From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2012 22:14:05 -0500

The question about whether repositories are more sustainable than
journals in providing OA content is similar to the question of whether
libraries are publishers. Sure, libraries can provide platforms where
scholarly materials can be posted and shared, but libraries
traditionally do not provide the services that publishers do in
massaging raw content until it becomes processed into a quality
product.  This makes all the difference between the sustainability of
repositories--which, as the name suggests, are just places where
materials are passively dumped, in whatever form they happen to
be--and the sustainability of journals, where the contents have gone
through an expensive process of improving the quality of the initial
submission.

Repositories offer no guarantee at all of the quality of what they
contain, and to the extent that they can, they are dependent on the
quality control exercised by publishers. The more repositories try to
duplicate that quality control by taking on the management of peer
review, design, copyediting, and the like, the more their costs will
come to mirror those of publishers and the less sustainable they will
be within normal library budgets. Try changing a library into a
publisher and you will end up with all the costs that publishers use
either subscriptions or OA fees to pay for.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 11:41:22 -0400
>
> Perhaps to tweak Fred's analysis a bit, I would say:
>
> 1. Obviously repositories are sustainable, highly sustainable: they
> are as sustainable as the libraries that support them. They are one of
> the two main roads to achieve OA.
>
> 2. OA journals face a sustainability issue only if they are taken to
> be in a category where cost-recovery is unavoidable. In other words,
> more is asked of journals than of repositories that are supported by
> libraries. More is also asked of journals than is asked of research
> itself. Research itself is subsidized and is basically unsustainable
> in strict economic terms. If journals are considered to be part of the
> research process (as they are), then the sustainability issue is there
> only because some journal producers choose to put themselves in this
> kind of position, be they for, or not-for, profit. Otherwise, they are
> and can be wrapped into research budgets. At the end of the day, OA
> journals form the other road to achieve OA.
>
> 3. Making one road compete with the other is silly: social actors in
> various positions simply do the best they can with the perception they
> have, given their position. Our task is not to divide and compete; our
> task is to aggregate and harmonize to the extent possible. We all
> share the OA objective; so let us complement each other, support each
> other, and work in a distributed way.
>
> Jean-Claude Guédon
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Frederick Friend <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 6:04 PM
>
>  *A RESPONSE TO THE PERCEPTION THAT OA THROUGH REPOSITORIES
> IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO COMPREHENSIVE OA THROUGH JOURNAL
> PUBLICATION *
>
> It is time for supporters of OA through repositories to respond to the
> unfair comparisons being made between repositories and OA journals as a
> long-term route to open access. The comparisons appear to be made in terms
> of sustainability of the two routes to open access, the quality of content
> available through the two routes, and the push for a comprehensive
> solution. What follows is not written from an anti-publisher nor an anti-OA
> journal viewpoint, but is intended to make a case for a fair and
> even-handed approach.
>
> *1.*       *SUSTAINABILITY*
>
> The view that the journal route to OA is more sustainable than the
> repository route to OA flies in the face of objective studies of costs of
> various research communication models, which conclude that repository
> deposit and access provide a more cost-effective route to OA than
> publication in journals. How can a more expensive solution be more
> sustainable than a cheaper option in the long-term? Even supporters of open
> access journals seem to accept that additional funding is required for open
> access journals converted from subscription journals, and this view has
> been accepted by the UK Government in the announcement of an extra £10
> million to support open access on the journal model. Can the supporters of
> open access journals please come clean and say for how many years such an
> extra sum will be required before OA journals become sustainable? How is
> such a subsidy to be justified to the UK taxpayer when a cheaper OA
> alternative is available?
>
> The hope that open access journals will be cheaper and therefore more
> sustainable than repositories appears to be based upon a hope of low author
> publication charges. Some open access publishers certainly set low
> publication charges, but the journals with low charges are by and large not
> those journals in which authors choose to publish as first choice. The most
> important journals are owned by publishers with a reputation for charging
> high subscription prices and those publishers are likely to continue a
> high-price policy into the OA era in order to maintain their profits or
> surpluses. In theory competition for authors should lower the cost of
> author publication charges but in practice the power in the
> author-publisher relationship lies with the publishers of the most
> important journals. Authors are more desperate to publish in such journals
> than the publishers are to secure authors.
>
> Suggestions have been made that the repository route to OA is unsustainable
> but no evidence has been produced to support that contention. The large
> repositories - such as arXiv - have been in operation for many years and
> have proved themselves to be sustainable. The institutional repositories
> are smaller and have not been around as long as the big subject
> repositories, but many of the institutions running repositories have been
> around for hundreds of years. The large research institutions have enough
> income and enough commitment to making their research output available to
> ensure that their repositories are sustainable. So where does this view
> that repositories are unsustainable come from?
>
> *2.*       *QUALITY*
>
> A second criticism of the repository route to OA has been that repository
> content is of low quality. Do authors not find this criticism insulting and
> ask why the final draft of their journal article should be considered of
> low quality when the version published in a journal with only minor changes
> to the final draft is considered to be of the highest quality? Peer review
> and copy-editing are valuable but rarely make a dramatic difference to the
> quality of the article. And there is no reason in principle why peer review
> and an equivalent to copy-editing should not be applied to the author's
> final version deposited in a repository. After all a journal's peer
> reviewers are unpaid members of the academic community and copy-editing is
> similar to skills many researchers already employ in using the raw
> materials of research. The perception of the quality of repository content
> could be improved through a system of kite-marks linking the repository
> item to previous work by the author and the research assessment grading of
> the author's department.
>
> More fundamentally the criticism of repositories as allegedly containing
> low-quality content appears to be based upon a way of working which goes
> back to the paper era. Electronic systems have made copy-editing less of a
> drudge, and intelligent electronic systems can help to identify possible
> errors of substance. No longer can publishers claim to have a monopoly on
> quality control for research outputs.
>
> *3.*       *COMPREHENSIVENESS*
>
> There seems to be a view that open access journals provide the only route
> to a comprehensive OA world and that repositories can never be
> comprehensive in their holdings of research content. This view appears to
> be based upon a view that all countries will follow the UK Government's
> lead and require publication in open access journals. Fortunately for the
> future of open access there is no sign that the OA journal model will be
> followed by all researchers in all countries in the world. A single
> world-wide model is highly unlikely to be supported by so many disparate
> research communities, even though they collaborate much more than they used
> to.
>
> By contrast the large subject repositories have been remarkably successful
> in securing comprehensive collections of research articles in their
> disciplines. Institutional repositories are newer and not comprehensive at
> present, but a growing number of institutions are introducing deposit
> policies for their researchers and have the potential to make 100% of their
> research outputs available on open access. If any OA model has the
> potential to become adopted world-wide it is the repository model rather
> than the OA journal model, although both will co-exist for a long time.
>
> Fred Friend
>
> Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
> http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk