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William Y. ArmsCornell University

April 4, 2003

Free Access to Information Today Who Benefits? What are the Risks?

Who Pays?

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Benefits to Readers

The “democratization” of Physics

Benefits to Authors

An anecdote from Economics

A study of Computer Science

Steve Lawrence. Online or Invisible? Nature, Volume 411 Number 6837 page 521, 2001.

Benefits of Open Access to Scientific Material

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Open Access Articles are Cited More (Lawrence)

Open access articles are cited 4.5 times as often.

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Advice to Authors

Old

“Whenever you do anything, write an article. Some journal will publish it.”

Modern

• If you wish to pad your résumé, choose the best known journal that will accept it.

• If you belong to a tightly-knit community, publish where that community will read it.

• If you publish to be widely read, publish online and be sure to be indexed by Google.

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PhysicsRestricted access: Journals, Inspec

Open access: Physics ePrint arXiv, Google

When Everything is Openly Available

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Physics: the ePrint arXiv

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Physics: American Physical Society

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Physics

Stage Who pays

Physicist(s) writes paper Research group / dept. formatted in LaTeX may have internal review

Sends to arXiv NSF / Cornell University

Published by APS Subscriber (library) peer review copy editing printing, etc.

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Access to Physics Literature

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Strategic Study by the American Physical Society

Topic Strategies

Print Declining importance

Copy editing Unnecessary

Peer review Still important

Long-term archiving Important

Note. This report is still in draft. Please do not cite the discussions until the report is released.

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Paying for American Physical Society Journals

Note. This report is still in draft. Please do not cite the discussions until the report is released.

Physics is best served by open access to journals.

APS should move towards open access to their journals.

old: organizations, through their libraries, pay for their members to read (closed access) APS journals

new: organizations, through their libraries, pay for their members to publish in (open access) APS journals

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Computer ScienceRestricted access: Journals, Conferences, Inspec

Open access: Local Web Sites, CiteSeer, Google

When Everything is Openly Available

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Computer Science: ACM Journal

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Computer Science: Local Web Site

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Computer Science: CiteSeer

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Computer Science: Who Pays?

Stage Who pays

Computer scientists(s) Research group / dept.writes paper formatted in PDF, etc.

Posts on local Web site Research group /dept.

Published by ACM/IEEE Subscriber peer review copy editing printing, etc.

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Computer Science: Risks of Open Access

Topic Strategies

Loss of local Web site Institutional repositories

CiteSeer Vulnerable, but alternatives

Google Technology well known,alternatives available

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Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing

Restricted access: Conference Proceedings

Open access: Online Journals, Local Web Sites, Google

Open Access Journals

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Open Access Journal

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Costs of an Open Access Journal

Cost are much the same as for closed-access journal (less the costs associated with restricting access).

Must have an external source of funding:

• D-Lib Magazine has had grants from DARPA and NSF.

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Journal of Electronic Publishing

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Journal of Electronic Publishing

Costs

Editor and Managing Editor: volunteers

Copy editing and Web hosting: $4,000 per year (University of Michigan Press)

Dream budget -- pay part time Managing Editor, etc.: -- $20,000 per year (Columbia University Press)

Income

None

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Risk: Failure of a Journal

Example: Journal of Electronic Publishing

JEP sits on a Web server at the University of Michigan Press -- chance of loss of content is small

Authors can retrieve their articles and place them on local servers or institutional repositories

Indexing by Google continues

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Case Study of a Failed Journal: iMP

William Y. Arms, "Economic models for open-access publishing." iMP, March 2000. http://www.cisp.org/imp/march_2000/03_00arms.htm

Available at:

Original URL

Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)

Personal Web site

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Risks: Copyright Transfer

Authors and publishers want different benefits from copyright.

• Copying with attribution is good for authors.

it encourages reading it encourages many copies being archived

• Copying is bad for publishers.

In theory, publishers enforce copyright to protect authors, but in practice only enforce copyright to protect their financial interests.

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Risks: Peer Review

Thought Experiment

If all scientific publication were open access, would peer review be necessary?

Thought experiment (Thorsten Joachims, Paul Ginsparg)

How accurately can we predict which articles in arXiv will be published in which journals and how frequently will each be cited?

Approach is to apply machine learning to terms in title, record of authors (e.g., affiliation, citation to previous papers), pattern on early usage, etc.

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What Do Faculty Think of Electronic What Do Faculty Think of Electronic Resources?Resources?

Kevin Guthrie

www.jstor.orgwww.jstor.org

CNI Project BriefingSpring 2001

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The Impact of Budget Cuts

When times are tight, tough decisions are made. In the USA:

• Cuts in library funds are leading in cuts in old services (e.g., journal subscriptions)

• Cuts at university presses are leading to cuts in new services

but...

• Federal funds for open access to scientific information are still expanding.

• Universities are investing in institutional repositories

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Baumol's Cost Disease

Year

Price

1900 1950 2000

Bundle of goods and services

Labor-intensive services

Manufactured goods

2050

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Baumol's Cost Disease

Year

Price

1900 1950 2000

Bundle of goods and services

Labor-intensive services

Manufactured goods

2050

Moore's Law

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Some Light Reading

William Y. Arms, "Economic models for open-access publishing." iMP, March 2000. http://www.cisp.org/imp/march_2000/03_00arms.htm

William Y. Arms, "What are the alternatives to peer review? Quality control in scholarly publishing on the web." Journal of Electronic Publishing, 8(1), August 2002. http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/08-01/arms.html