From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2019 09:11:49 -0700

Brian Simboli --

I will respond to one only of your many interesting points in your
Charleston reflections, but have profited from the whole post.

You are right to observe that the demand for journal publishing is a
variable that grows in various ways beyond control.  (1) Increases in
research funding from existing sources.  (2) Incentive researchers feel
even in a steady state funding environment to slice-and-dice their work
(and sometimes recycle bits of it) into as many publications as possible.
(3) Disproportionate growth in research activity and thus article
productivity in emerging research economies, notably India and China but
also increasingly the new universities of the Arabic world.  The best
indicator of this demand boom is the ugly phenomenon of the predatory
journal universe:  yes, they are con men, but even con men need suckers to
give them money, and the size and growth of the predatory world is among
other things a measure of growth in overall demand.

Of course this development was long foretold by the prophet Daniel:  "Many
shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased" (Dan. 12.4).
Medieval writers took this as a caution about Babel-like proliferation, but
we are more inclined to join happily in the running to and fro.  So we
(library and research community) haven't much tried to manage that demand,
but it is an undoubted factor in making the whole system of publication
difficult to sustain under any regime.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU


On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 6:17 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Brian Simboli <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2019 12:12:30 -0500
>
> [usual boilerplate--apologies for cross-posting]
>
> If this week's Charleston conference was any indication, Plan S is
> definitely advancing in the U.S.
>
> In its wake, here are some Socratic questions that hopefully extend the
> philosophical and economic points I've already made about
> transformative/plan S schemes.
>
> These questions concern long-run consequences, but are nonetheless very
> timely. Near term decisions have long run effects.
>
> --Depending on how much APC funding eventually shifts from libraries to
> the federal government, will the price mechanism for APCs adjust to
> accommodate the readiness of grant funding agencies to bankroll APCs?  If
> so, can we assume the government will have a more price-elastic posture
> than universities historically have had, given the latter's tenure and
> promotion demand-side incentives to publish in high tier journals
> regardless the cost? If federal agencies are not elastically responsive to
> prices (i.e., if they reward publication in high priced journals without
> regard to prices), don't we just perpetuate the high pricing that
> librarians have so long lamented, therefore shifting this malaise's remedy
> to the public's dime? Is this fair to the citizenry? How does this affect
> public funding for other federally funded initiatives?
>
> --Concerns about "existential threats" now appears in discussions about
> scholarly publishing. Scholarly societies have them. Can societies be
> assured of stable revenue streams, erstwhile from library journal
> subscriptions, if some complex admixture of federal government grant funds
> and university funds fund APCs?
>
> --There seems to be no discussion among librarians about an "existential
> threat" to their own profession. If funding of journals shifts from
> universities to federal funding agencies, doesn't this cut out librarian
> involvement in selecting and funding journals? Correlatively, wouldn't this
> reduce their budgets? Also, would this reduce their collection development
> role  to APC bean-counting, much of which will become the purview of
> offices of research whose involvement will merely be one of marking APCs as
> a line item in grant funding disbursement accounting? Would this be a good
> or a bad thing?
>
> --Where is discussion about the opportunity cost of diverting a portion of
> hard-to-get state-funded research dollars to funding APCs? What research,
> e.g. for renewal energy, or cancer or agricultural research for developing
> countries, now goes by the wayside?
>
> --Will societies and university publishers just gradually assimilate the
> newly emerging APC regime for their economic survival in funding membership
> activities, without discussions about possible threats to financial
> stability or discussions about the larger philosophical premises of doing
> so?
>
> --On the philosophical issues, shouldn't society publishers worry about
> governmental ideological manipulation of who within their memberships gets
> grant-funded APCs?  Sure, one could make that argument about federal grant
> funding per se. But doesn't the latter arguably addresses an externality
> that (in an ideal world) concerns the common good, while APC funding is an
> externality that does *not* necessitate federal subsidizing--given that
> scholarly publishing mechanisms can and should be developed that don't
> require federal subsidy?  These are points everyone should ask regardless
> of political affiliation.
>
> --From what one speaker at Charleston said, the complexities of
> negotiating with publishers has a new overlay: tortuous internecine
> discussions among consortial members. If  this is true of all consortia,
> one has the sense that consortial leaders now have to have to engage game
> theoretic scenarios not only with respect to publishers, but also their
> individual members. Just imagine how much more complicated all this will
> now become with the pressures on libraries to pay for APCs. Isn't it
> undesirable to introduce this added complexity, at least at this juncture?
> Why not just work on contracting the number of journals published, about
> which . . .
>
> --I've been arguing for contracting the number of journals, a la something
> like Bradford's Law. A refinement on that: we need to distinguish two
> rationales for contracting the journal space. These are:
>
> Rationale (1.) An argument on the principled basis that it is desirable to
> contract the number of journals, given that the ever-growing glut of
> journal articles undermines the common good of discoverability and
> assimilation of research findings.
>
> Rationale (2.) An argument from economic reality: library budgets are
> relatively flat so we need to deconstruct Big Deals or even the number of
> subscribed journals regardless the journal sales model.
>
> Shouldn't big consortia use their negotiating power to argue that the
> ever-rising prices of journals (not to mention pressures for APCs merely to
> replicate the price dynamics of toll-access publishing) necessitates
> contracting the number of journals?  This point extends not just to
> toll-access publishing, but also gold ones? If so, pursuing rationale (1)
> for contracting the journal space aligns neatly with rationale (2) for
> doing so. I.e., rationale (2) becomes the vehicle for accomplishing
> rationale (1).
>
> --I've also argued that consortia with journal negotiating power should
> educate their faculty about the need to contract the journal space. A
> refinement to that, too: the discussions should focus on rationale (1)
> above, rather than (2), which concerns business matters that are not
> understanbly the concern of faculty or researchers. Perhaps this will
> incentivize faculty activism to create shifts in tenure and promotion
> assessment. That will take much, much longer than the roughly 20 year
> period in which OA took root. In the shorter run, perhaps working to reduce
> funding for so many journals will exert downward pressure on the t and p
> assessment process, thereby changing it incrementally in the direction
> toward contracting the journal space, which is absolutely critical to
> changing the demand side that drives prices. I'm sure many people who look
> at the publishing system have concluded that t and p--and also grant
> application assessment criteria (e.g., a record of publishing in high-tier
> journals or just in a *whole lot* of journals)--is *the* driver of demand
> for so much peer-reviewed publishing (including stuff with 0 citing
> articles) and therefore high prices. But efforts to change t and p should
> move slowly and after considering an array of counterarguments to avoid
> unintended consequences.
>
> --A constant refrain among librarians is that budgets have been relatively
> flat for a very long time. How many more resources will we not be able to
> buy if these "transformative" schemes takes hold? Transformative, toward
> what end goal and with what consequences? Is the assumption that there will
> be a gradual transition from library funding of APCs, to 100 percent state
> funding via grants? What again of ideological concerns, this time having to
> do with the impermeability that universities properly have from the state
> to retain their properly critical role in society? A non-partisan political
> statement; everyone in academia should agree on this, in my opinion.
>
> --What of APC charges imposed on individuals in developing countries? Is
> the idea that they will get discounted pricing? But then doesn't that
> impose a variety of neo-colonialism, namely developed countries deciding
> what research merits an APC discount? Of course, there have been discounts
> to developing countries for toll-access journal subscriptions, but what
> happens when developed country publishers now can waive APCs for individual
> researchers--thereby (potentially) making managing editors the brokers of
> what specific research agendas get the APC discount? The counterargument is
> that there are ways to isolate the APC discounting from peer review. But
> are managing editors really immune to bias, however subtle?
>
> Thanks for the various discussions at Charleston about some of these
> points. It has inspired me to continue working on my ongoing project about
> preprint publishing and its symbiosis with journal publishing. It has
> become clear that it's hard to address just one piece of the scholarly
> publishing system without all sorts of ripple effects for one's views on
> other parts of the system.
>
> [Views are solely my own, as usual]
>
> Brian Simboli
> --
>
> Brian Simboli
> Science, Mathematics, and Psychology Librarian
> Library and Technology Services
> E.W. Fairchild Martindale
> Lehigh University
> 8A East Packer Avenue
> Bethlehem, PA 18015-3170
> (610) 758-5003; [log in to unmask]
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>
>