the same subject, on the very same day: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11220/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/news/792 The only thing I cannot discern is whether Belinda's article so badly missed the mark because she failed to do her homework, or whether it is an occupational hazard of protecting brands, patents and property all day that one cannot conceive that researchers and research just do not fall in the category of one's usual clientele and their products... Cordially, Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Sep 16 16:56:16 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:48 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Critique of research Fortnight article on RCUK policy proposal Message-ID: "Learned societies argue open access depletes research funds," Research Fortnight 242, September 14, 2005 http://www.researchresearch.com/news.cfm?pagename=newsStory&lang=EN&type=default&elementID=54434&noSearch=true The above article, quote/commented below, was published unsigned, but I believe it was written by the journalist (identity deleted) who asked me the question I first prepend here, along with my answer. >> "I am a journalist for Research Fortnight and I'm writing about >> open access - in particular the contributions to the RCUK >> debate. I saw your paper in response to the letter from ALPSP >> and I wonder if I could have a chat with you about this. If this >> is not convenient, perhaps you could could send an email. >> I'm interested in how you back up the argument that open access >> would not damage learned societies' journals?" (1) It's not an "argument," it is evidence: 14 years of self-archiving in the area where it is most advanced -- hence the best predictor of what is and is not likely to happen elsewhere -- physics, in which some areas already reached 100% self-archiving a number of years ago: No increased cancellations, peaceful co-existence, active collaboration between both of the learned societies involved -- the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, on the one hand, and the self-archiving research community and their archive (Arxiv) on the other hand. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ (2) Besides that evidence -- and the absence of any evidence whatsoever to the contrary -- there is also the fact that there is still a large demand for the print edition, as well as a sustained demand for the publisher's value-added online edition. (Self-archiving is only about the author's own final draft, not the publisher's value-added version, with citation links, XML mark-up, imprimatur, PDF, etc.) (3) What *is* a Learned Society? you should be asking yourself: It is an organisation of the members of a scholarly or scientific discipline. They have conferences, they sponsor scholarships, they lobby government, and some of them also publish journals. There is no evidence at all to date that author self-archiving causes journal cancellations, as noted. (4) But even if it were ever to prove to be the case that self-archiving causes cancellations, self-archiving can and should of course be done anyway. Research is being done for the sake of research impact and progress, not for the sake of earning revenue for publishers, whether Learned Societies or not. Self-archiving increases citation impact by 50%-250%: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html (5) Learned Societies' other activities -- meetings, scholarships and lobbying -- can find other sources of support. Self-archiving has now been demonstrated to increase research impact by 50%-250% in all fields of research. The right way to ask the question about Learned Societies is to ask whether anyone imagines that -- once this causal connection between self-archiving and research impact is made fully known to all researchers -- that researchers would *knowingly* to continue to subsidise Learned Societies' other activities with *their own lost research impact*? (6) The answer is most certainly: No. If ever self-archiving should cause journal cancellations, it is Learned Societies who must find other sources of revenue to support their other activities. Authors not self-archiving their own work is not an option that anyone can defend, on any grounds, and certainly not on the basis of the express mission of Learned Societies, which is in the service of Learned Research. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#19.Learned (7) In general, it is good to remind ourselves that research publishing (whether by trade publishers of Learned Society Publishers) is done in the service of research, not vice versa. > Learned societies argue open access depletes research funds > > Learned societies have warned that the open access policy > proposed by Research Councils UK this summer threatens to close > journals and deprive societies of income for grants and other > research activity. They have made this warning, and have provided no evidence at all in its support. All existing evidence -- including that from fields of physics that have been self-archiving for a decade and a half and reached 100% some years ago -- is that there is peaceful co-existence between journal publishing and author self-archiving. Those institutions that can afford the publisher's value-added version purchase that; those researchers whose institutions cannot afford the paid access, use the author's self-archived draft. > RCUK proposed, in June, that researchers funded by the research > councils should be required to place resulting articles in either > institutional or disciplinary repositories after a delay agreed with > the publisher. No, RCUK proposed to require funders to self-archive a soon as possible, preferably by the date of publication. The requirement says nothing about any delay. Nor does any delay serve the interests of research progress and impact. > Although the policy respects copyright, publishers are concerned > that the large amount of information in repositories will mean > libraries will not need journal subscriptions. They are calling for > RCUK to determine accurately what the consequences of the policy > would be before implementing it. It is not clear what "determine accurately" could possibly mean. All the evidence from the cases where the self-archiving is actually being done is that it has no effect on journal subscriptions at all, even after many years. It is hard to imagine the justification for continuing to deprive research of its full impact on the basis on no evidence about negative effects on subscriptions, and nothing but strong positive evidence about its effects on research impact. The only translation of this is that ALPSP is asking RCUK to "determine accurately" that ALPSP's worries, based on no evidence and counter to all existing evidence, are groundless; ALPSP apparently counts its own subjective worries as face-valid evidence and does not count objective evidence that their worries are groundless as an "accurate determination." > In a letter to Ian Diamond, chairman of RCUK, in August, the > Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers said, > 'Librarians will increasingly find that 'good enough' versions of a > significant proportion of articles in journals are freely available; > in a situation where they lack the funds to purchase all the content > their users want, it is inconceivable that they would not seek to > save money by cancelling subscriptions to those journals. As a result, > those journals will die.' This is merely another repetition of the groundless worry, in the face of no supporting evidence and all existing evidence to the contrary. > Sally Morris, chief executive of ALPSP, told Research Fortnight > researchers will not always respect embargo periods for journals, > and that RCUK is 'suggesting strongly to authors that it will be > endeavouring to persuade publishers to reduce or eliminate them'. That is correct. Articles should be self-archived, with no delay whatsoever. There is no scientific or scholarly justification for delaying research impact and progress. And there would be no justification even if there *were* evidence that it reduced journal revenues. Research is not done in order to generate journal revenues, it is done in order to generate research impact. But in reality all evidence to date indicates that self-archiving does not have any effect on journal revenues. > 'At the very least we would want them to come out much more clearly > and strongly in support of whatever embargo a publisher finds > necessary to defend its journal,' Morris said. Is research access and impact then to be blocked for as long as a publisher deems necessary? And this without even any objective evidence to support it? Is research then actually being funded and conducted according to the perceived needs and worries of journal publishers? Is that why public tax money pays 3.5 billion UK pounds per year to support research? To have it embargoed as long as a publisher deems necessary, as dictated by his worries? > The Institute of Physics has already seen article downloads > from its site diminish for journals whose content is substantially > replicated in a repository, says ALPSP. This statement is false, and is the exact opposite of what the Institute of Physics has said (Swan & Brown 2005): "In a separate exercise we asked the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) what their experiences have been over the 14 years that arXiv has been in existence. How many subscriptions have been lost as a result of arXiv? Both societies said they could not identify any losses of subscriptions for this reason and that they do not view arXiv as a threat to their business (rather the opposite -- this in fact the APS helped establish an arXiv mirror site at the Brookhaven National Laboratory)." [Note: IOPP too is now about to host a mirror-site of arXiv, the central archive for self-archiving in physics. SH] http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/ > Advocates of the open access model have criticised the learned > societies' stance, arguing repositories have been delayed long > enough. Stevan Harnad from the Department of Electronics and Computer > Science at the University of Southampton, and a member the group who > submitted a response to RCUK, said last week that there was already > a 'peaceful co-existence' between societies and the self-archiving > research community in physics. What I actually wrote in print was: Journal Publishing and Author Self-Archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html > But even if self-archiving does cause cancellations of > journal subscriptions, it should be done regardless, > he says. 'Research is being done for the sake of research impact > and progress, not for the sake of earning revenue for publishers, > whether learned societies or not,' he said. Fair enough: I did (and do) say precisely that. > Universities UK, which represents all the country's universities, is > supporting moves towards open access, which it says will enhance the > reputation of UK research worldwide. But the Biosciences Federation, > which includes 33 learned societies in the life sciences, backs > ALPSP and said in a statement, 'Loss of journal income would then > lead ... possibly to the closure of some societies.' To remind everyone: All these dire warnings about loss of journal income, closure of societies, etc. are based on no objective evidence, merely subjective worries, voiced over and over, regardless of the absence of supporting evidence and the continuing growth of the contrary evidence. This non-argument does not gain force by dint of repetition, except to the uninformed. > The British Academy has also criticised the RCUK proposal for > being vague, saying they need to consider researchers in the > humanities and social sciences more. The British Academy criticism is rather vague: What is is about researchers in the humanities and social sciences that needs to be considered more? Does their research not depend on being read, used, applied and cited (i.e., research impact) just as all other fields of research do? > RCUK is analysing responses and will be talking with learned > societies, universities and libraries before it makes its final > decision on repositories next year. So far, RCUK has made no announcement to the effect that it will delay its final decision till next year. The comments period closed at the end of August, and as far as the UK research community knows, the RCUK is imminent. Stevan Harnad > Comments: admin@researchresearch.com > Home: http://www.ResearchResearch.com From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Sep 17 05:29:06 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:48 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) Message-ID: MODERATOR'S NOTE: Chuck Hamaker has asked me to forward his posting, below, but first some prior pertinent AmSci threads on the very same topic. As you will see, we are still retreading ground we covered over a half decade ago, this time in connection with Sally Morris's worries about library cancellations. -- SH -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Online Self-Archiving: Distinguishing the Optimal from the Optional" (Started May 11 1999) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0248.html "The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)" (Started July 5 1999) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html "Separating Quality-Control Service-Providing from Document-Providing" (Started November 30 1999) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0466.html "Distinguishing the Essentials from the Optional Add-Ons" (Started July 2001) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1437.html "The medium-independent essential function of a journal is and always has been that of peer-review service-provider, certifying the outcome of the peer-review, if successful, with the journal-name and associated track-record for quality (a "metadata" tag). The rest is and always has been just the arbitrary features of the storage and dissemination medium (which was for long print-on-paper). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#3.3 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm "This essential quality-control/certification function will remain the essential function of journals regardless of medium-change or cost-recovery model change." https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/2119.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 04:42:20 -0400 From: Chuck Hamaker Subject: AmSci list posting Stevan. I am unable to send an uncoded response from home except through a non-institutional account. Please accept this for AmSci. Chuck Hamaker Peer Review sine qua non? I know the point I'm making below has been made before, but it seems to get lost each time a publisher representative starts explaining library journal cancellations. Much of what publishers opine about cancellations makes no sense from the internal workings of academic libraries. It is researchers who by far carry the most weight determining what journals will be retained in any cancellation review. And why they acquiesce to some cancellations and not others is not based on cost alone. (Its normally not their money anyway) as evidenced by every cancellation review I've ever participated in, read about or discussed with colleagues. It is the value of the journals to their own fields--that is the determining factor. Two quotes from Jimmy Leach, Open access failings 'cost UK ?1.5bn', The Guardian, September 16, 2005. http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,10577,1571791,00.htms Sally Morris, the association's (ALPSP) chief executive: > Once all of a journal's content was available free online, university > librarians would stop buying it, she said. The advent of Google Scholar > meant it was now easy to find the contents of a journal scattered among > different repositories. comment: Please, Sally, and all publshers. Listen it isn't librarians who drive all by themselves decisions to "stop buying" or not a particular journal or a group of journals. We have LOTS of examples of journals available in aggregator databases and ALSO available as subscriptions in the same library or libraries. Why is that? Because faculty drive these decisions to retain subscriptions or not, --they may have to make hard choices, but ultimately it comes down to what does the researcher need to do their job. And the journal is NOT JUST NOTIFICATION of something published, a journal is a WHOLE system, an ecosystem. Access to the research it publishes,i.e. the archival record is NOT the first thing nor the last thing a journal does. It creates a community of scholars where perhaps there was none, it binds a community together. IT is FAR MORE THAN PAPER OR BITS AND BYTES. The journal is an invention that produces support for the field or fields it covers. This is just basic journal 101 stuff. Researchers don't eviscerate their own prestige, reviewing and ranking systems because the individual articles are avaialable some other way. We know that from decades of work with faculty in cancellations reviews. They protect their personal FIELDS of research-FIRST. That they have personal subscriptions, for example, won't mean they will agree to a library cancellation. In many cases it isn't access to the articles that solely or even "majorly" drives these decisions. The editor of a minor journal resides on my campus. He has a copy, his graduate students and colleagues all get access to his copy, why will he go to the Chancellor of the campus to demand my head if I cancel "HIS" title? It isn't access, its prestige, status, and protection, even nurturing, his field. Sally said: > "We are worried that the research councils in the UK are trying to push in > the direction of a parallel economy without thinking of the possible damage > to the journals on which they parasitise." The condition without which OA and therefore journals, will not exist, is quite simply peer review. No peer review, no OA, no journals. It is not too harsh, I hope, to state peer review is the sine qua non of scientific articles. Who controls peer review? Publishers.. Without publishers we don't have OA our journals. We have unreviewed snippets without quality markers. The system demands peer review, which, if memory serves- the Royal Society's reports in the 80's defined as more important than the archival record of research for scholars. That -even more than articles, is what journal publishers "sell" one way or another. Perhaps publishers don't want us to remember this elementary point. What researcher would dis-establish the peer review system of their own field by harming key journals because the "articles" might be findable somewhere? Only someome more ignorant than today's newspaper journalists. Sally's statements at their extreme implies researchers, who actually (not libraries) control what journals are subscribed --through myriad means-- are so confused about journals they would dismantle the very system that supports the validation of their own research. The evidence is exactly the opposite. They put up enormous barriers to protect their journals, and not becuase they can't get the articles any other way! (they can get them many ways right now-and have always had means to do so). Science works because of peer review as imperfect as it might be. Publisher's control peer review. That more than the print journals or the electronic contents more even than the distribution responsiblity, is why journals exist and will continue existing in some form as long as our societies do science. If peer review didn't exist we'd have to invent it anew to make sense of the cacaphony of unwashed propositions that get pushed out as ideas claiming validity. Publication, as every publisher knows is the end of a process. It is, and I think publishers have been remiss in stating this, the process that we pay for. All the emphasis on cost per thousand characters and cost per dowload is an interesting aside because that isn't what we actually pay for. Those are simply markers for the system the money supports. When publishers go on about pounds and dollars and ounces and ems and pages, and systems did they think librarians and scholars didn't know where the real costs were? Even though the majority of publisher's can't seem to calculate, or won't discuss the cost of the peer review system per se, we all know that's the value proposition in publishing. So stop selling journals by the pound (pun intended) and start talking about where the real costs to the system reside--its the process not the print (or e-print). And that process is the core reason for journals. It is not obviated at all by OA, in fact the process of putting high quality research out to the rest of the world will, by all accounts of research into the results of OA, ENHANCE the demand for high quality peer review systems, increasing the need for -oh, yes, publishers. Chuck Hamaker From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Sep 17 12:41:40 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:49 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] OA Testimonial from BBS Author Message-ID: [ MODERATOR'S NOTE: Posted for Seth Roberts, with permission. Some background information about BBS and CUP (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published by Cambridge University Press): http://romeo.eprints.org/publishers/27.html http://www.bbsonline.org/ http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/bbspreprintlinks_090105.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Kata/bbs.editorial.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/bbs.valedict.html ] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 09:52:40 -0700 From: Seth Roberts To: Stevan Harnad Subject: Re: Unofficial BBS Disposition Letter Dear Stevan, I'm afraid I am having quite a bit of trouble figuring out how to post it. So I hereby give you permission to post it. Thanks. Seth >On Sat, 17 Sep 2005, Seth Roberts wrote: > >> Dear Dr. Harnad: >> >> Here is one concrete effect of your belief in open access: After my >> paper (below) appeared in BBS, http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Roberts/Referees/ >> my friend Andrew Gelman blogged about it; >> and readers of his blog could read my paper because BBS had allowed >> me to put it in a University-of-California repository. It was one of >> the first papers in that repository, in fact. One of Andrew's readers >> was Alex Tabarrok, who wrote very favorably about it in his blog, >> Marginal Revolution. This got the attention of Stephen Dubner, who with >> Steven Levitt writes a column called Freakonomics in the New York Times >> Magazine. An article based on my BBS paper (see www.freakonomics.com for >> details) appeared last Sunday but even before then I had been contacted >> by Dubner and Levitt's agent -- now my agent, too -- who suggested I not >> only write a diet book (which will probably be called The Shangri-La Diet) >> but also a second book about self-experimentation (working title The >> Science of One). There is great interest among publishers; and although my >> colleagues have been very skeptical of my self-experimentation, the >> rest of the thinking world, at least as reflected in comments on the >> freakonomics website, is enthusiastic. >> >> My BBS paper has been downloaded over 6000 times, 75% of them in the last week. >> >> I have little doubt that both books will eventually exist and reach >> large audiences. >> >> It happened a lot sooner due to open access. >> >> Seth Roberts >> >> At 09:43 AM 8/31/2001, Stevan Harnad wrote: >> >> >Dear Dr. Roberts: >> > >> >Here is an unofficial version of the reports and disposition. >> >BBS will shortly send you and the referees an official one. >> > >> >Sincerely, >> > >> >Stevan Harnad >> >Editor, BBS >> > >> >-------------- >> > >> >Appended below are the 5 BBS referee reports on your manuscript: >> >"Self-Experimentation as a Source of New Ideas..." >> > >> >The reports indicate that your manuscript is potentially acceptable if >> >you can successfully revise it in accordance with the referees' >> >recommendations (which I will summarize below). BBS policy under >> >these conditions is that the revised manuscript must be re-refereed and >> >must be accompanied by a detailed, itemized statement of how and where >> >in the revised draft each referee's specific points AS CAPITALIZED AND >> >NUMBERED IN THE REFEREE REPORTS have been accommodated. >> > >> >To focus your revision, here is a summary of the CAPITALIZED points in >> >the reports that particularly call for attention, according to the >> >numbered categories in the composite ratings that follow the last >> >referee report below. >> > >> >[1] SIGNIFICANCE: >> > >> >The topic is potentially significant enough for BBS Commentary but >> >the presentation has to be made stronger, tighter and more rigorous >> >if it is to elicit useful Commentary. >> > >> >[2] PRESENTATION: >> > >> >There are many problems with the presentation as it now stands. It is >> >not sufficiently well-organized or focussed. It wanders, repeats >> >itself, contains unnecessary material and omits necessary material. >> >Referees indicate that many points are unclear, needing more detail and >> >fuller explanation. The figures and tables also need a good deal of >> >work to make them self-contained, clear and informative. >> > >> >[3] SCHOLARSHIP: >> > >> >The referees draw a good deal of existing work to your attention that >> >you need to take into account. More attention also needs to be given to >> >the historical precursors of your approach. >> > >> >[4] EVIDENCE: >> > >> >More statistical details and testing are needed for your single-subject >> >data. The referees also raise a number of important methodological >> >points that will require clarification, amplification, and perhaps some >> >further empirical work. >> > >> >[5] REASONING: >> > >> >The referees raise a number of prima facie questions and objections >> >regarding some of your inferences and conclusions. Not all of these >> >need to be decisively replied to in the target article, but please do >> >address the more important ones. Also, all outright errors pointed out >> >by the referees should be corrected, rather than being allowed to be >> >pointed out again in the Commentary. Similarly, points that require >> >further explanation or justification should be strengthened here rather >> >than left to be raised anew by the commentators. >> > >> >[6] THEORY: >> > >> >You are asked by the referees to amplify and elaborate a number of >> >conceptual, theoretical and methodological points in order to provide >> >more rigor as well as substance for eliciting constructive commentary. >> > >> >[7] LENGTH: >> > >> >Although the referees' critiques and recommendations will require >> >adding to the paper, they do also stress that the paper currently has >> >extraneous material and repetition, and that the present material does >> >not justify the length. So please strike a balance between trimming and >> >tightening the present material, and adding the requisite further >> >material to strengthen it in response to {3] - [6]. >> > >> >For the details, please see the 5 thoughtful referee reports. >> > >> >I hope you will accept the challenge to revise your paper. Most >> >ultimately accepted BBS papers first undergo major revision. This is >> >necessary not only to ensure the quality of BBS target articles, >> >but also to protect authors from running the gauntlet of open peer >> >commentary before being adequately forearmed. The "mini-treatment" >> >consisting of the BBS referee reports tends to provide a fair >> >sample of what a paper is likely to encounter in Commentary; and so >> >experience has dictated that to elicit commentary that is constructive >> >and useful to the author as well as to the field, a paper must fully >> >accommodate these prima facie criticisms in advance. >> > >> >I would also like to recommend that, before resubmitting to BBS, you >> >take advantage of a new intermediate medium for "test-piloting" >> >material that is being prepared for BBS. Psycoloquy is BBS's electronic >> >counterpart: a refereed electronic journal sponsored by the American >> >psychological Association that specialises in shorter target articles >> >for open peer commentary in much more rapid, global and interactive >> >form (dubbed "scholarly skywriting") than the print medium permits. >> >Target articles accepted by Psycoloquy are immediately edited, archived >> >on the Web, and circulated around the world to the journal's >> >readership, who may then submit comments (which likewise appear as soon >> >as they have been refereed and accepted). Psycoloquy Commentary can be >> >very valuable in revising a BBS target article. More and more BBS >> >target articles follow successful Psycoloquy treatments (Koehler, Wright, >> >Pulvermueller, Fitch & Denenberg, Glenberg, etc.). >> > >> >Please inform us of how you intend to proceed, and according to what >> >timetable. >> > >> >Sincerely, >> > >> > >> >Stevan Harnad >> >Editor, BBS >> > >> > >> >======================================================================== >> >Seth Roberts >> > >> >"Self-Experimentation as a Source of New Ideas: >> >Ten Examples About Sleep, Mood, Health, and Weight" >> >======================================================================== >> > >> >Referee #1 ANON >> > >> >I read the abstract and glanced at the article. I did not find it >> >comfortable to read the article in full. I do not think it is suitable >> >for regular review because of EXCESSIVE LENGTH [2], DISORGANIZATION OF >> >PRESENTATION [2], and FAILURE TO FOLLOW UP FROM NEW IDEAS TO SCIENTIFIC >> >EXPERIMENTS [4,5]. >> > >> > >> >======================================================================== >> >Referee #2 >> > >> >The paper proposes that using oneself as the subject of experimental >> >investigation is a good means of generating new ideas for further >> >investigation. This argument is supported by descriptions of ten >> >studies (five concerning sleep, activity and mood, and five concerning >> >dietary interventions), which the author has conducted on himself over >> >a period of many years. The results from these two sets of studies are >> >explained using a theory of stone-age living and a theory of >> >taste-calorie associations. >> > >> >The paper is one of the most stimulating that I have ever reviewed and >> >as such proves its point concerning the method as a means of idea >> >generation. The dedication and investment that the author has put into >> >the studies is also quite remarkable. I found many of the results >> >intriguing and I concur with the notion that the behavioral sciences >> >would benefit from more understanding and methods concerning idea >> >generation. In terms of suitability for BBS, the paper is certainly >> >likely to provoke interesting comment from various quarters (although >> >this is in part due to its OVER- BROAD AIMS [1,2,5] -- see below). >> >However, this 'labour of love' is in need of a MAJOR OVERHAUL TO GIVE >> >IT FOCUS, COHERENCE AND BREVITY [2,5,7]. The LENGTH [7] of the paper >> >is currently twice that recommended for BBS I believe. The author >> >argues that 'innovation benefits from diverse goals' but unfortunately >> >this DIVERSITY HAS HINDERED PRODUCING A COHERENT PAPER [2,5]. In fact, >> >there is probably material for 3 papers here: self- experimentation for >> >generating ideas, and the two sets of studies. >> > >> >1) If the author really wishes to make this a paper concerning the use >> >of self-experimentation then MANY OF THE DETAILS WITHIN THE EXAMPLE >> >STUDIES ARE UNNECESSARY [4]. The author would also need to FURTHER >> >EXTRACT AND EXPAND THE PRINCIPLES OF SELF- EXPERIMENTATION FOR IDEA >> >GENERATION [6] and IDENTIFY THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE CURRENT FINDINGS >> >FOR FURTHER EXPERIMENTS [4,6]. Alternatively the author could use >> >either of the two sets of studies as the focus (although some of the >> >second set appear to have been published before) and make the >> >methodology secondary. At present there is a danger that some very >> >interesting preliminary findings (e.g., morning faces and sugar-water) >> >are LOST AMONGST LESS INTERESTING FINDINGS [2,5]. >> > >> >2) One problem I had in reviewing this paper is that it is DIFFICULT TO >> >EVALUATE because it is NOT CLEAR WHETHER IT IS THE METHOD OR THE >> >CONTENT OF THE EXAMPLES THAT SHOULD BE JUDGED [1,2,5]. Certainly many >> >of the examples DO NOT HAVE THE EXPERIMENTAL RIGOUR [4,5] that would >> >normally be expected but presumably the author would argue that their >> >purpose is simply to generate ideas for further testing. Perhaps the >> >author could suggest some CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING IDEA GENERATION >> >[4,6]. More generally, it raises the question of WHETHER CURRENT >> >JOURNALS CAN PROVIDE A SUITABLE VEHICLE FOR SPECULATIVE IDEAS [5]. >> > >> >3) Nevertheless, there appears to be a real danger that SOME OF THE >> >EFFECTS ARE ARTEFACTS OF THE OTHER INTERVENTIONS TAKING PLACE AT THE >> >SAME TIME [4,5]. For example, in 1996 the author conducted self- >> >experiments on faces, water and legumes, and in 1997 conducted >> >self-experiments on faces, standing, walking and pasta. A diary >> >showing the timing of the 10 studies might help allay these fears. >> >There is also a related concern that these RESULTS MIGHT BE >> >IDIOSYNCRATIC [4,5]. For example, the author had persistent sleep >> >problems and was constantly juggling with his routine. What effect >> >might this have had on the results? >> > >> >Turning next to the details of the paper. >> > >> >4) Introduction on missing methods. I'm not convinced that concepts >> >concerning idea generation are quite as missing as the author >> >suggests. For example, SIMONTON'S WORK [3] on creative productivity >> >(including his variation-selection model) and WEICK'S WORK [5] on >> >theory construction as disciplined imagination come to mind. The >> >notion that expert tools for idea generation will resemble those for >> >idea testing also seems MORE LIKELY TO BE A CHOICE THAN A NECESSITY >> >[5]. >> > >> >5) Introduction on self experimentation. The author should CLARIFY IN >> >WHAT SITUATIONS SELF-EXPERIMENTATION IS NOT VIABLE [2,5,6], and WHETHER >> >ITS USE FOR IDEA GENERATION IS DIFFERENT FROM ITS USE FOR IDEA TESTING >> >[2,5,6]. Although it is claimed that one of the main advantages of >> >self-experimentation is that it is easy to do, it struck me that MANY >> >OF THESE STUDIES TOOK A LONG TIME AND INVOLVED CONSIDERABLE PERSONAL >> >INVESTMENT [5]. The claim that discovery is always unexpected may be >> >true by definition but this does not mean that some expectations were >> >not involved and confirmed in the example studies. >> > >> >6) Stone-age living. I am uncomfortable with the notion that our >> >brains and bodies worked well in the Stone Age (indeed mortality rates >> >might suggest otherwise). NATURAL SELECTION does not optimise >> >components of living systems, it ACTS ON SYSTEMS AS A WHOLE [5] to >> >produce better adapted systems. Hence MANY ASPECTS OF HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY >> >AND PHYSIOLOGY MAY NOT HAVE WORKED PARTICULARLY WELL IN THE STONE AGE >> >[5]. This type of theory tends to provide POST HOC EXPLANATIONS [5] >> >i.e., the description of Stone Age living CAN BE ADJUSTED TO FIT THE >> >RESULTS [4,5]. >> > >> >7) Example 1, breakfast. It is suggested that the lights could have >> >produced a 90 minute oscillator, but alternatively they MAY HAVE >> >INTERFERED WITH AN ENDOGENOUS ULTRADIAN RHYTHM [5] (e.g., basic rest >> >and activity cycle). >> > >> >8) Example 2, faces. A problem in this example and elsewhere is that >> >the RELATED RESULTS TEND TO BE IN NOTE FORM RATHER THAN PROPERLY >> >INTEGRATED WITH THE FINDINGS [2,4,6]. Missing from the related results >> >is recent research that has found a CIRCADIAN RHYTHM IN HAPPY MOOD >> >(e.g., BOIVIN ET AL., 1997) [3,4]. However, this rhythm is usually >> >only apparent under certain conditions such as irregular sleep-wake >> >cycles and depression (e.g., TOTTERDELL, 1995) [3]. At other times, >> >the rhythm is masked by other factors. Related to this, circadian >> >rhythms usually only explain a small amount of the variance in mood. >> >This suggests that the circadian effect may not have a strong influence >> >on everyday living (now or in the Stone Age). >> > >> >The author has related his results on faces to those concerning >> >depression. However, the effects he found on overall mood were based >> >on AVERAGES OVER A SELECTED TIME FRAME (NEXT DAY), WHICH MAY BE >> >PROBLEMATIC GIVEN THAT THE EFFECT IS RHYTHMIC AND COMMENCES 12 HR AFTER >> >THE TRIGGER EVENT [4,5]. Exposure to faces in the morning and evening >> >might also cancel each other out. Is it not likely that the related >> >results concerning depression were caused by irregular sleep-wake >> >cycles (e.g., staying up late to watch TV) rather than by the faces on >> >TV. Is there evidence to support the claim that modern living enforces >> >greater variation in time of arising? Don't most people start >> >school/work about the same time and therefore arise about the same >> >time? Commuter trains/buses might also involve much exposure to early >> >morning faces. It also wasn't clear to me that morning exposure to >> >faces prevents insomnia -- the author's awakenings persisted, for >> >example. >> > >> >9) Example 3, standing. Models of alertness (e.g. FOLKARD AND >> >AKERSTEDT [3]) suggest that alertness is determined by the combined >> >influence of an endogenous circadian component C, an exogenous sleep >> >need component S which is recuperated during sleep but builds up with >> >time awake, and a wake-up component W. Given that time standing was >> >correlated with time awake and that it was associated with reduced >> >sleep duration, could its effect on feeling rested actually be due to >> >changes in S (as an artefact or otherwise) and even C? Perhaps the >> >author could CONTROL FOR TIME AWAKE AND SLEEP DURATION 4,5]. >> > >> >10) Example 4, morning light. The description suggests that the >> >experiment was conducted near a window, so does the No- Light Condition >> >really mean NO LIGHT OR DOES IT MEAN NO-LAMPS [4,5] (but with >> >sunlight). The author is quite right in pointing out that most >> >research has concentrated on phase rather than amplitude effects. >> > >> >11) Example 5, colds. There are some interesting observations here. >> > >> >12) Pavlovian weight control. Although the principles outlined in the >> >second set of studies seemed plausible to me, I am not sufficiently >> >expert on dietary factors to judge the details of the example studies. >> >However, the author DOES NOT APPEARED TO HAVE TAKEN ACCOUNT OF THE >> >AMOUNT EATEN [4,5] in example 6 concerning water or in example 9 >> >concerning sushi. How can the explanation of the Ramirez study (in >> >example 10) that the rats gained weight because of increased water >> >intake be RECONCILED WITH INCREASED WATER INTAKE AND WEIGHT LOSS IN >> >EXAMPLE 6 [5,6] ? The ideas that water erases flavor memories and that >> >sweetness doesn't raise the set point also seem HIGHLY SPECULATIVE >> >[4,5] (but not necessarily wrong). >> > >> >13) General discussion. The AUTHOR'S CATEGORIES FOR THE EXAMPLES SEEM >> >RATHER CRUDE E.G., PUZZLING, HARD TO BELIEVE [5]. COULD A BETTER >> >SYSTEM BE DEVISED? [4,6] There also seems to be some IRRELEVANT >> >MATERIAL [2,7], for example the discussion of JEP. The author calls >> >for methods that can test many possible causes at one time, but what >> >about the problem that there will be a HIGH NUMBER OF FALSE POSITIVES >> >[5]? The author has observed that the self- experiments all involve >> >self-regulatory processes. Could it therefore be the case that this >> >method is useful because it is suitable for addressing the sorts of >> >phenomenon (e.g., temporal processes) that most experiments cannot or >> >do not address. Similarly perhaps it is good for generating >> >applications because it addresses everyday practical matters. >> > >> >14) There are QUITE A FEW MINOR ERRORS IN THE TEXT [2] (e.g., figure >> >12 duplication in caption, Table 4 missing words). The use of hyphens >> >is also unusual. >> > >> > >> >In summary, I liked much of the contents of the paper and would like to >> >see many of the ideas and results published. However, I think the >> >paper is in need of an extensive overhaul. In terms of a commentary, >> >points 8 and 9 might form the basis for a commentary. >> > >> > >> >======================================================================== >> >Referee #3 >> > >> >This reviewer very strongly supports publication of this paper, >> >provided the STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT FEATURES ONLY ARE PRESENTED WITH >> >A PROPER DISCUSSION [2,4,5,6]. The author could thus set an example for >> >many others to follow in sleep and much broader research with >> >relatively simple tools, complementing the current use of expensive >> >devices during a night in the sleep lab and continuing with the use of >> >simple tools to collect data amenable to the resolution of infradian, >> >such as about half-weekly or weekly variation (1-5). The main point >> >that self-experimentation can give new ideas, COULD BE DOCUMENTED WITH >> >APPROPRIATE HYPOTHESIS TESTING AND PARAMETER ESTIMATIONS, OR AT LEAST >> >BY SEQUENTIAL TESTING, BY CUMULATIVE SUMS [4,5] (6) or otherwise. It >> >would be a pity if others had to take data off graphs that may involve >> >considerable error in so doing. >> > >> >Credit is given to the few instances where the author mentions >> >statistics, albeit not applied to the rhythmic functions he >> >investigates. A general comment is that the author should TEST WHATEVER >> >HE HAS AVAILABLE NUMERICALLY, RATHER THAN RELYING ON TESTS WITHOUT >> >PARAMETER ESTIMATIONS [4,5], such as those on page 19. The author also >> >deals with periodic functions and any INFRADIAN RHYTHMS, notably weekly >> >ones, characterizing, for instance, sleep and wakefulness SHOULD BE >> >RESOLVED [4,5]. He could assess circaseptan parameters on different >> >regimens by TESTS OF THE ZERO AMPLITUDE ASSUMPTION [4,5], and if that >> >can be rejected, by SUBSEQUENT PARAMETER ESTIMATIONS [4] (7). Changes >> >in parameters are revealed by PARAMETER COMPARISONS [4] (8). The >> >QUESTION OF POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC REASONING SHOULD ALSO BE >> >ADDRESSED IN EACH CASE [5], whether or not it can be answered >> >definitively. >> > >> >The author deserves great credit for studying himself in the medical >> >tradition of the physician Santorio, who recorded his body weight for >> >30 years, in keeping with many others in chronobiology, where >> >self-study, self-measurement and self-rating has been the rule, even >> >when it involves drawing blood every 90 minutes, day and night for 2 >> >days (9) or much longer. Some individuals have measured ten or more >> >body functions around the clock for years, more than one even for >> >decades (10, 11). The more rigorous documentation of the manipulations >> >of body weight could benefit from his consulting publications that >> >showed the stage-dependence of the effect of meals, which he has >> >apparently not examined (12, 13). >> > >> >The author may wish to discard his statement that medical uses of >> >self-experimentation, on p. 3, 2, "have also been quite brief, >> >typically also for a few days"; it is AT VARIANCE WITH SELF-STUDIES, >> >SOME INVOLVING BLOOD DRAWING AT 90-MINUTE INTERVALS FOR A FEW DAYS >> >[4,3,5] (9), but continued in several cases for months or covering over >> >3 decades, as noted. On p. 8 and on p. 16, about social >> >synchronization, the author may wish to CONSULT REFERENCE 14 [3]. The >> >STATISTICAL EVALUATION OF EACH RECORD COULD BE PART OF EACH GRAPH [2,4] >> >so that statistical test results complement eyeballing. In summary, I >> >congratulate the author for following the medical tradition of another >> >era. I am glad to waive anonymity and am ready to serve him if he >> >should be interested. >> > >> >1. Beau J., Carlier M., Duyme M., Capron C., Perez-Diaz F. Procedure to >> >extract a weekly pattern of performance of human reaction time. >> >Perceptual and Motor Skills 88: 469-483, 1999. >> > >> >2. Hildebrandt G., Bandt-Reges I. Chronobiologie in der Naturheilkunde: >> >Grundlagen der Circaseptanperiodik. Haug, Heidelberg, 1992, 102 pp. >> > >> >3. D'rer L. Rhythm and proliferation with special reference to the >> >six-day rhythm of blood leukocyte count. Neoplasma 7: 117-134, 1960. >> > >> >4. Halberg F., Engeli M., Hamburger C., Hillman D. Spectral resolution >> >of low-frequency, small-amplitude rhythms in excreted 17-ketosteroid; >> >probable androgen induced circaseptan desychronization. Acta >> >endocrinol. (Kbh.) Suppl. 103, 5-54, 1965. >> > >> >5. Halberg F. The week in phylogeny and ontogeny: opportunities for >> >oncology. In vivo 9: 269-278, 1995. >> > >> >6. Corn'lissen G., Halberg F., Hawkins D., Otsuka K., Henke W. >> >Individual assessment of antihypertensive response by self-starting >> >cumulative sums. J. Medical Engineering & Technology 21: 111-120, >> >1997. >> > >> >7. Corn'lissen G., Halberg F. Chronomedicine. In: Encyclopedia of >> >Biostatistics, Armitage P., Colton T. (editors-in-chief), v. 1, John >> >Wiley & Sons Ltd., Chichester, UK, 1998, pp. 642-649. >> > >> >8. Bingham C., Arbogast B., Corn'lissen Guillaume G., Lee J.K., Halberg >> >F. Inferential statistical methods for estimating and comparing cosinor >> >parameters. Chronobiologia 9: 397-439, 1982. >> > >> >9. Halberg F., Visscher M.B., Flink E.B., Berge K., Bock F. Diurnal >> >rhythmic changes in blood eosinophil levels in health and in certain >> >diseases. Journal-Lancet (Minneapolis) 1951; 71: 312-319. >> > >> >10. Halberg F, Corn'lissen G, Otsuka K, Watanabe Y, Katinas GS, Burioka >> >N, Delyukov A, Gorgo Y, Zhao ZY, Weydahl A, Sothern RB, Siegelova J, >> >Fiser B, Dusek J, Syutkina EV, Perfetto F, Tarquini R, Singh RB, Rhees >> >B, Lofstrom D, Lofstrom P, Johnson PWC, Schwartzkopff O, International >> >BIOCOS Study Group. Cross-spectrally coherent ~10.5- and 21-year >> >biological and physical cycles, magnetic storms and myocardial >> >infarctions. Neuroendocrinol Lett 2000; 21: 233-258. >> > >> >11. Corn'lissen G., Halberg F., Schwartzkopff O., Delmore P., Katinas >> >G., Hunter D., Tarquini B., Tarquini R., Perfetto F., Watanabe Y., >> >Otsuka K. Chronomes, time structures, for chronobioengineering for "a >> >full life". Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology 1999; 33: 152-187. >> > >> >12. Halberg F., Haus E., Corn'lissen G. From biologic rhythms to >> >chronomes relevant for nutrition. In: Not Eating Enough: Overcoming >> >Underconsumption of Military Operational Rations, Marriott B.M. (ed.), >> >National Academy Press, Washington D.C., 1995, pp. 361- 372. >> > >> >13. Halberg F. From aniatrotoxicosis and aniatrosepsis toward >> >chronotherapy: Introductory remarks to the 1974 Capri Symposium on >> >timing and toxicity: the necessity for relating treatment to bodily >> >rhythms. In: Chronobiological Aspects of Endocrinology, J. Aschoff, F. >> >Ceresa, F. Halberg eds., F.K. Schattauer Verlag, Stuttgart, 1974, pp. >> >1-34. >> > >> >14. Apfelbaum M., Reinberg A., Nillus P., Halberg F. Rythmes circadiens >> >de l'alternance veille-sommeil pendant l'isolement souterrain de sept >> >jeunes femmes. Presse m'd. 77: 879-882,1969. >> > >> >As to ratings it is clearly A with the above descriptive, not >> >prescriptive, commentary >> > >> > >> >======================================================================== >> >Referee #4 ANON >> > >> >I think that "Self-experimentation as a source of ideas" is an >> >interesting and important paper. It is particularly appropriate for >> >BBS because it is likely to arouse intense commentary - both positive >> >and negative - from a wide range of disciplines. Psychology, and >> >surely other scientific areas implicated in these arguments, is often >> >reluctant to spread its wings and search out alternative ways of >> >looking at research topics - and, according to Roberts' argument, for >> >ways of identifying research topics. In this paper Roberts has drawn >> >upon insights, research, confirmation and challenge from a remarkably >> >wide range of disciplines and sub-disciplines. Bringing together such >> >a wide range of research findings is also likely to make the paper >> >interesting and provocative to numerous individuals. >> > >> >I like the organization followed in each of the sections: The >> >self-experimentation Example; the presentation of Related Results, >> >drawing from a wide range of research areas; finally, the Discussion, >> >which pulls these findings and the research together. I don't think >> >this can be improved. >> > >> >Possible problems with the paper: >> > >> >The paper is TOO LONG [2,7] for my tastes. The length has the >> >advantages of making sub-elements of the paper quite clear. Methods >> >that have not been fully spelled out in earlier Roberts' papers are >> >described in enough detail that replication would be possible (at least >> >to a first pass). However, replication seems only a secondary goal of >> >the paper. Roberts' primary goal is to persuade that >> >self-experimentation is as an overlooked or undervalued method - and >> >the details with which the paper is laden may be an obstacle to >> >achieving that goal. >> > >> >A related difficulty is that in his eagerness to lay out the wealth of >> >ideas that self-experimentation has generated (certainly a goal >> >consistent with the paper's purpose) he DESCRIBES A LESS STRONG >> >EXPERIMENT OR TWO [4,5]. He also includes a wealth of TABLES THAT DO >> >NOT ADD [2,4] fundamentally to his core issue. Such complexity does >> >not weaken the overall argument, but it adds to the length, makes it >> >more difficult to follow and does not strengthen the major arguments. >> > >> >Roberts, one would guess, knows from experience that critics will >> >attack the issue of "expectations" as having a significant impact on >> >outcomes. Such arguments occur with all self-experimentation studies. >> >He deals with this issue throughout the paper protesting perhaps too >> >much. I think he should DEAL WITH THE ISSUE ONCE AND MOVE ON [2,7] (if >> >this is possible). >> > >> >Commentary >> > >> >Roberts is clearly NOT THE ONLY ONE [3] who has engaged in >> >self-experimentation in areas of health, wealth and happiness. The >> >present reviewer, and undoubtedly thousands of others, makes more or >> >less coherent records (some lasting for many decades) of modifications >> >in diets on weight, of imposition of drugs on happiness, weight and >> >other measures. What distinguished Roberts from this large company is >> >the care with which records his data (three scales!!), his shrewd >> >ability to select the critical variable and the critical intervention, >> >and his ability to impose upon himself experimental conditions few >> >would find it easy or even possible to comply with. I am led, however, >> >to a vision of a research method in which hundreds or thousands of >> >individuals amassed their data on a common topic (more on this below). >> > >> >Although Roberts' arguments are quite comprehensive (sometimes almost >> >overwhelmingly so), he does omit (or bury) one theme -the issue of >> >INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES [5]. To take only one example: fascinated by >> >his mention of fructose water as a weight loss mechanism, I implemented >> >a modest level of fructose in my drinking water. Although my beginning >> >concentrations were considerably lower than even his last and lowest >> >level (I was concerned about blood sugar levels) I encountered a very >> >different reaction - pains in joints that are ordinarily all pain >> >free. Using a standard design of fructose, no-fructose, etc., in a >> >matter of two weeks it was clearly demonstrable that I have a strong >> >sensitivity to fructose (at least in the powered form I used). This >> >relationship (like a number of Roberts appeared to be causal) and like >> >many of his, was quite surprising. Moreover, like Roberts I am able to >> >speak authoritatively about pain in joints because over a 20-year >> >period I have monitored the health of individual joints on each hand >> >(codes for each joint, a variety of indicators of pain - at least three >> >measures on each joint, etc.). Distinctive patterns of pain accompany >> >certain additives in food. Eliminating the offending additive >> >eliminates the difficulty. Adding the offending element back into the >> >diet immediately (within hours) reproduces the difficulty. I >> >assiduously avoid any food that produces a measurable reaction. >> > >> >In summary, there are probably enormous individual differences in >> >reaction to foods, as well as to other elements in Roberts' fascinating >> >programs. This is not an argument against his approach. In fact, an >> >approach such as his, with an informed citizenry contributing data, may >> >be the only way for us to ever recognize the full range of differences >> >among individuals on health and psychological dimensions. Birdsource >> >(www.birdsource.com ) permits individuals >> >throughout the country to make contributions to observations on the >> >locations of birds. Enormously more is known about the migration of >> >species than can be learned from other more formal scientific sources. >> >I can imagine and much approve of a new contribution to health issues >> >provided by an expanded application of Roberts' method. >> > >> >======================================================================== >> >Referee #5 >> > >> >A. General comments and evaluation >> > >> >This paper describes a body of ingenious, systematic, and risky >> >research conducted over more than a decade. It is focused on the use >> >of self-experimentation (SE) as a source of new ideas. However, it >> >also demonstrates the use of SE as a means of testing ideas that would >> >be difficult and expensive to test using conventional methods, because >> >the testing involves treatments that radically affect life-style, that >> >must be applied for long periods, and that involve measurements that in >> >some cases would be difficult without a live-in sleep-in laboratory >> >and/or major modifications of a home and/or work environment. >> > >> >The domains of research are interesting and important: as the title >> >says, they include sleep quality, mood, level of health, and control of >> >weight. It is true that the research involves just one subject, >> >experimenting on himself, raising issues of generality and bias, and no >> >doubt raising alarms in some readers because of their belief that SE is >> >taboo as a research method. But if further work, suggested by these >> >findings, showed that they were valid and that they applied to even a >> >small fraction of the general population, the payoff in human health >> >and happiness would be very great. And it is not at all clear that >> >such systematic work on these questions would have been attempted, >> >using conventional methods. Indeed, the fact that so many new, >> >interesting, surprising, and potentially important and useful findings >> >could have emerged from this work shows that SE may promote research >> >that is otherwise not done, even though in principal it could be. And >> >one major new finding with these features -- and one that was >> >surprising to the investigator, is the remarkable productivity of SE in >> >answering questions in these domains. >> > >> >The main question raised in the context of these findings is how to go >> >about generating interesting and promising new ideas in human >> >behavioral and biological science, a very important question about >> >which we know little. The commentaries that would be stimulated by >> >this article are likely to further illuminate this issue, especially if >> >commentators are explicitly invited to do so, as well as to address the >> >specific material presented in the paper. >> > >> >Another way to regard the paper is as a case study in the history of >> >ideas within science, something with which few scientists ever provide >> >us. In this case, the paper will be of interest to many readers for >> >professional reasons, because of the substantive issues addressed and >> >the research method, but should also be of interest to almost all >> >readers for personal reasons. >> > >> >Overall, I find this paper fascinating, provocative, profoundly >> >original, imaginative, highly controversial, and likely to change some >> >readers' beliefs about how to make progress in behavioral and >> >biological science. It reflects the many years of research and >> >thinking that led up to it, in its refinement of ideas and >> >consideration of their implications. In short, this paper is excellent >> >and, except for its length, is perfect for BBS. Furthermore, while I >> >feel that some MINOR ADJUSTMENTS IN CLARITY OF ORGANIZATION [2] may be >> >desirable (to help readers cope with the large amount of material the >> >paper contains), the large number (ten) of diverse examples is an >> >important contributor to the points made by the paper, so that any >> >salient length reduction would weaken it considerably. I also believe >> >that a number of MINOR REVISIONS MIGHT NOTICEABLY IMPROVE THE PAPER, >> >and recommend that BBS publish the paper after such revisions are >> >made. >> > >> >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >> >B. Comments on major issues. >> > >> >B1. The emphasis in the title and introduction is the use of SE >> >(self-experimentation) as a means of generating ideas. (See the cell >> >with the question-mark in Table 1.) I have four comments here: >> > >> >First, it would be helpful to PROVIDE EMPHASIS, IN EACH EXAMPLE, ON THE >> >DESCRIPTION OF THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA OR IDEAS [2,3,6]. This could be >> >done, e.g., by typographical emphasis, or (better) a NUMBERED >> >SUB-SECTION [2]. If unexpected observations, facilitated by >> >self-experimentation, are important (as indicated in the final section) >> >then perhaps they, also, should be given emphasis in a similar way, or >> >be included in the same sub-section. >> > >> >Second, some of the examples, especially those concerned with weight >> >regulation, are presented in a way that emphasizes the testing of ideas >> >rather than their generation. Yet the introduction separates >> >generation and testing of ideas ("two ends of a continuum"), and the >> >title emphasizes the utility of SE for idea generation. At the end of >> >the paper (Section 5.3) several other desirable features of SE are >> >discussed, including the ease of testing ideas. The paper should take >> >a consistent view: DOES IDEA GENERATION INCLUDE IDEA TESTING, OR NOT >> >[4,5]? Is the paper concerned primarily with idea generation or with >> >both that and idea testing. If not the latter, then the PRESENCE OF >> >SEVERAL OF THE EXAMPLES NEEDS TO BE EXPLAINED [4,5]. In the case of >> >weight regulation the main ideas are embodied in the theory described >> >in the introduction to Section 4, and even the new ideas added to the >> >"standard" set-point theory appear not to have originated from SE. >> > >> >Third, if possible I would like to see MORE ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION OF >> >WHAT IT IS ABOUT SE THAT ESPECIALLY FACILITATES THE BIRTH OF NEW IDEAS >> >[4,6]. This could be compared, for example, to reading the literature >> >and taking note of features of the data reported that may deviate >> >systematically from what the author or the reader expects, or to >> >noticing unexpected features in one's own data from a standard >> >experiment. Other methods that might be compared with SE include the >> >incorporation into standard experiments of supplementary observations >> >not called for by the main goals of the experiment, or the >> >incorporation of extra experimental manipulations as factors crossed >> >with the ones of main interest (which, as R. A. Fisher showed, costs >> >little). >> > >> >Fourth, if an important feature of SE is the ability to easily test >> >ideas (as distinct from generating them), a point made in Section 5, >> >then perhaps the TITLE AND INTRODUCTION SHOULD BE REVISED TO INCLUDE >> >THIS FEATURE [2,4,6]. >> > >> >---------------------- >> > >> >B2. My impression is that the two main reasons people give when they >> >argue against SE are the possible role of expectancies, and the SMALL >> >SAMPLE SIZE [4,5] (one). The first issue is considered in the paper, >> >but the second gets little attention. THIS ISSUE OF SAMPLE SIZE AND >> >THE PROBLEM OF GENERALIZATION NEEDS TO BE BROUGHT OUT, DISCUSSED >> >SOMEWHERE [4,5,6], and at least mentioned in the introduction, to make >> >it clear that the author has considered it. (Otherwise readers may be >> >deterred from reading further.) It may also be helpful to mention early >> >the idea that there is a TABOO AGAINST THE SE METHOD, and to at least >> >start discussing WHAT THE BASIS (AND THE HISTORY) MIGHT BE [2,3]. My >> >impression is that the taboo may be against using only data from SE; >> >see comment below on the study of sensory processes. >> > >> >---------------------- >> > >> >B3. With respect to the role of expectations, I think that the argument >> >that they are unimportant, based on findings that were initially >> >unexpected, is a good one (and one of the reasons why examples not be >> >omitted to shorten the paper). But once an observation has been made, >> >this argument disappears; the impressive consistency in some of the >> >findings, when they have been repeated, could have been produced by >> >expectations of consistency. This ISSUE SHOULD BE ACKNOWLEDGED [5]. >> > >> >It is also possible that the influence of expectations MAY VARY FROM >> >EXPERIMENTER TO EXPERIMENTER [5], in SE, so that even if Roberts' >> >findings from SE are found to generalize to other subjects, another >> >investigator's findings from his or her SE, influenced more by >> >expectations, might not. >> > >> >Another sense in which the success of SE might not generalize is to >> >other kinds of questions or measures. The unexpected findings about >> >mood impress me more than unexpected findings about weight gain, >> >because I believe that mood ratings are more likely to be influenced by >> >expectations that is weight gain. The long tradition of SE in the >> >study of sensory processes probably reflects the belief, held until the >> >advent of signal-detection theory, that decision processes were >> >relatively unimportant in sensory experiments, and that the results of >> >such experiments depend on physiological states of affairs that are >> >relatively uniform among most subjects. >> > >> >---------------------- >> > >> >B4. In Section 2.1 some of the earlier thinking about how discoveries >> >are made, and mentions Hyman (1964) and Root-Bernstein (1989). But >> >there is ACTUAL RESEARCH ON THIS QUESTION, reviewed, for example, in >> >KLAHR & SIMON (1999) [3], Psychological Bulletin, 125, 524-543. It >> >would be helpful if Roberts could CONNECT HIS IDEAS AND FINDINGS TO >> >THOSE [3,6], and do so succinctly so as not to enlarge the paper >> >further. >> > >> >---------------------- >> > >> >B5. Evolutionary arguments play important roles at several points in >> >the manuscript. There seems to be an implicit assumption that human >> >characteristics evolve independently, and hence that every >> >characteristic must be adaptive -- must itself serve some useful >> >function. This ASSUMPTION SHOULD BE MADE EXPLICIT AND DISCUSSED >> >[5,6]. >> > >> >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >> > >> >C. Comments on expository issues >> > >> >INDICATE ORGANIZATION AT OUTSET (e.g., tell reader that each example >> >will include related results and discussion); important to make the >> >organization of this long paper more transparent. If possible, a table >> >of contents would help greatly. E.g., say anticipate the "related >> >results" sections. >> > >> >RECONSIDER NUMBERING OF SECTIONS AND SUB-SECTIONS; NAMING OF >> >SUB-SECTIONS; ADDING NEW SUB-SECTIONS. If the structure is >> >hierarchical, USE SECTION NUMBERING THAT MAKES THIS CLEAR. [2] >> > >> >Emphasize BIRTH OF IDEAS, UNEXPECTED OBSERVATIONS. [2,3,6] >> > >> >Reconsider numbering and naming of sections and sub-sections. >> > >> >Consider numbering examples with the main sections they are from - >> >e.g., example 3.3 instead of example 2. >> > >> >Continue decimal numbering in all sub-sections, to help reader to know >> >where he/she is in the text, to help in searching for particular parts >> >of examples, and to make cross-referencing within the paper (and in the >> >commentaries) easier. >> > >> >SUBDIVIDE the sections that are especially long, with suitable >> >headings. >> > >> >Reconsider all subheads to help reader keep oriented. >> > >> >Some statements are made with TOO MUCH CERTAINTY. [5] >> > >> >"DIFFERENT FROM" [2] rather than "different than" in most cases (as in >> >"separate from", "distinct from", "apart from"; one thing differs from >> >another.) >> > >> >DATES and other biographical details. Dates are provided from time to >> >time, e.g., the first probably appears in the caption of Figure 1. It >> >is not clear what the reader should do with these. Are they important >> >enough for him to remember? Are they important enough to be included? >> >I suggest that these be given in a SEPARATE TABLE, POSSIBLY IN AN >> >APPENDIX, AND MENTIONED ONLY WHEN NECESSARY IN TABLES, FIGURES, OR >> >CAPTIONS. [2,7] >> > >> >Several of the REFERENCES MENTIONED IN THE TEXT ARE NOT IN THE >> >REFERENCE LIST. [2,3] >> > >> >Data points on a number of the plots (in the copy I am using) are not >> >closed shapes. E.g. many of the points in Fig. 23 consist of two sides >> >of a triangle. In all these cases, CLOSED SHAPES WOULD MAKE THE PLOTS >> >EASIER TO COMPREHEND [2]. >> > >> >"Processing" of food is sometimes used in a way that makes it unclear. >> >Aren't all foods "processed"? (Is the term well enough defined so that >> >spraying, picking, shipping, and affixing a code label to a piece of >> >fruit are not instances of processing?) >> > >> >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >> > >> >D. Comments about particular points in the text >> > >> >These are keyed to page numbers in a pdf version of the manuscript >> >dated 3/5/2001. With the page number is indicated quarter of the page, >> >as a, b, c, or d. Also, for stylistic simplicity, some of these >> >comments are addressed to the author ("you", "your"). >> > >> >2b. a large amount -> considerably >> > >> >2c. big difference between first and second series (theory in second) >> > >> >4b. "all possible ideas". Is this what actually happens? Doesn't one >> >often start with a question, or an observation (including, in >> >psychology, an introspection) >> > >> >5a. Should say that in SE the investigator and the subject are one. It >> >is therefore restricted to experiments where the subjects are humans >> >and (presumably) the outcome can't be fatal. Also, SE differs from >> >other methods in being subject to a special kind of bias. Deal with >> >this problem here, or anticipate dealing with it later. >> > >> >5d. "differed even more" than what? >> > >> >5d. I believe there are other famous instances of SE in the psychology >> >of perception. E.g. HELMHOLTZ, HERING, MATIN [3] (curare). (The first two >> >checked their findings with other subjects, but Matin did not, because >> >of the severity of the treatment.) >> > >> >6a, 6c. I think the importance of Kristofferson's experiments are >> >underestimated, and that they did reveal new cause-effect linkages. >> >See comment later. >> > >> >6c. "discoveries .. cannot be due to expectations". Seems glib. >> > >> >6d. "testing possible solutions". But this paper is supposedly about >> >generating the ideas for solutions. >> > >> >7b. input/output distinction should be made more clear. >> > >> >8c. What about the stimulus suggested a 90-minute period? >> > >> >9b. "baked goods". This will be interpreted as including bread. Ok? >> > >> >11d. "no breakfast". This paragraph describes the birth of the first >> >idea, and should be given emphasis (see above). >> > >> >12ab. This FIGURE COULD BE IMPROVED [2,4]. The scale of the x-axis >> >could be days (into the experiment, starting with 1); Given that the >> >dates are unimportant, particular ones could then be equated to day >> >number in the caption; this would reduce clutter, Regions for different >> >treatments should be delimited more clearly. The same measure (time to >> >fall asleep after awakening) is used to define "early awakening" and to >> >measure its magnitude. These two features are hard to separate from >> >the plot. One possible improvement would be to plot them separately, >> >the first as a smoothed proportion or cumulative number, and the second >> >as a smoothed duration versus time in treatment. Perhaps, given Figure >> >3, Figure 2 is not even needed. >> > >> >12d. *positive* correlation. >> > >> >13a-d. Make caption conform to plot labels. If Fig. 3 is based just on >> >Fig. 2 data, say so in caption. >> > >> >14c. due to *experimenter* expectations. >> > >> >14d. There should be more analysis of and emphasis on *HOW* SE >> >CONTRIBUTED TO GENERATION OF THE IDEA [4,5,6]. >> > >> >15a. Conjectures about what our ancestors did or didn't eat should be >> >stated more tentatively. This one should be accompanied by an >> >explanation. >> > >> >15b. This paragraph describes the birth of the first idea associated >> >with example 2, and should be emphasized, along, perhaps, of comments >> >about HOW IT WAS FACILITATED BY SE [4,6]. >> > >> >15c. "Events that affect the phase of a rhythm usually affect its >> >amplitude": is this a conjecture? If not, can you provide a >> >reference? Perhaps it doesn't matter; in that case you could say "I >> >believed that events ... amplitude". >> > >> >16a. Re Szalai's survey: As written, this suggests that this survey >> >information helped to generate the idea. If this is autobiography you >> >might say when you learned about the survey. >> > >> >16a. than in persons -> than persons >> > >> >16a. watching (upper -> watching at midnight (upper >> > >> >17a. difference was -> difference seemed (autobiographical) >> > >> >19a. This paragraph describes the birth of the second idea associated >> >with example 2. See comment re 15b and first idea. >> > >> >20ab. There are no filled points. >> > >> >22a-d. To demonstrate a delayed effect of the treatment, don't you need >> >data between the treatment time (6am) and the following 6pm? And to >> >show that the effect ends 24 hours after it starts, don't you need data >> >after the second 6pm? The absence of any effect during the first 12 >> >hours or after the next 24 hours seems quite important, so more should >> >be done to persuade the reader that it is true. >> > >> >23a. It would be good to say, explicitly, that exposure to faces raised >> >mood with a one-day lag *and for just one day* (or something like >> >this). >> > >> >23a-d. Caption should be adjusted: This figure is concerned with TV >> >distance as well as TV size. Visual angle subtended by the face should >> >be indicated in the legend. To determine the roles of distance versus >> >visual angle, a (projected) 3-D plot could be shown, with visual size >> >as distance as independent variables. Alternatively, it may be helpful >> >to perform a multiple regression of mood versus those two factors. >> > >> >24b. Conversational distance should be specified. It would also be >> >useful to know the approximate fraction of the screen covered by the >> >face. It is not at all clear whether you are claiming that there is a >> >distance effect in addition to a visual-angle effect. Why is 20/1 >> >better than 32/1.5? This suggests that there is a separate distance >> >effect. >> > >> >27b-c. If possible, make the points for Vancouver and Seattle distinct >> >from the others, and easy to group together. E.g., they might be + and >> >x. Explain filled points in the caption as well as in the text. >> > >> >28d. Did the increase occur after the second interview? >> > >> >29c. Re bipolar disorder: Isn't it important whether the equal >> >intervals were daily - i.e. whether the shift occurs within 24 hours? >> > >> >29c. Figure 6 doesn't show that there's no effect during the initial 12 >> >hours. >> > >> >29d. If the new ideas were highly plausible, wouldn't someone have >> >thought of them without SE? More generally, mustn't there be a limit >> >on the plausibility of new ideas based on unexpected findings? >> > >> >31a-c. Without support from research, several of these statements are >> >expressed too strongly. As conjectures they seem reasonable and >> >interesting, but stated as they are, they may alienate readers. (E.g., >> >"productive group work requires . .", "happy people complain less . . >> >") >> > >> >31c. if you starts at 70; -> if you start at 70, >> > >> >31c. "another reason for a rhythm": benefit rather than explanation? >> > >> >31d. "this data bears" -> these data bear >> > >> >32b. "breakfast and go" -> breakfast and do go >> > >> >32c. "no other explanation": You haven't explicitly provided an >> >explanation. So one has to assume that it is no faces in the am, and >> >faces in the evening. Do you really want to assert this as an >> >"explanation" of depression? >> > >> >33a. Birth of idea in Example 3. See above. >> > >> >33a. "Stone-Age humans": Evidence or other justification? >> > >> >33c-d, 34a. Make clear that there were three levels of the treatment, >> >and relate the separation between the second and third phase explicitly >> >to Table 3. Make clear where the percentages (29%, 9%) come from. >> >Given the data, it is surprising that the test results are so >> >different. >> > >> >34a. after standing that much *during a day* I awoke *the next morning* >> >feeling . . >> > >> >34b. "no psychology experiment". Is it a psychology experiment or a >> >physiology experiment? >> > >> >34d. median of *observations on* 20 days. >> > >> >36a. Anticipate this suggestion (and others?) about ways of making SE >> >double blind, in initial discussions of the method and what the paper >> >will do. >> > >> >37d. Caption: "time to of bed" -> time to bed. >> > >> >38a. First sentence mentions 5 panels; next sentence applies to only >> >one. >> > >> >38b. ("The lack of a correlation . . ") Are there statistically better >> >ways to make these inferences? E.g., partial correlation? Isn't there >> >a problem if the other factors that do have effects might themselves be >> >correlated, or that, together, they might explain as much variance as >> >the prior duration of standing? >> > >> >39b. This argument would suggest that in someone who suffers from >> >osteoporosis, the condition does not apply to, e.g., the arms. Is that >> >the case? >> > >> >39d. "made sleep deeper": Given its use here, the idea of *depth of >> >sleep* requires a definition, or at least a reference. >> > >> >39d. The results cannot -> Some of the results cannot >> > >> >40a. "predicted ... more poorly". See comment above about partial >> >correlation. (How much additional variance is accounted for in a >> >multiple regression when standing duration is added to the other >> >factors?) >> > >> >40b. "did not make me feel more tired": any data other than subjective >> >impressions? >> > >> >40b. Re: "third, and most decisive": If the idea of sleep depth is >> >meaningful, then unless you say that you awaken when there is no S >> >remaining, which you cannot say) why assume that the duration/depth >> >tradeoff leaves S invariant? >> > >> >43b. "Stone-age people .. not stand all day"; "usually not in short >> >supply": Evidence or other justification? On page 33 you suggest a >> >lower bound on the amount they stood, here an upper bound. Better to >> >put these aspects of your conjecture about how much they stood >> >together, and then later tell the reader what he needs to believe for >> >your various arguments. Also, given these bounds, the health/sleep of >> >modern humans whose jobs are associated with standing becomes >> >especially important. >> > >> >44cd. In my version the plotted points are not closed curves, making >> >the graph harder to read. Even though the y-label says so, the caption >> >should also make clear that the rested ratings are on the subsequent >> >day. SAY EXACTLY WHAT THE ARROWS MEAN IN THE CAPTION [2,4]. >> > >> >45c. "ratings are easier to understand": But are they as valid? do >> >they show relations more clearly? >> > >> >46d. "on sleep-wanted ratings *on the next day*" (caption). >> > >> >47a. Summarize the rested ratings, to avoid skepticism. >> > >> >47a. "no clear effect": see comment on Fig. 17. >> > >> >48d. title of plot: "parameters *on the following night*". >> > >> >49a. "did not notice": puzzling: why not? >> > >> >49a. "on the time of day" -> on the time the ratings were made. Also, >> >this is written as if the time of the light is being varied. >> > >> >51a. "step function": mentioned earlier; refer back? more numbered >> >sub-sections would help in such references. Might help to anticipate >> >this part of this example in example 1. >> > >> >52c. These tests are not independent; better to do one test on points 1 >> >- 7. >> > >> >52cd. If the points are referred to by number, then number them on the >> >plot. See earlier comment about dates on plots. As above, for points >> >indicated by squares, the squares are not closed, having only three >> >sides. >> > >> >53a. bright light and non-seasonal depression: not clear whether it has >> >been shown not to help, or hasn't been tried. >> > >> >54a. Wehr, Wirz-Justice mentioned in previous paragraph; is redundancy >> >needed? >> > >> >54b. "spring of 1997": example of a biographical detail that is hard >> >for the reader to deal with (see above). If the date is important >> >because of what preceded it, then this should be stated. If the >> >chronology is important in general, then consider providing a time >> >line, perhaps labeling the critical points to be mentioned in the text >> >(T1, T2, etc.). >> > >> >55d. See comment about dates on plots. >> > >> >56c. "may have been fighting off an infection. *If so,* it is an >> >indication . ." >> > >> >56d. "sleep may have begun as a response to infection". Begun in which >> >species? Say something to increase plausibility? >> > >> >57a. "surely due to" seems too strong. >> > >> >57b. Bigger ratio of winter colds/summer colds in more northern >> >regions? >> > >> >58a. No need to mention Nieman (1994) in two successive sentences: use >> >"He". >> > >> >58c. Show dates (symbolically) on figure 20. >> > >> >58d. Re morning light in the workplace. Doesn't the light have to be >> >quite early, which limits applicability? (Does late light hurt the way >> >late faces are supposed to?) >> > >> >58d. "with some dissent": Worth indicating basis? >> > >> >58d. "helped develop a theory": Presenting the theory first weakens >> >this argument, which is also the main point of the paper as it is now >> >formulated. It is important to ANTICIPATE THIS, IN A SECTION THAT >> >DESCRIBES THE OVERALL ORGANIZATION OF THE PAPER AT THE OUTSET, AND ALSO >> >HERE [2]. Important to anticipate that you will say how components of the >> >theory came from SE. And it is important to say this, as the sequence >> >of SE tests are describes. The main emphasis now in these descriptions >> >is how the SE sequence tested and confirmed the theory, not how it gave >> >rise to elements of the theory. The best solution (if it actually >> >happened this way!) would be to use the standard theory and develop its >> >extensions and elaborations in pieces, along with the SE sequence. >> >Now, even the two assumptions added to the standard theory are not >> >described as coming from SE. All of this is, of course, related to B1 >> >above; an alternative is to recast the paper to emphasize two features >> >of SE. But if that is done, the introduction would have to be >> >radically altered. >> > >> >59a. Should you not also say that for a given degree of association, >> >more calories raise the set point more? >> > >> >59d. Worth pointing out that the broken lines are linear with time >> >(does this need justification? I.e., is it known to be true? Is it a >> >part of the theory? A new part?), while the solid lines are >> >decelerating, per added assumption (b). >> > >> >59d. (a) and (b) were also used above for the added two assumptions. >> >Use different letters. Indicate the status of these new two points. >> >The new (a) is, of course, simply a restatement of part of assumption >> >(b). If the new (b) is another assumption in the theory, say so, and >> >indicate its status relative to the standard theory. >> > >> >60a. If this is a fictitious numerical example, it would be better to >> >say something like "if at a high weight it falls 1kg/day . . .". but >> >if you point out that the solid curves are decelerating, that makes the >> >example unnecessary. >> > >> >60d. "by flavors" -> by a flavor. >> > >> >60d. "overlaps" -> temporally overlaps. >> > >> >61a. "weight that rats" -> weight than rats >> > >> >61c. (plentiful vs scarce food): (1) Doesn't this depend on the idea >> >that all foods are equally reduced in availability when there is a >> >shortage? Any basis for this? (2) Won't learning occur during the >> >shortage? >> > >> >62a. Describe the effects of additional food processing earlier, before >> >your conclusion about association strength. >> > >> >62a. Important to emphasize the role of Fig. 1 data, possibly >> >presenting it earlier in Section 4.1. >> > >> >62a. "Examples 6-10 developed the theory": Testing should be >> >distinguished from elaborating it. "Developing" it in the sense of >> >making it "plausible, meaningful, and detailed" should be related to >> >the primary thesis about SE and the generation of new ideas. >> > >> >62b. "change to the theory" -> change in the theory. >> > >> >64d. "This explanation implies": The principle on which this >> >implication is based is not clear. How does the implication follow? >> > >> >64d. Why not in "Related Results"? >> > >> >66b. "closely correlated" -> correlated negatively >> > >> >67abc. To unify the organization of the paper, shouldn't much of the >> >"Discussion" in this case be in "Related Results"? >> > >> >68d. Indicate the two weeks clearly on the plot. >> > >> >69b. "reduced the processing in my diet" (unclear; not standard usage) >> >-> reduced the amount of (highly) processed food . . (Could be the >> >degree of processing, or the presence of any processing. Aren't all >> >foods processed in some sense? >> > >> >71c. "had I started with a typical" -> had I preceded the sushi diet >> >with a typical. >> > >> >71c. "how much weight I would have lost": This reasoning depends on one >> >or more assumptions that may not be true. They should be brought out. >> > >> >72b. "23 versus 65" -> 23, versus 65 >> > >> >75a. "but it helped discover it": How did it help? And what does this >> >say in relation to the main thesis about idea generation? >> > >> >75d. "bad for you" -> bad for sleep. >> > >> >77c. "That an effect (e.g." -> That a treatment (e.g.. >> > >> >77c. "does not imply that others": Unclear; depending on how one >> >interprets "cured" it may seem like a contradiction. >> > >> >77d. Last sentence before Table 4 is unclear. First, what is >> >"determined" - not "sleep"; perhaps the amount of time spent sleeping. >> >Your problem was a particular one, i.e., early awakening. Why not use >> >this as what is "determined"? Perhaps what you mean to say is that >> >early awakening in others may result from causes other than those >> >associated with your early awakening, hence may be ameliorated by other >> >treatments. >> > >> >77d. Table 4: Either expand, to make the support more evident, or give >> >specific references to appropriate sub-sections in the text. >> > >> >78a. "constantly monitor". One of the important contributions to >> >theses instances of SE is the systematic and careful measurement and >> >recording that they exemplify. Exactly what do we "constantly >> >monitor"? In which examples was an effect evident without systematic >> >and careful measurement? It may also be important that even if you >> >made important discoveries without careful measurement, the >> >self-training associated with careful measurement may have made you >> >especially skilled at more informal monitoring. >> > >> >80a. (notice better mood): It would be helpful to catalog such >> >instances versus others, and whether they occurred before or after you >> >had systematically measured that variable (here mood). >> > >> >80c. "easy to test treatments never tested before": should add. "simply >> >because it made all tests easy" >> > >> >80d. "using conventional methods": Are conventional methods instances >> >of random search? >> > >> >80d. "effect of processing": again, unclear. -> effect of eating highly >> >processed food. >> > >> >81c. "include only one new cause-effect relationship": This seems much >> >too strong, partly because "cause-effect relationship" is not well >> >defined. For example, is the invariance of a measure over levels of a >> >potentially controlling factor a cause-effect relationship? Or is this >> >classed as a cause-noneffect relationship? I've checked only in the >> >case of the Kristofferson papers. In the 1976a paper mentioned, he >> >showed that under a certain procedure (a cause?) and extensive practice >> >(another cause?) the variability of duration estimates is astonishingly >> >invariant over a range of durations of about 150 to 550 msec. >> >(Duration is a potentially controlling factor, and one that shows >> >itself in other parts of the range.) In the 1976b paper mentioned, he >> >showed that after extensive practice (cause?) the increase of variance >> >with mean duration (another cause?) becomes similar to a step >> >function. You seem to be saying that our goal is to determine which >> >factors influence a given measure, and that the details of how they >> >influence that measure (the "shape" or "form" of the effect as a >> >function of the cause), or of exactly when they do or don't influence >> >it, or of factors that "ought to" but don't influence it, are of less >> >importance or interest. It seems to me that this goes in the direction >> >of trivializing quantitative relationships relative to qualitative >> >ones. This may be a reasonable view in some more primitive fields, but >> >may also be a view that keeps them primitive. Another issue is whether >> >the discovery of cause-effect relationships is the only goal, or the >> >only measure of effectiveness of a particular method of investigation. >> >Turning to cosmology, what would be the status of the discovery of the >> >background microwave radiation, with its spectrum and isotropy? This >> >discovery had a huge impact, but it is hard to describe it as a >> >discovery of a cause-effect relationship. (The cause-effect >> >relationship was purely theoretical.) >> > >> >81d. My guess is that a great deal of research in experimental >> >psychology with humans starts with SE - especially if one includes >> >cases where the observations are introspections. What is special in >> >the instances of SE described here is the great magnitude of the >> >effort, the deliberate manipulation of conditions, and the systematic >> >and numerous measurements. Thus, this is "formal" SE, not simply SE. >> > >> >82a. "regulatory processes are . . more difficult to study". >> >Certainly they seem to take longer. (On the other hand, can't >> >light-adaptation be described as a regulatory process?) Are they more >> >difficult in other ways? >> > >> >82b. "single intriguing observations". These should be emphasized when >> >they are initially presented, and included in a sub-section on "birth >> >of the idea", which could then be referred to here. >> > >> >83a. "experimental psychology . . applications have yet to appear". >> >This seems like a hazardous statement. HOW DOES ONE COUNT? [4,5] >> >Consider the case of the applications of psychoacoustic research to >> >speech communication by telephone, or to the design of hearing aids. >> >Or of applications of experimental psychology to the design of the >> >telephone key-pad, or the choice of typography, or the design of >> >computer displays. Or of psychometric research to testing. Or of >> >animal (and human) research to the development of behavior-relevant >> >drugs. Even given this short list, we are all exploiting applications >> >of experimental psychology every day of our lives. Why did the number >> >of PhDs in experimental psychology rise to about 200 in the Bell Labs >> >Development Area in the late 1970s? >> > >> >83a. "10-20 person years". This is normally taken to mean full-time. >> >Given evidence of your other work, it is probably a vast >> >over-estimate. >> > >> >83a. "new tool". As you say, there are other instances, and, as noted >> >above, there are still others. >> > >> >83b. Clearly if these findings are found to generalize, there are >> >applications, probably of great importance. BUT IT IS NOT AT ALL CLEAR >> >THAT IF THEY OCCUR IT WILL BE BECAUSE OF SE [4,5]. After all, most of >> >the SE work described in the present paper was motivated by the goal of >> >solving particular practical problems, unlike a great deal of the >> >research that experimental psychologists conduct. If there are fewer >> >applications that there "should be", it could equally well be a >> >consequence of numerous other factors, including the snobbishness of >> >some (many?) academic experimental psychologists about applied >> >research, the kinds of pressure placed (and not placed) on >> >investigators by government funding agencies. In the environment even >> >of the Research Area of Bell Labs, where technology transfer was more >> >salient than in academia, a discovery by experimental psychologists >> >became, during one year, the highest priority idea for patent >> >application in an organization that contained many engineers with >> >numerous patents. >> > >> >84a. These comments seem premature. Almost nothing is said in this >> >paper about whether there ARE any successful practical applications. >> >Given the studies described here, the problem of generalization over >> >subjects, alone, could be a major stumbling block. >> > >> >84d. Samples are often larger than 10, especially in JEP:HLM. Some of >> >the studies in JEP:HPP could surely be described as "high-tech". >> > >> >85b. "low-tech". Many of the experiments that I have done would never >> >have been attempted without computers. >> > >> >85bc. These statements are HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE, AND WILL ALIENATE >> >READERS [5,1]. I believe that JEP experiments often involve subtle >> >manipulations, delicate measurements, and sophisticated designs. It >> >may be easy to do research in experimental psychology, but it usually >> >isn't easy to do good research, in my view. >> > >> >86d. The stated importance of evaluating a function seems inconsistent >> >with the earlier emphasis on qualitative cause-effect relationships, >> >and the devaluing of Kristofferson's findings. >> > >> >87ab. This starts with literally spatial (i.e. geographic) data, and >> >ends with the conversion of non-spatial data into a spatial display. >> >(It isn't clear from the quotes which meaning Oliver had in mind. ) >> > >> >87b. It isn't clear that SE needs to involve a large number of >> >measures. (Consider the work mentioned above in vision.) Also, in >> >research in some domains (or for other experimenters and subjects), >> >expectations may have large effects, possibly precluding SE. >> > >> >88b. "published SE .. is rare". Many sensory studies include the main >> >author as one of the two or three subjects, so it is not so rare in >> >some domains. The fact that there are few publications of SE studies >> >need not be an indicator that it is seldom done. My own observations >> >(and practices) suggest that there is a great deal of of non-SE "pilot" >> >data that is also unpublished, probably for a number of reasons: >> >procedures different, evolving, and/or more informal, concern about >> >learning or practice effects and the inability to balance over them >> >when a procedure is evolving, and probably simply the complexity of the >> >description of design and procedure under those conditions. These >> >considerations surely also apply (with others, such as the possible >> >influence of expectations) to SE itself. To use Medawar's terms, SE >> >and pilot data are probably thought of in the "context of discovery"; >> >what gets published is in the "context of verification". That doesn't >> >mean that SE and pilot experiments are not used. >> > >> > >> >======================================================================== >> >======================================================================== >> > >> >[1] SUITABILITY FOR COMMENTARY [SIGNIFICANCE, ORIGINALITY & GENERALITY] >> >ACC 2 3 4 >> >MIN 5 >> >MAJ >> >NOT >> > >> >[2] PRESENTATION: >> >ACC 3 4 >> >MIN 5 >> >MAJ 2 >> >NOT >> > >> >[3] SCHOLARSHIP: >> >ACC 3 4 5 >> >MIN >> >MAJ 2 >> >NOT >> > >> >[4] EVIDENCE: >> >ACC 4 5 >> >MIN >> >MAJ 2 3 >> >NOT >> > >> >[5] REASONING: >> >ACC 3 4 >> >MIN 5 >> >MAJ 2 >> >NOT >> > >> >[6] THEORY: >> >ACC 3 4 5 >> >MIN >> >MAJ 2 >> >NOT >> > >> >[7} LENGTH: >> >ACC 3 5 >> >MIN 4 >> >MAJ 2 >> >NOT >> > >> >DISPOSITION >> >ACC >> >MIN 3 4 5 >> >MAJ 2 3 >> >NOT 1 >> >ELS >> From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 19 06:54:52 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:49 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Dlib article has errors Message-ID: In the following Dlib Article: "Academic Institutional Repositories Deployment Status in 13 Nations as of Mid 2005" Gerard van Westrienen & Clifford A. Lynch http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september05/westrienen/09westrienen.html the authors write: "In examining the software used to support IRs, we found considerable variation in the level of software diversity from one nation to the next; looking across nations, only a few packages saw use in many different countries, most notably the EPrints software, which according to our respondents is used in at least 7 of the 13 countries" In fact, a quick check (near mid-2005, since when there has been very little change) of the Institutional Archives Registry (itself not yet an exhaustive list) http://archives.eprints.org/ would have revealed the following Eprints archive counts for the (arbitrary) 13 countries sampled. Note that both the number of countries with Eprints archives and the number of Eprints archives in each is undercounted [incorrect Dlib estimate **, correction in (parens)]: Australia *7* (11) Belgium *0* (1) Canada *0* (12) Denmark *0* (2) Finland *0* (0) France *11* (11) Germany *2* (4) Italy *7* (12) Norway *0* (0) Sweden *3* (5) Netherlands *0* (0) UK *24* (35) US *+* (38) Total countries with Eprints archives: 10/13 (not, as reported, *7/13*) Total Register Eprints Archives: 22 countries Total Eprints Archives worldwide: 159 This is just a spot-check of a subset of the data from: Table 4: Number and kind of software packages used for IRs. on which I happen to have some systematic data. I suspect though, on statistical grounds alone, that Tables 1-3 are equally erroneous and incomplete: Table 1: Academic institutional Repositories; state of the art in 13 countries - June 2005 Table 2: Coverage of IRs related to type of objects (in percentage of total objects) Table 3: Estimations of disciplinary coverage of the IRs I sent these corrections to the authors and to Bonnie Wilson of Dlib well before the date of publication (hence closer to "mid-2005"), but alas no corrections were made. This is one of the risks of relying on hearsay soundings rather than systematic sources. (Note that the data from Canada are especially bad.) Caveat emptor. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 19 06:14:22 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:49 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, [Identity Deleted: engineer for medium-sized UK industry] wrote: > Professor Harnad, > > A very good paper. I would like to point out one major group of people > who are excluded from access to published research - staff working in > industry. Obviously there are some companies which are heavily research > oriented, for example drug companies, and who therefore subscribe to > a range of journals. However, outside this small group of companies > developers are excluded from direct access to new research results. You are quite right. And this is why I said that my estimate of loss -- which is based only on lost citations in peer-reviewed journals -- is an under-estimate: because it leaves out the loss from inaccessibility to potential users who might have made practical *applications* of the research findings, rather than writing a further research paper citing them: "And that is without even considering the wider loss in revenue from potential practical applications and usage of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry." http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html Industry tends to be mentioned in this context only as deep pockets that can afford subscriptions. But of course there is also a good deal of industry that cannot afford subscriptions, just as many research institutions cannot afford subscriptions to most journals -- and none, not even the Harvards, can afford access to all, most, or even many out of the total of c. 24,000 research journals published. Self-archiving is intended to supplement the affordable paid access for the would-be users among the Have-Nots who cannot afford it. (I personally find it crude and crass to speak of "wealth-creation" as the rationale and justification for supporting research and Learned Inquiry, but as that is, alas, the idiom in vogue today, the case for OA can, fortunately, be made purely in "wealth-creation" terms too. Hence all the hype about losses in potential impact-income.) > It would take a bit of digging to try and quantify the loss to the > economy. Clearly companies are not failing due to lack of access to > current research, but since so much research is funded on the basis > that it is of economic benefit there must be some impact if access by > industry is restricted to the research departments of a small number of > vary large companies. It's SMEs [Small/Medium-sized Industries] that have > the highest probability of picking up and exploiting a new idea. You are right that it is hard to quantify, but I suspect you are also right in your inference. Stevan Harnad > Principal Engineer > [Identity Deleted] Limited > Registered in England... From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 19 14:57:51 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:49 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Critique of research Fortnight article on RCUK policy proposal Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, [identity deleted] wrote: >> SH: (1) It's not an "argument," it is evidence: 14 years >> of self-archiving in the area where it is most advanced -- >> hence the best predictor of what is and is not likely to happen >> elsewhere -- physics, in which some areas already reached 100% >> self-archiving a number of years ago: No increased cancellations, >> peaceful co-existence, active collaboration between both of the >> learned societies involved -- the American Physical Society and >> the Institute of Physics, on the one hand, and the self-archiving >> research community and their archive (Arxiv) on the other hand. > > Have you spoken to any physics librarians recently? > > The ones I [have spoken] to don't see it like that at all. They see > the current scenario, whereby they are paying for subscriptions, and yet > much of the content is OA via the ArXiV, as inherently a broken model > that needs to change. They see the value in peer review, and see that > someone needs to to pay for the service that journals provide. But they > do not wish to be held to ransom over subscription prices, and do not > wish to be limited in what they can and can't do with the final version > of the article. > > They haven't de-subscribed en masse yet because they are a conservative > bunch, don't want to burn their bridges too soon, don't want to cause > unnecessary turmoil for journals, and think that coordinated action > is needed. > > But they're very keen to see change in the model by which journals > are funded, away from subscriptions, and will do whatever they can to > make it happen. I'm not quite sure of the thrust of what you are saying. (1) The objective *evidence* is not what librarians are *saying* but what they are/aren't *doing*; and after 14 years, they are still not cancelling physics journals. (2) This is not surprising, since, as repeatedly pointed out (e.g. by Derek Law), it is not really librarians who decide whether or not to cancel journals, but researchers -- and physicists are not asking their librarians to cancel their journals even though they use mostly Arxiv. (3) Librarians don't just deal with physics journals, hence they don't just *talk* about physics journals when they talk about "being held ransom" -- they are talking about all their journal holdings. (4) Self-archiving will not free librarians from the demands on their budgets; it will free researchers from access-denial to their research. And it will free both researchers and librarians from the current life/death *urgency* of acquisitions/cancellations decisions. (5) Self-archiving is not in the hands of librarians; it is in the hands of researchers. Librarians' views on it would carry no weight whatsoever -- except for one thing: Silly talk (by *some* librarians) like the above (which talk, to repeat, is not coupled with any objective actions on the part of librarians) *could* help to keep some researchers in their current state of paralysis and stupour about self-archiving. (5) Is that the objective? (6) If not, why are we talking about this? Stevan Harnad P.S. If some librarians are silly, most researchers are more than silly, and they are the real culprits for the grotesquely late arrival of 100% OA. The mandates will solve this at last, but this is not the time for librarians, who were initially part of the solution, to make themselves part of the problem. From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 19 15:53:32 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:49 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Critique of research Fortnight article on RCUK policy proposal In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Two points omitted from the prior posting; apologies for 2 postings that should have been one: > On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, [Identity Deleted] wrote: > > > > [Librarians] see the value in peer review Well the endorsement of peer review by librarians is very nice, but the fact is, peer review's not done for librarians! It's done by and for researchers. > > [Librarians] do not wish to be limited in what they can and can't do > > with the final version of the article. Articles are not self-archived and made OA for what librarians can and can't do with them: They are self-archived and made OA for what researchers can do with them -- and can't do without them. [Reminder: Self-archived articles are accessible 24/7 to all, webwide, for searching, browsing, reading, downloading, storing, computational crunching, printing off, using, applying building upon, citing, and putting metadata and URL in course lists. They are also picked up by harvesters like Google. The above point sounds like yet another iteration of the empty free-access/open-access distinction, usually invoked by promoters of OA publishing whenever faced with the koan of why an author would want to switch journals for OA when they can keep their journals and simply self-archive -- as, one hopes, the authors of the 130,000 research journal articles published annually in the UK will soon be doing.] " Maximising the Return on the UK's Public Investment in Research" http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html "Free Access vs. Open Access" (started, August 2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Mon Sep 19 16:30:53 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:49 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research In-Reply-To: <432EB690.1030500@stfx.ca> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Brian Lynch wrote: > Until self-archiving and/or institutional repositories become > universal, require all granting agencies and/or publishing > organizations to mandate that all abstracts of published papers of > electronic or paper issues [to be freely accessible through the > Internet] must include either an e-mail address for the principal > author, or an institutional web site providing author access through a > directory of e-mail addresses. > If this practice existed, anyone interested in a specific paper could > ask the author to provide them with a preprint or postprint file. I quite agree that this would be useful, and indeed it is part of the "Keystroke Strategy": mandate self-archiving the metadata and full-text immediately upon acceptance, but leave it up to the author whether they wish to set full-text access as "OA" or just as "IA" (institution-internal access), in which case eprints can be emailed to all who email to request them based on the visible metadata and email address (which are always OA): http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin3-harnad.ppt > It may be that toll-access journals would claim that an author obliging > such a request infringes copyright, but surely no > responsible justice system would or could secure a guilty verdict for > the supposed "offence". Neither self-archiving one's own draft nor emailing it is an offence, but the Keystroke Strategy is a suitable sop for the timid and unimaginative. They will soon tire of sending emails and hit the "OA" key. It is only a few keystrokes per paper that have been standing between us and 100% OA Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/ The Eprints software is being designed to make either option easy and natural. > The proposed action is the modern-day equivalent of providing a > reproduced copy of a reprint of one's own article > after you have exhausted your supply of publisher-supplied reprints. (as has been noted, many, many times: but one can never say it often enough -- until we reach 100% OA) Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Sep 20 06:41:07 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:49 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] OECD December 2004 Working Party Report In-Reply-To: <200509201053.17502.philippe.aigrain@wanadoo.fr> Message-ID: Organisation de Coop?ration et de D?veloppement Economiques Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 02-Sep-2005 DIRECTORATE FOR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRY COMMITTEE FOR INFORMATION, COMPUTER AND COMMUNICATIONS POLICY Working Party on the Information Economy DIGITAL BROADBAND CONTENT: SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/oecd_sci.pdf Presented to the Working Party on the Information Economy in December 2004 and declassified by the Committee for Information, Computer and Communications Policy in March 2005, this report is not without some value, though it is considerably out of date today, and was already out of date in December 2004. It devotes far too much space to OA publishing (gold) relative to OA self-archiving (green), treating OA as if its real goal were OA publishing, rather than OA (perhaps because this report is really about the economics of publishing rather than the exigencies of research). It contains the usual confusions about peer review, repeatedly fading out on the the fact that self-archiving is the self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles; it misses the lion's share of the evidence of the OA research impact advantage; and it makes spurious distinctions between OA "archives" and "repositories." But it will be an interesting historical curiosity, once this all reaches its optimal and inevitable conclusion. Prior Amsci Threads on OECD: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3530.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3511.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4370.html Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Sep 21 12:21:57 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:50 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Is Anthropology Any Different? Message-ID: Below is a notice that appeared in Peter Suber's OA News about an article from the American Anthropological Association. I precede it by providing some objective data on what anthropologists actually do (rather than what they say they do). Anthropology (10-year ISI sample): OA articles / (OA + non-OA articles): 3365/32912 Percentage of articles that are OA: 10% OA citations / (OA + non-OA citations): 14313/59503 Percentage OA citation advantage: 165% http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm The right questions to ask anthropologists are: (1) Do you self-archive your articles (or publish them in OA journals)? (2) Are you aware that (1) is possible? (3) Does it matter to you and your discipline whether and how much your articles are used and cited? (4) Are you aware that in anthropology (and in all disciplines) OA enhances citation impact by 50-250%? (5) Are you aware that anthropology (like all other disciplines) w is a notice that appeared in Peter Suber's OA News about an article from the American Anthropological Association. I precede it by providing some objective data on what anthropologists actually do (rather than what they say they do). Anthropology (10-year ISI sample): OA articles / (OA + non-OA articles): 3365/32912 Percentage of articles that are OA: 10% OA citations / (OA + non-OA citations): 14313/59503 Percentage OA citation advantage: 165% http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm The right questions to ask anthropologists are: (1) Do you self-archive your articles (or publish them in OA journals)? (2) Are you aware that (1) is possible? (3) Does it matter to you and your discipline whether and how much your articles are used and cited? (4) Are you aware that in anthropology (and in all disciplines) OA enhances citation impact by 50-250%? (5) Are you aware that anthropology (like all other disciplines) is still only providing OA to about 5-25% of its research output. Now, having heard this, read what the AAA Anthroplogy News article wrote. Stevan Harnad --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why are anthropologists reluctant to share research online? http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_09_18_fosblogarchive.html#a112731389929363621 Stacy Lathrop and Gretchen Bakke, Multivalent Networking is Indispensable to Communicating Information, American Anthropological Association, September 2005. http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/0905/Lathrop_Bakke.htm Excerpt: In April 2005 the AAA launched a confidential survey to its full membership to seek information about members' current practices for communicating electronically about the association and their research....Although there is a wide recognition of the usefulness of posting conference papers and supplementary materials online, there is minimal willingness to post one's own work, and there is even less willingness to submit online comments on annual meeting papers. This is true regardless of age or employment status of the respondent....If respondents were to post [conference] papers and other substantive materials online, which they do not think should be mandatory, they would prefer to do so either after the annual meeting or in the month preceding it; they would also find such submitted materials most useful during this time. There is marked interest in annual meeting papers and abstracts being electronically accessible indefinitely, coupled with little interest in the preservation of online bulletin boards and interactive discussion forums for more than four months....Respondents were asked about Creative Commons licensing options available through AnthroCommons (these options range from the 'all rights reserved' of traditional copyright to a voluntary 'some rights reserved' copyright), and their views on Open Access models. (Open Access is a movement to grant access to a large variety of up-to-date information sources, electronically, for free.) Results suggest that respondents value the idea of Creative Commons and the Open Access model (such as AnthroCommons); yet, only a third of the respondents who completed this survey, or roughly the number who accessed AnthroCommons, completed this question. Also of those five people who responded that they had actually posted material, three respondents selected a Creative Commons license and two a traditional 'all rights reserved' copyright option....The full report of the AAA Electronic Communications Survey is available through the AAA website. http://www.aaanet.org/ Also see this comment by Judd Antin on his blog: is there something fundamental about anthropology that makes the discipline averse to an open model? Anthropology is, after all, based on fieldnotes which are deeply personal and often private. Maybe these values extend to other forms of writing as well, such as notes, conference papers, and even online discussions. Many anthropologists were (and in some cases still are) also indoctrinated with the idea that anthropology is about the lone ethnographer, trudging off into the jungle to find his or her 'people.' If anthropologists believe that doing anthropology is a lone enterprise, and further that the product of their work is too deeply personal and individual to share, does that erect an insurmountable barrier to Open Source Anthropology, at least for the foreseeable future? Or is it just a generational thing - the old, 'traditional' anthropologists are as stuck in the mud as they've ever been?...Maybe our only choice is to sit back and wait for the paradigm shift when the current generation of thought leaders fades away....So maybe the obstinacy of many anthropologists isn't insurmountable. The challenge is to maintain a critical mass of anthropologists who continue to contribute and share freely. If the explosion of blogging anthropologists is any indication, it's a promising future. is still only providing OA to about 5-25% of its research output. Now, having heard this, read what the AAA Anthroplogy News article wrote. Stevan Harnad --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why are anthropologists reluctant to share research online? http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_09_18_fosblogarchive.html#a112731389929363621 Stacy Lathrop and Gretchen Bakke, Multivalent Networking is Indispensable to Communicating Information, American Anthropological Association, September 2005. http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/0905/Lathrop_Bakke.htm Excerpt: In April 2005 the AAA launched a confidential survey to its full membership to seek information about members' current practices for communicating electronically about the association and their research....Although there is a wide recognition of the usefulness of posting conference papers and supplementary materials online, there is minimal willingness to post one's own work, and there is even less willingness to submit online comments on annual meeting papers. This is true regardless of age or employment status of the respondent....If respondents were to post [conference] papers and other substantive materials online, which they do not think should be mandatory, they would prefer to do so either after the annual meeting or in the month preceding it; they would also find such submitted materials most useful during this time. There is marked interest in annual meeting papers and abstracts being electronically accessible indefinitely, coupled with little interest in the preservation of online bulletin boards and interactive discussion forums for more than four months....Respondents were asked about Creative Commons licensing options available through AnthroCommons (these options range from the 'all rights reserved' of traditional copyright to a voluntary 'some rights reserved' copyright), and their views on Open Access models. (Open Access is a movement to grant access to a large variety of up-to-date information sources, electronically, for free.) Results suggest that respondents value the idea of Creative Commons and the Open Access model (such as AnthroCommons); yet, only a third of the respondents who completed this survey, or roughly the number who accessed AnthroCommons, completed this question. Also of those five people who responded that they had actually posted material, three respondents selected a Creative Commons license and two a traditional 'all rights reserved' copyright option....The full report of the AAA Electronic Communications Survey is available through the AAA website. http://www.aaanet.org/ Also see this comment by Judd Antin on his blog: is there something fundamental about anthropology that makes the discipline averse to an open model? Anthropology is, after all, based on fieldnotes which are deeply personal and often private. Maybe these values extend to other forms of writing as well, such as notes, conference papers, and even online discussions. Many anthropologists were (and in some cases still are) also indoctrinated with the idea that anthropology is about the lone ethnographer, trudging off into the jungle to find his or her 'people.' If anthropologists believe that doing anthropology is a lone enterprise, and further that the product of their work is too deeply personal and individual to share, does that erect an insurmountable barrier to Open Source Anthropology, at least for the foreseeable future? Or is it just a generational thing - the old, 'traditional' anthropologists are as stuck in the mud as they've ever been?...Maybe our only choice is to sit back and wait for the paradigm shift when the current generation of thought leaders fades away....So maybe the obstinacy of many anthropologists isn't insurmountable. The challenge is to maintain a critical mass of anthropologists who continue to contribute and share freely. If the explosion of blogging anthropologists is any indication, it's a promising future. Posted by Peter Suber at 9/21/2005 10:31:00 AM. From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Sep 22 06:16:56 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:50 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] =?iso-8859-1?q?Re=3A_Open_access_to_research_wor?= =?iso-8859-1?q?th_=A31=2E5bn_a_year?= In-Reply-To: <200509212337.j8LNbxXa007060@quickgr.its.yale.edu> Message-ID: On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: Re: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/16/free_access_research/ > Am I alone in failing completely to understand the basis for Stevan's > calculation of the 1.5 bn? It seems to be (hypothetical (and as far as I > can follow, unexplained) figure) x (hypothetical figure) x (hypothetical > figure). Am I missing something? > > Perhaps someone could explain it to me nice and slow... Dear Sally, happy to oblige: (1) The UK spends ?3.5 billion pounds annually on funding UK research: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4620.html (2) The return on that investment is not the number of UK articles published (130,000 per year) http://auth.athensams.net/?ath_dspid=ISI.PHL&ath_returl=http://isiknowledge.com/ (3) The return on that investment is the number of UK articles used, built-upon, cited: 761,600 citations per year: http://auth.athensams.net/?ath_dspid=ISI.PHL&ath_returl=http://isiknowledge.com/ (4) 15% of articles are self-archived worldwide, 85% are not: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm (5) Self-archived articles have 50%-250% more citations: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm (6) Hence, for 85% of its research output (?2.98 billion pounds worth) (7) the UK is losing 50-250% of the potential return on its investment: ?1.49 - ?7.44 billion pounds worth (8) To be conservative, I used only the lower end of this estimate of the UK's annual loss in potential return on it research investment: ?1.5 billion pounds worth http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/29-guid.html In other words, the fiction is not in the figures I have cited on the RCUK investment in research and the empirical evidence for the loss of potential return on that investment http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html The fiction is all in Sally's own non-figures and non-evidence on publishers' loss of potential revenues as a result of self-archiving: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Sep 22 21:40:22 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:50 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] =?iso-8859-1?q?Re=3A_Open_access_to_research_wor?= =?iso-8859-1?q?th_=A31=2E5bn_a_year?= In-Reply-To: <200509222331.j8MNV43e008890@quickgr.its.yale.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 22 Sep 2005, Peter Banks wrote: > No, you are not missing something, Sally. The reporter who covered this so > uncritically and without analysis was the one missing something. I am afraid that Peter Banks has either not read or has not quite understood what I (as opposed to the reporter) actually wrote: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/28-guid.html > I am not trained as an economist, but Professor Harnad's analysis seems > based on so many untested assumptions and leaps of logic that I am not > sure what we can draw from it. > > In particular, the work of Diamond which Harnad uses to set the value of a > citation was meant to quantify the value of a citation to the earnings of > a professor, not the value to society. I am not sure how Harnad makes the > jump from individual to collective benefit. But Banks is quite right about Diamond's data. And in my own article I make that point quite explicit: The Diamond calculation is a separate calculation, based on the value of the citation to the earnings of the professor, not to society: "Self-archiving, as noted, increases citations by 50-250%... the most conservative... of these estimates (50% citation increase from self-archiving at ?46 per citation)... translates into an annual loss of ?2, 541, 500 in revenue to UK researchers" But then I also go on to say: "But this [50-250%] impact loss translates into a far bigger one for the British public, if we reckon it as the loss of potential returns on its research investment. As a proportion of the RCUK's yearly ?3.5bn research expenditure (yielding 130,000 articles x 5.6 = 761,600 citations), our conservative estimate would be a 50% x 85% x ?3.5.bn = ?1.5bn worth of loss in potential research impact (323,680 potential citations lost). And that is without even considering the wider loss in revenue from potential practical applications and usage of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry." So the Diamond estimate did not even enter into my estimate of the UK's ?1.5bn worth of loss in potential research impact. > Moreover, Harnad seems to make the assumption that the 85% of research > that is not self-archived is unavailable for citation. In the field of > diabetes, this is clearly not the case. Of the most cited journals in > diabetes (Diabetes, Diabetes Care, J Clin Endo Metab, and Diabetologia), > the first three make virtually all accepted papers quickly available. ADA > enables any author to post accepted manuscripts in institutional archives > immediately on acceptance and makes full text available after three > months. It is unlikely that self-archiving would have much of an impact on > citation rate. The 50-250% impact advantage is based on comparing the number of citations for articles (within the same journal and year) that are and are not freely accessible on the web: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ If a journal makes all of its articles immediately accessible free, it is an OA journal (and it does not enter into our calculation of the OA advantage, it's all numerator and no denominator). Of course the articles in a non-OA journal are also available for citation -- to all those who have access to the non-OA version. That version is used and cited (the denominator is not zero), but the articles that have a self-archived OA version get used and cited more, and that is the point. They can be accessed by those would-be users whose institutions cannot afford access to the non-OA version. And over 90% of journals are now -- like Diabetes, Diabetes Care, J Clin Endo Metab -- green on author self-archiving. Nevertheless, only 15% of authors are self-archiving. And that too is the point -- and the point of my article, which was written in support of the RCUK's proposal to mandate self-archiving. http://romeo.eprints.org/ As to delayed access -- whether the delay is 3 months, 6 months, 12 months or more: Delayed access is not open access, and delayed access does not maximise usage and citations, which is, again, the point. In fact, early access and usage -- at the growth region of new research, is often the most important in rapidly developing research. The "Early Advantage" is one of the (at least six) components of the OA Advantage: "EA: EARLY ADVANTAGE, beginning already at the pre-refereeing preprint stage. Research that is reported earlier can begin being used and built upon earlier. The result turns out to be not just that it gets its quota of citations sooner, but that quota actually goes up, permanently. This is probably because earlier uptake has a greater cumulative effect on the research cycle." http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/29-guid.html See the findings of Kurtz, in astrophysics: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz/ > The most worrisome aspect of Harnad's analysis is that it may allow > legislators to dodge the real problem behind lack of scientific > progress--the underfunding of research--and instead pin their hopes on the > magic bullet of self-archiving. Research is indeed underfunded, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that research is also underused because it is not widely enough accessible. Self-archiving will not remedy the former, but that is certainly no reason it should not remedy the latter. Stevan Harnad > Peter Banks > Acting Vice President for Publications/Publisher > American Diabetes Association > 1701 North Beauregard Street > Alexandria, VA 22311 > 703/299-2033 > FAX 703/683-2890 > Email: pbanks@diabetes.org > > >>> sally.morris@alpsp.org 09/21/05 7:37 PM >>> > > Am I alone in failing completely to understand the basis for Stevan's > calculation of the 1.5 bn? It seems to be (hypothetical (and as far as I > can follow, unexplained) figure) x (hypothetical figure) x (hypothetical > figure). Am I missing something? > > Perhaps someone could explain it to me nice and slow... > > Sally Morris, Chief Executive > Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers > Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Hamaker, Chuck" > To: > Sent: Sunday, September 18, 2005 5:30 PM > Subject: Open access to research worth ?1.5bn a year > > > Subject: Open access to research worth ?1.5bn a year > > > > Open access to research worth ?1.5bn a year > > Published Friday 16th September 2005 10:39 GMT > > The Register > > > > Academic cries freedom > > By Lucy Sherriff > > Published Friday 16th September 2005 10:39 GMT > > > > The UK is losing out on its investment in scientific research to the tune > > of ?1.5bn every year, according to advocates of open access publishing. > > > > Professor Stevan Harnad from the University of Southampton argues that > > because of the tradition of locking the results of publicly funded > > research away in research journals the scientific community is not as free > > to build on and develop ideas as it should be. > > > > He calculates that if all published work was self-archived (i.e. made > > available online, after publication in a journal), the research impact > > would be the equivalent of a further ?1.5bn investment in UK science, > > every year. > > > > He argues that only researchers working at institutions that can afford > > journal subscription fees have access to published research, and offers > > his backing to the Research Councils UK (RCUK) proposal that all publicly > > funded research should be made available on the research institution's > > website. > > > > SEE this URL for rest of article and a link to Dr. Harnad's research on > > this: > > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/16/free_access_research/ > > > > #### > > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Sep 23 14:38:27 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:50 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] =?iso-8859-1?q?Re=3A_Open_access_to_research_wor?= =?iso-8859-1?q?th_=A31=2E5bn_a_year?= In-Reply-To: <200509231741.j8NHfTSh026315@quickgr.its.yale.edu> Message-ID: On Fri, 23 Sep 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > The problem lies with Stevan's 50% figure - apparently picked out of the > air, and with no factual basis whatsoever - for the increased 'return on > investment' if research is OA. I don't find it very convincing to base > such sweeping conclusions on a completely unsupported figure Picked out of the air? I reported (and provided the references and URLs) the strong new empirical evidence that open access articles consistently receive 50%-250% more citations, comparing always within the same journal and same year. Here are some summary data at the discipline level: In each case the two percentages will be (%OA) the percentage of OA articles among all articles (OA and non-OA) in the same journal/year: OA/(OA + nonOA) articles (%OAc) the percentage gain in citations for OA article compared to non-OA articles in the same journal/year: (OA/nonOA) - 100% citations From: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm %OA %OAc Administration 6% +180% Economics 14% +49% Education 5% +77% Psychology 6% +93% Management 8% +68% Health Science 5% +57% Social Science 14% +126% Biology 14% +30% (other disciplines: data still being gathered, samples still too small) From: http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ Astrophysics 24% +114% Nuclear/Particle 38% +120% (other disciplines: data still being gathered, samples still too small) I then took a low-end conservative figure for OAc at 50% and applied it to the conservative figure of 85% not yet self-archived, to yield 50% x 85% x ?3.5.bn = ?1.5bn worth of loss of return (in terms of citations) on the RCUK's ?3.5.bn annual investment. As noted, it is not the number of articles published annually (about 130,000) that represents the return on the UK's research investment; it is how much those articles are used, applied, and built-upon. Research published but not used, applied and built-upon is research that may as well not have been done or funded at all. The citation counts are measures of the degree to which research is used, applied and built-upon -- "research impact." The UK is losing 1.5bn worth of potential research impact annually (on our conservative, low-end estimate) for the 85% of it that it is not yet self-archiving (another conservative estimate). The RCUK open-access self-archiving mandate -- *if* it is not hobbled into an open-ended embargoed-access policy, as the NIH policy proposal was -- will remedy all of this needless loss of research impact and return on the UK public investment in research. "Please Don't Copy-Cat Clone NIH-12 Non-OA Policy!" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4307.html "Open Access vs. NIH Back Access and Nature's Back-Sliding" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4312.html Please note that I did not say the UK was getting *no* return on its research investment: Even non-OA articles get used and cited -- but only by those users whose institutions can afford the toll access to the journal version. The empirical 50-250% citation-gap corresponds to the loss of the potential research impact from those users who are currently denied access. Self-archiving the author's version is done to maximise usage, impact, and hence the return on the public investment, by making the research accessible to those access-denied would-be users too. But just as toll-access is not open access, and fails to maximise research impact, so embargoed access is not open access and fails to maximise research impact. The self-archiving must be required to be done immediately upon acceptance for publication. To allow delays of 3, 6, 12 months or more would simply be to return to the needless loss in the return on the public investment in research that the RCUK self-archiving mandate is intended to remedy. So: No embargo, of any length at all. What can be allowed instead -- with some loss in efficiency, but no significant loss in impact -- is the immediate, required self-archiving of the full text and the metadata (author, title, journal, date, etc.), with the access-setting for the full-text to "open access" being merely encouraged, but not required. If an author prefers to set access to the full-text as "institution-internal" access only, the metadata are still visible and searchable to all, and the full-text can still be harvested and inverted by google without displaying it (as google already does with books). Would-be users can then email the author for an eprint: Somewhat slower and less efficient than direct click-through access, but good enough. As over 90% of journals are already green on self-archiving, fewer than 10% of articles will suffer from this inconvenience, it will be bad press for the non-green publishers, and the authors will soon tire of doing the keystrokes to keep emailing the eprint -- and will simply do the last keystroke, switching access from "institutional" to "open." http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Sep 24 11:54:43 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:50 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research In-Reply-To: <013f01c5c112$9ea1e7b0$0200000a@samsung> Message-ID: On Sat, 24 Sep 2005, Sally Morris (ALPSP) wrote: > Not sure there is any point continuing this but, for what it's worth, > increased citations do not self-evidently equate with increased return on > research investment. > > Those who have ears to hear have, I think, already heard. I will post no > more on the topic of fantasy economics. On the subject of fantasy economics (for those with ears to hear), I quote Sally Morris when she is citing usage and citations on the subject of her speculations about potential revenue loss for publishers: Sally Morris: Increasingly, librarians are making use of COUNTER-compliant (and therefore comparable) usage statistics to guide their decisions to renew or cancel journals. The Institute of Physics Publishing is therefore concerned to see that article downloads from its site are significantly lower for those journals whose content is substantially replicated in the ArXiV repository than for those which are not." [See reply: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html] Sally Morris: "Citation statistics and the resultant impact factors are of enormous importance to authors and their institutions; they also influence librarians' renewal/cancellation decisions. Both the Institute of Physics and the London Mathematical Society are therefore troubled to note an increasing tendency for authors to cite only the repository version of an article, without mentioning the journal in which it was later published." [See reply: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html] In other words, when usage and citations are being cited as evidence of hypothetical losses to publishers, they are not fantasy economics. But when they are cited as evidence of actual losses to research and researchers, they are fantasy economics. As it happens, the only fantasy in all of this is Sally Morris's own fantasy "that RCUK's proposed [mandatory self-archiving] policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of journals." As already pointed out at length (for those with ears to hear), Sally adduces *zero* evidence in support of her fantasy. All objective evidence to date is for peaceful co-existence between journal publishing and self-archiving. [See reply: http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/20-guid.html] The rest is not fantasy, but facts, among them the worth of a citation to a researcher Diamond, A., 1986. What is a citation worth? Journal of Human Resources 21, 200-215. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v11p354y1988.pdf and, still more important, the return, in number of citations, per pound spent on research by RCUK: Data-based estimate of 760,000 annual citations (on UK's 130,000 annual articles for RCUK's ?3.5 billion pounds invested annually = 0.000217 citations per pound [Source: ISI Web of Science] Data-based estimate of 50%-250% increase of citations for self-archived articles [Source: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm] Data-based estimate that only 15% of articles are being self-archived today [Source: http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm] Therefore: 85% x 50% of 760,000 citations = 323,000 citations lost at 0.000217 citations per pound = ?1.5 billion pounds worth of citations lost if not self-archived -- and gained if RCUK mandates self-archiving. It is a real head-shaker that Sally continues to find subjective imagination-based predictions of revenue loss to publishers as a result of self-archiving to be non-fantasy, while she finds objective data-based estimates of researcher revenue as well as return on research investment to researchers, research and the public to be fantasy. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sat Sep 24 20:57:15 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:50 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research Message-ID: Letter to Times Higher Education Supplement for publication concerning: Laura Barnett and Hanna Hindstrom, "All research to go online," Times Higher Education Supplement, September 23, 2004 http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=2024710 The Research Councils UK have proposed to mandate that all RCUK fundees make their articles openly accessible online by self-archiving them on the web. In disappointingly inaccurate THES article ('All research to go online' Sep 23), the authors get most of the important details wrong. They write: THES: '[A] benefit of online *open access publishing* [italics mine] would be that academics and researchers would no longer have to rely on their institutions to provide access to articles published in subscription-only journals.' Not only is it not open access publishing but open access self-archiving (of their articles published in subscription-only journals) that the RCUK is mandating for their researchers, but this does not mean that their researchers will no longer rely on their institutions to provide access to the journals they subscribe to: How could my giving away my own published articles online provide me with access to the articles in the journals my institution subscribes to? I give my articles away so other researchers worldwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to the journals my articles were published in can nevertheless access and use them. That is how it (1) maximises my own research impact, and, far more important, also (2) maximizes the return on the British public's yearly ?3.5 billion investment in research. But the THES article misquotes me on (1): THES ("quoting" SH): 'if citations rose by 50 to 250 per cent because of online *open-access publishing* [sic, again: italics mine, but not the words] researchers could gain more than ?2.5 million a year in potential salary increases, grants and funding renewals' and simply leaves out completely (2) the far more important loss of ?1.5 billion in returns (in the form of at least 50% more citations) on the British public's yearly ?3.5 billion pound investment in research. Nor is this an if/then pipe-dream: The projections are based on objective, published measurements of the degree to which self-archiving increases research impact. But by far the worst inaccuracy in the THES article -- and it really does a disservice to those who pin their hopes on the RCUK policy for maximising British research impact -- is the gratuitous exaggeration of what is currently a real but remediable flaw in the wording of the RCUK proposal. The current draft says RCUK: 'Deposit should take place at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication.' But the THES article instead says: THES: 'Under the proposals from Research Councils UK, published work would not necessarily go online immediately. Academics and publishers would be allowed a grace period, which could last anywhere from a few months up to several years. The publisher would determine the exclusion period...' This is utter nonsense, and it would make a nonsense of the RCUK policy, if this were indeed the form it took. The RCUK's current language simply needs to be made more precise: SH: 'Deposit must take place immediately upon acceptance for publication, and access should be made open at the earliest opportunity.' (In the meanwhile, the article is visible, and the authors can email e-prints of it to all those e-print-requesters whose institutions cannot access it, thereby still maximising its impact, but with more keystrokes than would be most efficient.) The 8 co-signatories of the open letter in support of the RCUK policy, including the inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, are quoted correctly on this, but the THES authors don't seem notice that what they said is contradicted by the letter: TB-L et al: 'We believe the RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate [italics mine] self-archiving mandate, without delay.' http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html (More trivially, the THES authors name 4 universities, corresponding to one each of 4 of the 8 co-signatories, but omit Southampton, the university of all 4 of the remaining co-signatories, including Sir Tim!) The last piece of nonsense is this: THES: 'Universities are not obliged to implement a repository system, which costs about ?80,000 to set up and about ?40,000 a year in maintenance.' This too is based on a flaw in the current wording of the policy, which actually says that the articles RCUK: 'should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository is available to the award-holder.' But the cost of creating and maintaining a repository is in reality less than 10% of the arbitrary and inflated figures cited by THES. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Sun Sep 25 16:45:19 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:51 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Research Information article on institutional self-archiving Message-ID: [This is a reply to the article below; I am submitting it for publication, all or in part, in Research Information] > Archive programmes gain momentum > Research Information, October/November 2005 > Nadya Anscombe > http://www.researchinformation.info/rioctnov05repositories.html > Sally Morris (ALPSP) > 'But imagine if all these individual articles (albeit > not necessarily final versions) were linked up through networked > institutional repositories. It could happen that the majority of > papers from a particular journal become available for any researcher > to find. This could lead cash-strapped libraries to stop buying that > journal, which would make it no longer viable.' What I imagine when I think of cash-strapped librarians is the journals they cannot afford (i.e. most of them) for their institution's users, hence the research results their researchers cannot access and use, hence all the research impact and progress thereby lost. Sally thinks only that cash-strapped librarians might cancel some journals. (They always do: they must; that's what "cash-strapped" means; it means not having anywhere near enough cash to buy access to all, most, many, or even enough journals to meet all of their users' potential needs). Researchers (both the producers and the users of the research) can perhaps be forgiven for thinking instead about all the research access and impact that Sally seems quite happy to see continue to be "strapped down", because, after all, the thing that *really* matters is the cash-flow to publishers, not the research access/impact-flow. Let access-strapped researchers eat cake, or go hungry. (Yet is that really what research is about, and for? Is the public funding research, and are researchers conducting it, in order to ensure the cash flows from cash-strapped librarians to publishers' bottom-lines?) > Sally Morris: If readers access journals through > repositories this usage will not show up in the data. The librarian > might therefore decide to cancel a subscription even though the same > numbers of people still access the journal.' Cancel one journal in order to be able to afford another one. That is what cash-strapped librarians -- with finite journal acquisitions budgets nowhere approaching the capacity subscribe to them all -- are always doing. But a self-archiving mandate has *no differential effect on that*, one way or the other! The mandate applies randomly, to the funded articles in *all* journals. And all it does is provide supplementary access to the author's draft for the access-denied would-be users, allowing the cash-strapped librarians to do their selecting just as before, but without the pressure of elemental necessity: The supplementary author's versions are a safety net: "Even if I have to cancel this journal in order to be able to afford that journal, at least I know that the users that really need access will have access to the author's self-archived draft." Unless Sally really believes that journals add *no* value worth paying for, this scenario does not spell the end of journals; just the end of needless access-denial and impact-loss for researchers, and the end of desperation and inordinate stress on librarians. Their finite acquisitions budget will still be spent, selectively, as it always was; but researchers will no longer be deprived of the bare necessities. And research will no longer lose 50%-250% of its potential impact. > And it is not just the publishers who are affected. Institutional > repositories could also be seen as a threat to traditional libraries. A threat to libraries? The peer-to-peer provision of peer-reviewed research by its authors, in order to be used and built upon, as intended, is now not only to be accorded a lower priority than the protection of publishers' cash flows, but also in order to protect librarians' traditional practices? Why is research, done by and for researchers, being weighed as a means toward these other ends, rather than the end in itself that it was meant to meet -- an end that publishers and librarians were meant to help serve, not obstruct? > Author apathy and reluctance to change seem to be the biggest > challenges, even for the most successful of repositories. Leo > Waaijers... told Research Information: > 'Our biggest problem is convincing academics that they have something > worth preserving and that an institutional repository is the place > to do it.' It might have been more useful to try to convince academics that they have something worth maximising access to, so as to maximise its research impact, rather than for the sake of "preserving" it. Preservation is not the pressing problem facing research today. Needless access-denial and resultant impact-loss is. Preservation is a librarian's problem, and it should be addressed to the journals they are using their strapped cash to subscribe to, not to the institutional researchers they are trying to persuade to provide supplementary authors' drafts, for those users at *other* institutions, who cannot afford access to the journal they happen to appear in. (Librarians are clearly a blessing in the open access and institutional repository movement, but they are a decidedly mixed blessing, often regressing, like the dypsomane and the lamp-post, to what they find familiar, even when it is obsolescent or irrelevant.) > Peter Morgan, project director for DSpace@Cambridge... says 'Many > people underestimate the cost of an institutional repository. It can > be set up very cheaply with open-source software, so no-one should > be able to say they can't get started, but as soon as you want to > develop the system, provide support and store different kinds of data, > hardware and personnel costs start to rise. Here, we need at least > two people on the technical side and one librarian. Any institution > that wants to start a repository should seriously consider the > long-term costs.' It all depends what you want the repository for. If it is for digital preservation, digital asset management, course-ware, e-publishing, etc., it will get pricey. But if it is for providing access to the self-archived authors' drafts of institutional research output (the pressing and primary problem, remember?) then creating and maintaining the archive is cheap, and all that's missing is a policy that mandates its filling. (Please inquire for University of Southampton's ECS archive's actual costs.) > 'Most academics are uneasy about copyright issues and believe that > in order to succeed in the annual Research Assessment Exercise they > must publish in the best journals,' says Morgan. Ninety-percent of journals have already given their blessing to author self-archiving. And depositing the metadata (author, title, journal) and full-texts while making the metadata open-access and the full-texts merely harvestable and invertible for searching by google and the like is enough. Eprint requests can be emailed to the author, who can then email the eprint the the wuld-be user -- until he tires of all the keystrokes and makes the full-text open access too. The RAE is relevant inasmuch as maximising impact by self-archiving will give those with a head-start a competitive advantage, but it has nothing to do with journal choice: *All* articles in *all* journals need to be self-archived (and that is what Research Councils UK look poised to mandate at last, for the sake of the UK's competitive advantage, but also for the sake of the absolute advantage of research itself). > [Morgan] hopes that > the recent RCUK position statement will help to change this but > believes institutional repositories have a larger role to play > than just publishing academic work. Repositories don't *publish* academic work! Researchers publish their work in peer-reviewed *journals*. They self-archive their authors' drafts in their institutional repositories in order to supplement the access, usage and impact -- that currently comes only from those users whose institutions can afford the access to the official journal version -- with the access, usage and impact of those who cannot: 50%-250% more usage and impact, according to our data. > 'Some academics believe that if > their work is stored on the department computer, there is no need > to worry about it. There is widespread ignorance about data loss,' > says Morgan. 'Data has to be managed properly. We believe strongly > in long-term data preservation and we migrate files into new file > formats regularly, preserving them for future use.' Preservation again. Fine as (yet another) potential use for institutional repositories, but has *nothing* to do with the access/impact problem that the open-access/self-archiving movement is all about (remember?). > It is in this area of data preservation that institutional > repositories really show their worth. By storing files in a managed > repository researchers will be ensuring that their work can be read > by future generations, for free. Just like in a library. The access/impact problem, however, is not the future generations, but the current ones, who continue to be access-denied as we fret irrelevantly about data-migration and future generations. Besides, those worries should first be addressed at the official journal version that the cash-strapped library paid for, not the home-brew they are trying -- unsuccessfully with these irrelevant preservation incentives -- to persuade their own authors to provide. > The right tools for the job There is now a range of adequate, > easily-available software for creating and maintaining institutional > repositories. Some are commercial packages but many others are > available free under open-source licences. The two leading software > packages are DSpace (MIT, US) and EPrints (Southampton, UK) but > there are plenty of others to choose from, including the following: The problem is not choosing software, it is filling archives! "EPrints, DSpace or ESpace?" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2670.html > DSpace: developed by MIT, US and suitable for data preservation > applications as well as storing academic papers and experimental > data (www.dspace.org) Eprints: developed by Southampton University, > UK for the managing of academic research papers (www.eprints.org) Both packages are equally suitable for all of these applications. But the pressing (and neglected) problem is none of these: it is the problem of adopting a policy to ensure that the archives will be filled with their target content (the institution's own research article output). That is what we need policies like the RCUK's proposed one for. Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum Chaire de recherche du Canada Centre de neuroscience de la cognition (CNC) Universit? du Qu?bec ? Montr?al Montr?al, Qu?bec, Canada H3C 3P8 Professor of Cognitive Science Department of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Tue Sep 27 20:35:49 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:51 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] =?iso-8859-1?q?Re=3A_Open_access_to_research_wor?= =?iso-8859-1?q?th_=A31=2E5bn_a_year?= In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Peter Banks wrote: > Whether the issue of self-citation or any other aspect of their work > is convincing is another matter. Although Peter Suber recently claimed > (in a letter to the Washington Times) that "Study after study has shown > that free online access increases the impact of research literature, > as measured by citations, 50 percent to 250 percent," I am not sure > what "study after study" refers to, though is clearly is a reference to > Harnad's work. See: "The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies" http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html > Dr. Harnad has provided one other refererence > (http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm ), so perhaps > "study after study" means literally that: two studies. Or maybe there are > more, but I can't find references. There are studies by other groups in the bibliography above. Our own studies at UQaM have been on discipline after discipline in the ISI database, including, so far, biologogical sciences, social sciences, education, and business. Mor underway. The Southampton studies were on physics and mathematics. > Neither of the studies above appears > to have been peer reviewed or published other than by preprint. Indeed, > in the first study, the authors make this disclaimer: "Warning: The data > presented here are preliminary unrefereed results that are still being > analyzed and corrected (we welcome any suggestions or questions). This > is not yet the "definitive" version of our findings. Please do not cite > them without consultation with the authors." That refers to the data site. You may go ahead and cite the published studies. > I would encourage interested parties to take the authors up on their > invitation for (much needed, in my view) peer review. Warmly welcomed. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Sep 28 14:24:56 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:51 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] =?iso-8859-1?q?Re=3A_Open_access_to_research_wor?= =?iso-8859-1?q?th_=A3_1=2E5bn_a_year?= In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Peter Banks wrote: > I did find one peer-reviewed study on the impact of open access > on citation rate: "Publishing Online-Only Peer-Reviewed Biomedical > Literature: Three Years of Citation, Author Perception, and Usage > Experience," by Kent Anderson and his colleagues. > > It is a study of online-only vs. print articles in the journal > Pediatrics. It does not find the same citation advantage for online > publications claimed by Harnad and his colleagues. > > See http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-03/anderson.html Please weigh findings against the preponderance of evidence. The comparison you are citing is for one journal only, and in one 3-year range only. Our data are for all ISI journals, across disciplines, across a 12-year range. The selection criterion (both by the author and by the journal (for the online-only publishing versus print) in that particular journal in that particular study are not at all the same as the self-selected decision on the part of authors to self-archive. I suggest, again, that Peter look at the bibliography below , and not only at one study congenial to his own preferred outcome. I am afraid he will not find much hope for his own preferred outcome there. Maximising online access to one's own articles by self-archiving them does not reduce their usage, it increases it, dramatically, and with virtually no exception (apart from occasional chance fluctuation, usually because of small sample size). That is not only the consistent outcome, both for the already peer-reviewed findings and the not yet-refereed ones, but it is also exactly what logic would dictate: that access is a necessary (if not a sifficient) precondition for usage. http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html Stevan Harnad PS (Note also the difference between studies comparing OA and non-OA journals, which are apples and oranges, with comparing articles within the same journal/year, differing only in whether or not the author has elected to self-archive.) From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Wed Sep 28 15:21:50 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:51 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research In-Reply-To: <311174B69873F148881A743FCF1EE537AB184D@TSHUSPAPHIMBX02.ERF.THOMSON.COM> Message-ID: On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 eugene.garfield@THOMSON.COM wrote: > Dear Stevan: There seems to me to be problem with your estimates > of increased citation due to lack of author self-archiving. Have > you determined what percentage of citations are made by authors at > institutions that cannot afford access to the journals? Dear Gene, good to hear from you! No, our studies did not analyse the location of the citing authors, nor their institutional journal holdings. Such a study would be possible, but rather complicated, and I am not sure it would be necessary. I think the sizeable citation advantage for the self-archived articles speaks for itself, without the need to confirm that the increased usage indeed comes from those who did not have institutional access. > It would seem to me, from previous experience, that the group of > institutions that account for a large percentage of the publications and > subsequent citations, are the ones that can afford and do have access to > the journals which account for the largest percentage of pubs and cites. That was true in the days of Current Contents, when the only way to supplement institutional access was to mail paper reprints to reprint-requesters. But today, when one can provide help-yourself eprints to any would-be user webwide, it is very likely that the proportions have changed. The core journals and institutions are still the core journals and institutions, both for subscriptions and for use, but the size of the potential-user population whose access-denial can now be remedied is far, far larger. Surely you don't think *every* potential user and citer already has institutional access to *every* article they may wish to use and cite? The rest is just about how many, where... > Am I mistaken in making this assumption. Not at all. Perhaps only about the size of a webwide open-access effect. > So how will the citations increase if it is mainly the poorer > institutions that benefit from free access. Just because you provide > access to journals does not mean that you have made it possible to do > more research. I of course support the idea of access but see it as of > great educational value to those in the poorer nations. We must also > promote increased support for research in those countries if we are to > see increased citation. Best wishes. Gene Garfield I will let the researchers from the "poorer institutions" speak for themselves! But I suspect that it's not true that even the richest institutions have everything they need -- either in terms of access as users or impact as authors (the latter being dependent on the access of *others*), nor that it is quite as closed a circle as it may have appeared from the old statistics in paper days. But, when all is said and done, an increased citation rate of 50-250% speaks for itself, regardless of its provenance (rich/poor, core/non-core). The finer-scale analysis of where the enhanced usage is coming from and going will all be done in good time. The urgent priority right now is fast-forwarding the self-archiving rate from its current 15% level to the 100% where it should be, and should long have been. That will ensure that we stop losing the benefits. Then we can, at our leisure, count and classify the ways we've all benefitted. See "Sitting Pretty": http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#29.Sitting Best wishes, Stevan > -----Original Message----- > From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad > Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 9:57 PM > To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG > Subject: Re: Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment in Research > > Letter to Times Higher Education Supplement for publication concerning: > > Laura Barnett and Hanna Hindstrom, "All research to go online," > Times Higher Education Supplement, September 23, 2004 > http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=2024710 > > The Research Councils UK have proposed to mandate that all RCUK fundees > make their articles openly accessible online by self-archiving them on > the web. In disappointingly inaccurate THES article ('All research to > go online' Sep 23), the authors get most of the important details wrong. > They write: > > THES: '[A] benefit of online *open access publishing* [italics mine] > would be that academics and researchers would no longer have to > rely on their institutions to provide access to articles published > in subscription-only journals.' > > Not only is it not open access publishing but open access self-archiving > (of their articles published in subscription-only journals) that the > RCUK is mandating for their researchers, but this does not mean that > their researchers will no longer rely on their institutions to provide > access to the journals they subscribe to: How could my giving away my own > published articles online provide me with access to the articles in the > journals my institution subscribes to? I give my articles away so other > researchers worldwide whose institutions cannot afford to subscribe to > the journals my articles were published in can nevertheless access and > use them. That is how it (1) maximises my own research impact, and, far > more important, also (2) maximizes the return on the British public's > yearly ?3.5 billion investment in research. > > But the THES article misquotes me on (1): > > THES ("quoting" SH): 'if citations rose by 50 to 250 per cent because > of online *open-access publishing* [sic, again: italics mine, but > not the words] researchers could gain more than ?2.5 million a year > in potential salary increases, grants and funding renewals' > > and simply leaves out completely (2) the far more important loss of ?1.5 > billion in returns (in the form of at least 50% more citations) on the > British public's yearly ?3.5 billion pound investment in research. Nor > is this an if/then pipe-dream: The projections are based on objective, > published measurements of the degree to which self-archiving increases > research impact. > > But by far the worst inaccuracy in the THES article -- and it really does > a disservice to those who pin their hopes on the RCUK policy for > maximising British research impact -- is the gratuitous exaggeration of > what is currently a real but remediable flaw in the wording of the RCUK > proposal. The current draft says > > RCUK: 'Deposit should take place at the earliest opportunity, > wherever possible at or around the time of publication.' > > But the THES article instead says: > > THES: 'Under the proposals from Research Councils UK, published work > would not necessarily go online immediately. Academics and publishers > would be allowed a grace period, which could last anywhere from a > few months up to several years. The publisher would determine the > exclusion period...' > > This is utter nonsense, and it would make a nonsense of the RCUK policy, > if this were indeed the form it took. The RCUK's current language simply > needs to be made more precise: > > SH: 'Deposit must take place immediately upon acceptance for > publication, and access should be made open at the earliest > opportunity.' > > (In the meanwhile, the article is visible, and the authors can email > e-prints of it to all those e-print-requesters whose institutions cannot > access it, thereby still maximising its impact, but with more keystrokes > than would be most efficient.) > > The 8 co-signatories of the open letter in support of the RCUK policy, > including the inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, are quoted > correctly on this, but the THES authors don't seem notice that what > they said is contradicted by the letter: > > TB-L et al: 'We believe the RCUK should go ahead and implement its > immediate [italics mine] self-archiving mandate, without delay.' > http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/18-guid.html > > (More trivially, the THES authors name 4 universities, corresponding > to one each of 4 of the 8 co-signatories, but omit Southampton, the > university of all 4 of the remaining co-signatories, including Sir Tim!) > > The last piece of nonsense is this: > > THES: 'Universities are not obliged to implement a repository system, > which costs about ?80,000 to set up and about ?40,000 a year in > maintenance.' > > This too is based on a flaw in the current wording of the policy, which > actually says that the articles > > RCUK: 'should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository > (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository > is available to the award-holder.' > > But the cost of creating and maintaining a repository is in reality less > than 10% of the arbitrary and inflated figures cited by THES. > > Stevan Harnad > From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Thu Sep 29 15:50:55 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:51 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: Open access to research worth A3 1.5bn a year In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Peter Banks wrote: > omits the Anderson paper, which did not show an effect. Steve Hitchcock will shortly include that paper (many thanks for pointing it out), duly noting that it is based only on one journal, one 3-year sample several years ago, might be comparing articles with different selection criteria, seems to compare online with non-online rather than OA with non-OA, and is refuted by the preponderance of subsequent evidence based on much larger and wider samples (but, as you correctly note, much of it not yet published, hence not yet peer-reviewed). > The claim seems to come mainly from the paper of Brody et > al (Citation Impact of Open Access Articles vs. Articles > available only through subscription ("Toll-Access"), > http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/). I think these authors have > generalized their findings far beyond what the data can support. They > are convincing when they stick to the core Physics/Mathematics papers > in the ArXiv database, but not when they try to apply their method > to other disciplines. It is not Brody et al. that apply the method to other disciplines (in their published work to date) but Hajjem et al., in their not yet published work. Brody et al. published only on the Arxiv-based comparisons. > Their method is to compare citations for papers in ArXiv vs. those > that are not. Outside of the core physicians and mathematics > literature, however, ArXiv contains very few papers from disciplines > like medicine or social sciences. For most fields, Brody finds > that the number of papers that are 0A are less than 1%--sometimes > much less than 1%. (1) I note that Dr. Banks seems to be ready to take unpublished results at face value when they are congenial to his preferences: Brody et al's data from other disciplines is on their unrefereed data site, not in their refereed paper. http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/ (2) The unpublished data on other disciplines from the Brody et al. site are merely pilot data, based on tiny samples. They have since been superseded by far larger systematic sampling at the Hajjem et al data site, and there the proportions of self-archived papers in other disciplines are found to be much higher (though this too is probably an underestimate, as will be discussed in the published version). http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm > For these papers, which are likely to be highly > specialized and relatively obscure, self-archiving probably does > have a large effect. One can not conclude, however, that the same > effect would occur for a widely-read, widely cited journal, like > Pediatrics or Diabetes Care. I suspect--and the Anderson paper may > hint at this--that the more widely read the journal, the less the > citation advantage for OA. We will take this a prediction, and I will ask Chawki Hajjem to check your journals in particular, as special cases, and compare them to other biomedical and non-biomedical journals. But your assumptions about the overall proportions are contradicted by the evidence. I will add, however, that so far the *size* of the average OA/nonOA advantage in biomedicine -- though always present, as in other fields -- is lower than in other fields, hovering at about 20% rather than the 50-250% elsewhere, though it is higher in some biomed subfields. I don't know the reason for this. I don't know whether it will hold up with still larger samples, but it does not appear to be because of a systematically lower self-archiving rate in biomedicine. > What we need to study other disciplines are archives like > ArXiv. Perhaps there are others in certain fields that could be > mined for research. No, we don't need to study centralised archives like Arxiv in other disciplines, because since Arxiv (1991) there has been the OAI-interoperability protocol (1999) which effectively made all distributed archives equivalent and interoperable. What is not clear, howeverm is how much of the 15% self-archiving our robots are picking up in their web-trawls are from arbitrary websites and how much from OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories. This too will be analysed, to test for any differential trends. Stevan Harnad From harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk Fri Sep 30 23:36:06 2005 From: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stevan Harnad) Date: Mon Jan 2 02:09:52 2006 Subject: [Journal-notes] Re: OA Impact Advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA In-Reply-To: <200509302152.j8ULqA7R002321@quickgr.its.yale.edu> Message-ID: On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Mcsean, Tony (ELS) wrote: > Another complication in trying to arrive at a like-for-like > comparison is which of their articles authors choose to self-archive. > Maybe I'm just a cynical old git, but would be surprising to me if authors > weren't at least slightly more likely to self-archive their best work and > less likely to be bothered with their more humdrum output. You might > expect these to be more heavily cited however they were made available. Not cynical at all. There *are* indications of a self-selection Quality Bias (QB) on the part of authors, towards preferentially self-archiving their better articles (as well as for the better authors to self-archive their articles). (It would be quite surprising if there were not.) As I think I mentioned before, Michael Kurtz has written about this in astrophysics. (See Steve Hitchcock's bibliography for references: http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html ). However, QB is not the only factor in the OA citation advantage (and, I'll bet, not the biggest one): "OA Impact Advantage = EA + (AA) + (QB) + QA + (CA) + UA" http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/2005/09/17/C1.html What will of course sort out the relative size of the components that contribute to the current 50%-250% self-archiving advantage will be the very process of moving upward from the current c. 15% self-archiving rate to 100%. http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/graphes/EtudeImpact.htm (It can't be QB as we get closer to 100%. as most work cannot, by definition, be best work!) We already know (again from Michael Kurtz's work in astrophysics) that at 100% OA there is still the Usage Advantage (3 times as many downloads) and the Early Advantage (a permanent increase in total citations, the early the paper is made OA). Michael also reports that in a 100% OA literature, reference lists are not longer (in fact, they are even a bit shorter!). But what 100% OA does provide is is QA, the Quality Advantage, levelling the field, so that authors can select the best and most relevant articles to use and cite, rather than merely the best and most relevant *amongst the ones that happen to be published in the fraction of the total number of journals that their institutions happens to be able to afford*. That last bit, in a nutshell, is the real essence of OA: Allowing work to achieve its rightful impact on the strength of its quality/merit alone, not constrained by the extraneous factor of accessibility/affordability. Stevan Harnad On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Mcsean, Tony (ELS) wrote: > I'd just like to add a footnote to Phil's characteristically thoughtful > comments. Another complication in trying to arrive at a like-for-like > comparison is which of their articles authors choose to self-archive. > Maybe I'm just a cynical old git, but would be surprising to me if authors > weren't at least slightly more likely to self-archive their best work and > less likely to be bothered with their more humdrum output. You might > expect these to be more heavily cited however they were made available. > > It's a bit embarrasing to be contributing yet another anecdotal/unproven > hypothesis to the list, but in my own defence I can say that I'm not > saying (a) that this definitely happens, (b) it's impossible to quantify > for the purposes of analysis or (c) that if it does happen you can't come > up with a methodology to compensate. I'm just saying it's a factor that > needs looking at and to me it doesn't look easy to fathom and that the > various conclusions we currently have to hand may be interesting but are > not even close to definitive. > > Tony McSe?n > Director of Library Relations > Elsevier > +44 7795 960516 > +44 1865 843630 > > -----Original Message----- > [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Phil Davis > Sent: 30 September 2005 02:18 > To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu > Subject: Re: Open access to research worth A3 1.5bn a year > > I just read the JEP article (referred to by Peter Banks) comparing > articles printed in Pediatrics with other articles only appearing in the > online addition. The authors' main findings suggest that despite wider > potential audience for articles published freely online, articles > appearing in print received more citations: > > "The difference between the mean citation levels for print and online was > 3.09 ?0.93 in favor of print (95% CI), meaning that an online article > could expect to receive 2.16 to 4.02 fewer citations in the literature > than if it had been printed." > > Or in other words, their data do not support the hypothesis that full OA > journals receive more citations than non-full OA journals. > > Yet it is methodologically difficult to rigorously test this hypothesis, > and the use of inferential statistics in this study suggests that they are > trying to generalize beyond their own journal. In this study, the authors > compared two different sets of articles: 1) those that were selected for > inclusion in the main journal, and 2) those that were not. Selection bias > alone may explain the different results, or at least interject a large > enough bias where the results may not accurately reflect their research > question. In other words, it would be difficult to understand whether > their results are a reflection of accessibility, or selection bias. > > Still, this article fails to support the unstated hypothesis that full OA > journal articles receive more citations than non-full OA journal articles. > For that conclusion alone, we would be wise to stay with the null > hypothesis (that is, no significant difference) unless we start seeing > compelling evidence the other way. > > The other conclusion that we may come to is that it may be impossible to > come up with universal statements about Open Access publishing (i.e. it > can provide 50 - 25% more citations). Methodology problems in designing > rigorous studies may only permit us to make anecdotal statements about > particular journals or publishing models that have very narrow parameters > for generalization. > > --Phil Davis > >