From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2019 14:37:00 +0000

Very good points, Danny, even though I do not like hybrid journals and I consider APCs to raise at least as many difficulties as they solve. But I share your interest for 1c.

1c can be further divided into peer reviewers (doing the job of intellectual quality and integrity for free), members of editorial board and editors. Let us call them 1ca, 1cb and 1cc :-) (this is becoming fun...).

1ca is not affected by OA.

1cb is not too affected by OA

1cc is affected by OA for one simple reason: editors are committed to both scholarly communication in a particular domain or perspective, but it is also committed to the good financial health of a journal. Furthermore, the editor has to deal with a publisher, and here, you have another distinction to propose:

a. The journal title belongs to a society or a group of scholars more generally. In this case let us talk about the editor as 1cca;
b. The journal title belongs to the publisher. In this case, let us talk about the editor as 1ccb;

The main difference is that 1cca is still a free agent responsible to his/her community of researchers, sometimes in the form of a society. By contrast, 1ccb is really an employee of the publisher.

Then, to muddle things a little, it may be that both 1cca and 1ccb are earning some money from the publisher. In this case their ability to act as free agents may be mitigated by the fear of a loss of income...

The concluding remark is that the 1cc category and its sub-categories acts as a boundary object between the intellectual realm and the commercial realm and it is this boundary that deserves being strongly scrutinized. Alas, it is also a very opaque area as little hard data has emerged from this extremely influential group of researchers. But, if we want to understand the ambivalence of some influential, often senior, researchers, this is where we must look.

1cca and 1ccb are at the epicentre of the "entanglement" phenomenon that has been documented by Aileen Fyfe et alii (https://zenodo.org/record/546100). My own "Internet of the mind" which appeared just before Aileen Fyfe's report studies many of the same points (https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/open-access-toward-the-internet-of-the-mind).

Jean-Claude

On 2019-06-19 12:17 a.m., LIBLICENSE wrote:
From: Danny Kingsley <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2019 17:29:34 +1000

Thanks Jean-Claude,

We actually need a further delineation of the actors:
1a. Researcher as reader
1b. Researcher as author
1c. Researcher as editor

The move from subscriptions shifts payment - if there is a fee: FROM 1a (through their library subscription) TO 1b (mostly through a funder or the institutional, but occasionally personally)

But 1c is also very important because as editors of journals it is crucial researchers actually understand all of these issues and can make sensible decisions for their circumstances. The problem with 1c is that as far as I can see the bulk of researchers remain pretty unaware of all of this. 

At Cambridge University Press there are multiple Learned Societies (who publish their journals through CUP) that won’t discuss hybrid or moving to open access models because they consider this to be ‘vanity’ publishing. Sigh.

Danny


Dr Danny Kingsley
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On 18 Jun 2019, at 07:29, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 20:12:53 +0000

The question obviously rests on "no fee for whom?"

Let us remember that the main actors in the research context are:
  1. the researchers,
  2. publishers and, more generally, those responsible for the four publishing functions (registration, certification, dissemination and preservation),
  3. the funding agencies,
  4. the general public in all its diverse communities,
  5. the research sites (universities, national labs, etc.) and their libraries

Leo - hello, in passing - puts forth a distinction between a no-fee or a discounted journal.

Clearly, a SCOAP3-style of financial support for journals is
  1. A no-fee solution for researchers
  2. A fee-garnering solution for publishers
  3. Maybe a fee solution for funding agencies
  4. A no-fee solution for the general public
  5. Certainly a fee solution for the research sites that decide to contribute and a no-fee solution for the sites that do not contribute (free riders)
This said, I do not understand what a "discounted journal" is. What is discounted? From what base-line?

It is clear that a SCOAP3-style approach to open access, or various forms of flipping arrangements, all start from the premise that, once researchers have free access to submitting and free access to reading, all that is needed is to find a kind of money flow designed to keep publishers happy, and research sites and their libraries not too unhappy. Of course, open access was never imagined to solve the financial equilibrium between hapy publishers and unhappy librarians; it was imagined to make scholarly communication optimal to improve the research process and the impact of research results in society. Fitting the latter objectives within a financial plan may appear "realistic" to some, but it really amounts to putting the cart before the horse. The right way to go is:
  1. See how to make the scholarly communication system optimal
  2. Scope where the money comes from (libraries, research sites, funding agencies)
  3. See how to coordinate the sources of money to achieve 1.

In conclusion, the question that should really be broached is whether the goal of open access must be constrained by the publishers and their "happiness requirements" (so to speak). Given that the four publishing functions can be distributed between various actors (for example libraries alone can register and preserve, and can probably disseminate; research sites can certainly certify), and given that the money flows from only two sources - libraries and funding agencies - the only reason why, presently, the money flows keep on going to legacy publishers is the fact that their products - journals (not articles, journals) are used to evaluate research (impact factor and journal rankings). Beside the fact that evaluating research in this manner is highly problematic (to say the least), the moneys held by libraries, research sites, and funding agencies might be better employed if they were pooled to develop new kinds of public publishing platforms with appropriate tools to carry out evaluations of research that are sensible.

Redalyc does so in Latin America.
The issue is also alive within the European Commission.

Jean-Claude Guédon


On 2019-06-15 2:27 p.m., LIBLICENSE wrote:
From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2019 13:37:44 +0200

What is a no-fee journal?

 

Spontaneously, I would have answered: an OA journal which does not charge publication fees. Further consideration might be needed, however, as DOAJ and QOAM come to different conclusions with respect to a number of journals. For example, the Elsevier journals 1873-2445 and 1873-1562 or the Springer journals 1029-8479 and 1434-6052 do not charge authors because libraries have paid the bill as members of the SCOAP3 project. But does that make these journals ‘no-fee’ as DOAJ seems to conclude, or are they just ‘discounted journals’ as QOAM claims? The outcome may have relevance to the wider Plan S debate as well.

 

I would appreciate if the community could shed some light on this.

 

Leo Waaijers