Who Pays in Author Pay?

I have read several comments recently indignantly protesting that "author-pay-journals" are not after all actually "author-pay". The fees the journal charges for publication of an article are supposed to be called "article processing charges", and there are supposed to be safeguards in place to guarantee that articles are published whether or not the fees are collected. These are safeguards offered with the best of intentions. They are hopelessly naïve and perhaps even slightly dishonest.

The new open access mathematics journals offered by Cambridge University Press are a good example. Proponents claim that once a paper is accepted for publication, an author has merely to arrange for his/her institution to send a letter stating that it is unwilling to pay the article charges – with no need for justification whatsoever. And I am quite certain that in the heady early days of gold open access, some institutions and funding agencies will indeed pay the charges. But some will not, especially without required justification. Over time, will the former continue to subsidize the latter? Surely not, and surely a business model built on volunteer payments alone cannot sustain itself in the long-run.

Several years ago, earnest scholars who had begun free online journals ran out of volunteer time and the modest amount of money needed to keep their journals running. These were high-quality journals with admirable goals, and the scholars proposed a simple scheme to keep them going: They asked libraries to pay a very small subscription fee, hoping that many small fees add up to the modest support they needed. That small fee would be a contribution to the battle against high subscription fees for commercial journals, they argued. Surely libraries would want to contribute. Invariably, they did not. If universities could access journals for free, why should they use scarce dollars to pay for access?

Now we are expected to believe that universities will make a much more substantial voluntary contribution to publish the papers of their own faculty. Maybe, for a while, they will. But over time, as dollars become scarce and there is pressure to spend them on other important things, even wealthy universities will decline to subsidize less-wealthy universities.

The long-term consequences of these policies are determined partly by simple business principles, but even more so by basic human psychology. Alas, the naïve scholars who assure us that gold open access can be accomplished without authors ever actually paying the charges are not especially attuned to human psychology (or business principles). The publishers who are their partners in the new journals are not naïve, however, and the initial low article charges and assurances that no one will actually have to pay are slightly dishonest. They know better. This is simply bait-and-switch, albeit in a scholarly and refined setting.

The author-pay model is exactly that—the author pays. We should not try to obscure reality with fanciful promises. Right now, the fee may come from the university or some funding agency, but inevitably the author "authorizes" the charge. For many new and proliferating journals, authors themselves are indeed paying, and journals cannot prevent them from doing so. Over the long-run all journals will require payment somehow—they must. If one insists on gold open access, this is the price one pays. It may be worth the cost, but pretending there is no cost is foolish.

John Ewing

Citation Statistics

A report from the IMU in cooperation with ICIAM and IMS. On the use and misuse of citation data and statistics in assessing research. 

Executive Summary

This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using "simple and objective" methods is increasingly prevalent today. The "simple and objective" methods are broadly interpreted as bibliometrics, that is, citation data and the statistics derived from them. There is a belief that citation statistics are inherently more accurate because they substitute simple numbers for complex judgments, and hence overcome the possible subjectivity of peer review. But this belief is unfounded.

• Relying on statistics is not more accurate when the statistics are improperly used. Indeed, statistics can mislead when they are misapplied or misunderstood. Much of modern bibliometrics seems to rely on experience and intuition about the interpretation and validity of citation statistics.  

• While numbers appear to be "objective", their objectivity can be illusory. The meaning of a citation can be even more subjective than peer review. Because this subjectivity is less obvious for citations, those who use citation data are less likely to understand their limitations.

• The sole reliance on citation data provides at best an incomplete and often shallow understanding of research—an understanding that is valid only when reinforced by other judgments. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments.

Using citation data to assess research ultimately means using citation‐based statistics to rank things— journals, papers, people, programs, and disciplines. The statistical tools used to rank these things are often misunderstood and misused.

MORE

What is the price of journal?

What’s the price of a journal?

For that matter, what is the price of a car or a novel or a loaf of bread? All these things are frequently discounted, but we don’t throw up our hands and claim that they don't have a "real” price. Yet on several occasions recently, I’ve heard people say that we can't tell the price of journals because they are often discounted.

When the editorial board of the journal Topology resigned and began a competing journal, Elsevier wrote: “Because the majority of our subscribers purchase this journal in a larger set of journals, most are paying a fraction of the institutional subscription price.” I’ve heard similar arguments from other publishers, who like to compute the “price” of a journal by dividing the total revenue by the number of “subscribers”. But that’s not the price! It’s the “average revenue per subscriber."

The (list) price of a journal is set by the publisher, and it’s plainly visible to anyone who examines annual price lists. For some journals, there may be a two-tiered price, one for institutions and one for individuals, but in every case there is a price. Just as for cars or novels or bread, journals may be sold at a discount. But it's important to remember that publishers discount journals for business reasons, not because, in a sudden fit of remorse, they want to lower the price. Journals are sometimes discounted to agents, who consolidate them to help libraries purchase from multiple publishers. They are discounted to institutional members of scholarly societies as a member benefit, in return for dues. And journals are discounted to subscribers who buy bundles of journals, often making a commitment to buy for several years. In each case, the publisher is discounting journals in order to gain some advantage -- it's a simple business arrangement.

There is nothing wrong with discounting journals; it's good business. But it doesn’t change the price. Indeed, the price is the starting point for all discounting arrangements, defining the terms of a bargain: I’ll return a portion of the price in return for some action on your part – consolidating, being a member, or purchasing a bundle. Confusing the discounted price with the actual price ignores one half of the bargain.

We should pay attention to the list price of a journal because inevitably some subscribers (quite often, most) pay the list price. But there are other reasons not to let publishers substitute the "average revenue per subscriber" for the price. The average revenue is a quotient, and publishers control both the numerator and the denominator.

Unlike the list price, we must rely on the publisher to tell us the numerator, that is, the total revenue for a journal. Calculating total revenue sounds straightforward until one realizes that when selling bundles, large publishers apportion revenue among many journals – a somewhat mysterious process that isn’t easily discovered. For many publishers, the total revenue assigned to a particular journal is a very fuzzy number indeed.

The denominator is even more problematic. How many subscribers does a journal have? If a publisher adds many journals to bundles at no charge, the number of subscribers will quickly rise. But adding unwanted (and frequently unused) journals to bundles doesn't really change the number of subscribers to each journal in any meaningful way. Allowing publishers to use these arrangements to calculate either the average price per journal (for an institution) or the average revenue per subscriber (for the publisher) is like allowing politicians to count all those people who might have voted for them (but didn't vote) in an election. And allowing publishers to tell us the "real" price of their journals is like asking car salesmen to dictate the "best" price for their cars.

Scholars face a crisis today caused by high journal prices. If they are going to make headway in addressing that crisis, they have to get smarter about journals and more sophisticated about business practices. They can't allow publishers to redefine the problem by redefining the price. That's neither smart nor sophisticated.

John Ewing

Where are Journals Headed?

Why we should worry about author-pay

People often ask me what I think will happen to journals. I’m a mathematician, but I know I won’t find the answer there. Mathematics journals account for roughly 5% of scholarly journals[1]-- journals in the biological and medical sciences account for about 50%! And this has consequences: At nearly every meeting about journals, biomedical journals dominate the discussion.

The business model adopted by biomedical journals will most likely be the model adopted by all others because biomedical journals not only dominate numbers but revenues as well. Customers (in this case, institutional libraries) don’t like to deal with multiple business models. They don't easily divide budgets into new pieces (say, subscriptions versus page charges), and they don’t like making complicated purchasing decisions. Dominant products and services usually shape those of lesser importance, and biomedical journals are clearly dominant.

The real question is therefore where are biomedical journals headed, and the answer seems obvious: They are moving towards an open access, author-pay model -- one in which journal content is available at no charge to everyone, but authors pay a fee prior to publication. To many biomedical scientists, this feels like the right model. The purpose of publishing a biomedical paper is to make the results available now, not to preserve them for the future. The focus is on immediacy. Paying a "posting-fee" makes sense, and since most biomedical research is supported by grants (often large ones), a relatively small posting-fee is easily absorbed in the grant. This is the model underlying experiments such as the Public Library of Science, and it is the model implicitly promoted by the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., as well as by various biomedical organizations throughout the world. It is the logical successor to the subscription model when papers are made freely available after only a six month embargo.

Should we worry that all scholarly journals may follow a course dictated by one discipline's need for immediacy and availability of ample grant funds? Some open access proponents claim not. Everyone wins, they say, because not only do we gain universal access but, if the posting-fee is only the cost-of-posting, we will also save money -- lots of it. As for the lack of grants, institutional budgets will merely shift from subscriptions to “page-charges” (that is, author fees), so that even those without grant funds will be able to publish their research. It's simple, they say, a model that benefits all.

But there are good reasons to worry about this sanguine view of the new model for journals.

(i) In areas where most research is not grant supported, universities and colleges will have to pay author-fees by reallocating money from libraries (subscriptions) to other parts of the institution (departments? divisions?) that need the funds. But reallocating money is never a simple process. Will those who pay author fees from grants (biomedical sciences) be willing to give their library budgets to those who cannot (say, the humanities)? I suspect not. Will administrators look for ways to save money by shifting funds to other uses? Long experience suggests they will. Will departments with prestigious faculties demand more of the funds than those with less prestigious? Of course they will, and this will exaggerate differences throughout the university. Various constituencies will vie for funds, with inevitable winners and losers. Perhaps that's not bad, but it's surely not "simple".

(ii) The change in who makes decisions will change the market; this is basic economics. In the subscription model, users and librarians make decisions; in the author-pay model, authors and publishers make them. To succeed in the subscription model, a journal must secure enough subscriptions by convincing users and librarians that it has intellectual value. To succeed in the author-pay model, a journal must convince enough authors to submit papers and then it must accept enough of them to make money. Price will vie with prestige. The most prestigious journals will charge more and will attract authors who can pay the cost (grants will help). The less prestigious journals will discount their price in order to attract more authors and will increase the acceptance rate. Some institutions may demand that scholars use less expensive journals; others will demand that their faculty publish only in expensive ones. The result will be a distorted and ugly market, driven by some of the same forces that drive vanity publishing. This is what happens when a market is driven by producers instead of consumers.

(iii) The author-pay model emphasizes immediacy. All money exchanges hands before the article appears when the author pays a "posting-fee". After a short period of time, the material in the journal has no monetary value to the publisher, other than to attract more authors. This is a subtle but profound change from the subscription model. Because anyone can post articles on the web, unscrupulous publishers will take advantage of this short-term view by accepting marginal papers (or just plain junk) into newly created journals in order to make easy cash. Those who think scholars will not publish in such "instant journals" have not looked at current marginal publishers (who are kept in check only because they have to convince someone to buy their publications). Almost surely, more papers will be published in such a system.

(iv) The large commercial publishers will thrive in this new model. In fact, all large commercial publishers already have units devoted to open access publishing and are (quietly) pushing the author-pay model. Why? They will now produce a product for which they get paid by the supplier, in advance, without risk, and with lower overhead (because they don't have to sell subscriptions). And because the large publishers are diversified, they can take advantage of a changing environment. Small journal publishers in areas that have no grants to pay author fees will quickly go under; large publishers will expand into areas that are most lucrative. Large commercial publishers will end up with less competition in a market that is more easily manipulated -- a market they will dominate even more than now. Of course they are pushing the author-pay model!

The fundamental problem for journals is simple – we pay too much for them! It’s not access (which has never been better). It’s not our business model (which is shared responsibility). It’s not how we pay but rather how much we pay!

Many proponents of the author-pay model think we can solve this problem by switching to a new business model. Some have faith that publishers can be persuaded to set author fees only slightly higher than publication costs. But publishers who have profited from subscriptions in the past will certainly expect to profit from author fees in the future. (I can assure you that commercial publishers have this expectation.) Others believe they can run inexpensive author-pay journals themselves to compete with established journals, miraculously succeeding with upstart author-pay journals where upstart subscription-based journals have failed in the past. But there is no basis for this optimism. Indeed, since we will likely publish far more than ever before, we will likely spend far more as well. And here’s the largest worry about the author-pay model: It does not solve the fundamental problem of journals -- this model makes it worse!

We are therefore heading in the wrong direction. Scholarly journals are sick and they need attention. But instead of following a regimen of reasoned and disciplined remedies -- instead of driving down prices by the steady, concerted actions of authors, editors, and librarians -- we are bleeding the patient with open access models, trusting in miracles (that university administrators will shift funds from those with research funds to those without), and praying that publishers will repent their ways.

It is ironic that those leading us down this path of folk remedies and faith healing come from the biomedical sciences.

John Ewing

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[1] These percentages are derived from data in the Genamics JournalSeek database. See http://journalseek.net/information.htm .

The Hysteria over PRISM

George Orwell would feel at home.

The Association of American Publishers recently unveiled a new campaign called PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), which is largely a website calling for scholars to write their Congressional representatives to oppose mandatory posting of scholarly articles funded by Federal research grants. Some of their heavy-handed arguments -- that mandatory posting would undermine the peer review process and open the door to censorship -- are transparently silly. Others -- that such a policy leads to inefficiency and may leave scholarly publishing subject to the vagaries of government funding -- are not, at least not transparently. But the open access advocates are irate, not about the arguments, but that an organization would oppose their cause. Some accuse AAP of a new McCarthyism against open access and demand a boycott of AAP -- presumably until the organization corrects its thinking. Orwell would have appreciated the logic.

For the record, I personally oppose many of the policies promoted by AAP, and I am associated to a society publisher that promotes more forward-looking policies. But I also realize that scholarly publishing is complex, and access is only one of many important issues we face today. As a scholar, I have faith that the best way to make decisions about change is through discourse, not through denunciations and thought-police.

Advocates of open access hired public relations firms and created ads to promote their cause long before AAP hired its own lobbyist. They also long ago created their own (multiple!) websites promoting their cause as well as advertisements, long before PRISM existed. They have received wide and favorable publicity from sympathetic reporters in various publications, including The Chronicle for Higher Education and Nature, and they have made the case for open access at many forums, including AAP sponsored meetings. It is therefore unsettling to see the hysterical reaction to PRISM (and before that, to the lobbyist hired by AAP to promote their side of the debate). This does indeed smack of McCarthy-like tactics, but not by AAP.

I feel uncomfortable defending AAP. (Actually, it is the executive committee of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of AAP that created PRISM.) This is an organization that too often stands for the status quo, and too seldom promotes thoughtful change. On the other hand, AAP has done some things well, and I would rather have society publishers a part of a major organization representing American publishers than to marginalize ourselves through a boycott. I recognize that members are not obliged to agree with everything an organization does, any more than publishers are obliged to agree with everything they publish. I find it particularly strange that those who head university presses do not understand this principle as well.

It may be time for all of us to stop denouncing one another and to start discussing the real issues that face scholarly publishing. Access is one of them, but there are many more, and many more important.

John Ewing

Postscript: As of 9/12/07, a Google search on "PRISM" doesn't even detect the website in the first dozen pages of results. It's hard to imagine that such a low-key, nearly-invisible effort will "mislead the public" about scholarly publishing.

Digital Downside

The Digital Downside

The Obsession with Open Access[1]

J. Ewing

Scholars and librarians usually focus on the advantages of electronic journals—faster processing, reduced costs, and new features (such as searching and linking)—and there are indeed many such advantages. But like all technology, electronic journals have a downside as well. Most people have ignored this downside because these problems are presently little more than annoyances. But we should understand the downside in order to prevent these small annoyances from turning into big crises in the future. In one or two cases, it may already be too late.

Here are five problems with electronic journals—problems that arise when the miraculous new technology is combined with the human fraili­ties of carelessness, greed, myopia, dogmatism, and infatuation.

1 Careless Scholars

In the digital age, we can do things we could never do before. Here are some examples from the recent literature of things we can do:

• A journal posts an article in January; in April, without any notice, the editors replace the article with a “corrected” version.
• A journal posts an article in July; in November, the publisher sim­ply removes the article (without notifying the authors!).
• A journal posts an article in April, but the author posts a corrected and substantially changed version on a well-known server in Oc­tober, with an indication that the article appeared in April, but no indication that it was different.

Mathematics relies on its literature for its underpinnings; its liter­ature is interconnected. Imagine a world in which one percent of the mathematical literature is affected in the above way, in which one per­cent of the articles one finds are not the “authentic” versions. Over time, as work based on faulty references spreads, the fraction of unre­liable literature will increase. Experts may be able to overcome this, but nonexperts will be overwhelmed. We ignore this potential crisis at the peril of future generations of mathematicians.

These sloppy practices occur because new technology allows us to do things never before possible. That doesn’t mean we should do them! To prevent this from destroying the scholarly literature, we need to insist on high standards. There are two ways to handle this—back­-linking or forward-linking—and both require discipline. Every author regrets publishing mistakes (as do publishers!), but we have to resist the temptation to hide them.

2 Big Deals

The electronic age has made it possible for big publishers to offer big deals. Here’s the way they work. Rather than subscribing to journals one by one, an institution is offered electronic access to a huge package of journals across many fields (many of which were previously unavail­able to the institution). Initially, the cost of this package is comparable to the cost of the publisher’s journals to which the institution previously subscribed, and (the publisher points out) it’s always far less than the total cost of the individual subscriptions. This seems to be a wonderful opportunity for the institution, and the vice-president for information (the one who negotiated the deal) crows about the fiscal prowess that brought about this arrangement.

Big deals are now offered by Elsevier (an innovator in this area), Springer, Wiley, Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis. In a recent survey of US research libraries, 93% indicated that they held bundles with at least one of these publishers. Just about half (49%) held bundles with at least four. Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer have achieved 70% market penetration.[2]

Figure 1. Percentage of commercial journals among all mathematics journals

When asked about their motivation, most said that it was a “good return on investment” and that the “alternatives . . . were prohibitively expensive.”

But these institutions have paid a heavy price for that “good in­vestment.” Such big deals are almost always multi-year contracts that do not allow cancellations or changes. The extra titles are often of marginal value to scholars. Most importantly, decisions about what is purchased are made at a high level, far removed from scholars them­selves. In the end, big deals make it more difficult for scholars to make sensible decisions about journals based on price and need. Of course, big deals give the big publishers a substantial advantage over smaller publishers, which is their real purpose.

Big deals are hard to resist, although a few prominent libraries have done so. But the commercial publishers are winning. In 1985, roughly a third of mathematics articles were in commercial journals; by 2004, over half the articles were commercial.[3]  We need to fight back.

3 Walt Disney

The Walt Disney story is a metaphor. The first Mickey Mouse cartoon was produced and copyrighted in 1928. By the late 1990s, the term of copyright for Mickey Mouse (then 75 years for corporate works) was about to expire in 2003. The Disney corporation was making lots of money on the character, partly because new technology allowed new uses. What did Disney do? It persuaded the US Congress to change the law, extending copyright by 20 years. It is now 95 years for corpo­rations; for authored works, copyright extends for the life of the author plus 70 years.

Copyright—the ability to own intellectual property—was never meant to be forever (the late Jack Valenti, as head of the movie producers’ as­sociation, was overheard to say the term should be “forever minus a day”). But as technology progressed over the past 400 years, copy­right became longer and longer . . . barely indistinguishable from for­ever. Until the digital age, this did not affect scholarly publishing much. Now, however, there are new reasons to worry about copyright’s reach.

Scholarly publishers have never made much money by selling jour­nal back volumes. In the age of print, publishers kept a few copies of old journals to sell to libraries when they wanted to replace missing volumes or (rarely) to start a new collection. Typically, such sales of back volumes amounted to one to three percent of journal revenues. Publishers expected to recover their initial costs (and make a profit) by selling current subscriptions, not by selling back volumes.

Now, however, like the Disney corporation, publishers see an op­portunity to make money on their old material using new technology. They want to sell their journals twice, once as a current subscription and a second time as a collection of backfiles. There are many varia­tions on this scheme, some merely sell the backfiles with the current subscription, pointing out that it makes the subscription more valuable (and hence more expensive). But the central point is that publishers carefully control access to the backfiles.

Of course, publishers who digitize their back volumes want to re­cover their costs. But rather than find a way to pay the one-time cost of digitization, and then make the material freely available, they want to continue making money next year, and the year after that, and after that, and on and on into the future. This includes publishers of every kind, not just the commercial ones.

This doesn’t make sense for Mickey Mouse, but it makes even less sense for scholarship. By “owning” scholarship and restricting access indefinitely, publishers make it impossible to realize the dream of con­necting the large body of the past scholarly literature to the present. This makes our present journals less valuable, not more, and ultimately hurts the publishers themselves.

Copyright was invented to make publishing profitable. But no one— no publisher, no author, no one—needs to hold copyright for more than two or three decades. We ought to make a pact that everything goes into the public domain after 28 years.[4]

4 Mindless Accountants

Using flawed statistics to make (equally flawed) decisions is not new. But it is so, so much easier to do in the digital age. Many people have written about the “impact factor,” which is more and more frequently misused, but I want to talk about another troublesome statistic—journal usage, which is even more dangerous than the impact factor.

Librarians all over the world are insisting on usage statistics for journals, which roughly translates into the number of downloads of var­ious articles over a given period of time. They claim this is necessary in order to measure the value of journals and to make decisions about sub­scriptions. Publishers in general seem happy to oblige—almost eager in many cases.

This is a hopelessly naive and dangerous game. What is the meaning of such usage statistics? What does it mean that some article has been downloaded 100 times? Have people read it 100 times? Surely not— you don’t read every item on which you click while browsing the web, so why would scholars read every article they download? And which is more valuable, an article downloaded once a week for ten years, or one downloaded 520 times in its first month? What about caching and the many flaws in browser software that give rise to faulty counts? There are many questions, but almost no answers—just the demand for usage statistics in order to measure value.

Making decisions using ignorant accounting has always been a bad idea, but in this case it may have some disastrous consequences. If li­brarians are really going to measure value by clicks, surely publishers will force users to click more often. It would be foolish to give away abstracts or references or even bibliographic data, for example, if this leads to fewer clicks and hence less value. And if value equals clicks, then why on earth would publishers let authors post copies of papers anywhere except on the publisher’s website. The more liberal a pub­lisher’s policy in this regard, the more the publisher risks losing value. Making decisions by using flawed usage statistics will inevitably shift publishers’ practices, all in the wrong direction. We need to explain this to those who dogmatically claim that value can be measured by a few flawed numbers.

5 Fads and Fashions

A corrupted literature, a literature controlled by a handful of giant publishers, a literature hidden away forever, a literature shaped by nutty accountants using flawed statistics—all these are potential crises caused by the advent of electronic publishing. None is insurmountable, but each is worrisome. And so with these worries pressing upon us, what do we advance as our most pressing issue in the new electronic age? Access—open access to the literature.

On the face of it, this is bizarre. In the digital age, scholars have more access to the literature than ever before. When an institution subscribes to a journal, the articles are now delivered straight to a user’s desktop. Finding articles is far easier than ever before using any number of search tools. Articles can be downloaded, printed, and (dare we admit?) sent to others via email. Even when a user’s institution does not subscribe to a journal, the user can see the abstract and (often) the list of references. This allows scholars to decide whether the article is useful and then to send email to the author to ask for a copy (or simply to find it elsewhere on the web—recent changes in publisher policies make this easy). And many publishers provide access to older articles without any subscription at all. None of this was possible in the print-only world—none of it! In the print world, good access to the scholarly literature was restricted to a few institutions, and near-universal access was unheard of. This has all changed.

Nonetheless, instead of focusing on the four potential crises men­tioned above, the scholarly community has decided to focus on access, the one aspect of the scholarly literature that has already been greatly improved in the digital age.

I have spent a lot of time trying to understand why people seem obsessed with access, and I have come to realize that there is no simple answer. In part, it is human nature: when things improve, we want to improve them still more. Having a taste of increased access, people want completely unfettered access. In part, this is because the call to “open access” is simple to understand. Scholars are not willing to invest time in wrestling with the tougher issues of scholarly publishing mentioned above, which are messy and sometimes hard to unravel. But there is a more subtle, and more insidious, reason for the obsession with access: whenever technology changes the world around us, we become more susceptible to fads and fashions. New technology opens up new opportunities, and new opportunities bring forth opportunists— zealous people who promote their own special causes.

On the face of it, increased access is surely not a bad thing: it is hard to argue against having more access to scholarship. On the other hand, it can be bad if it causes us to ignore the real problems we face, and it can be tragic if new enticing technology combines with an irresistible fad to mislead us into acting against our own interests.

Open access has had both effects on mathematics. When plan­ning for our digital future, we spend most of our time talking about access (already greatly improved), and almost no time talking about the integrity of scholarship, copyright issues, foolish bureaucrats who use faulty statistics, or (worst of all!) avaricious publishers who have created a crisis in scholarly publishing. Instead, we talk about ac­cess. And, of course, those avaricious publishers are delighted by the distraction.

We also formulate ideas that are clearly bad for mathematics. The author-pay model for journals simply does not work for mathemati­cians. Our funding levels do not support it and they never will, at least at the levels of medical sciences. We will always be at a competitive disadvantage to other scientists in an author-pay world.

The self-archiving model of open access is clearly bad for mathe­matics, which more than any other discipline depends on the long-term survival of a reliable web of scholarship—into the distant future many decades from now. And preprint servers, without any obvious source of long-term funding, are not much more attractive.

The government-funded model of open access is also clearly bad for mathematics, which has never competed well with the other sci­ences for government largess. Besides, the budget for the government-funded model seems to assume a stable publishing environment for the long term, without the need to invest in ever changing technol­ogy. Surely this is short-sighted. We will have to invest even more in the coming decade than we have in the past in order to keep up with changing technology. Will the government really do that investing?

Indeed, every model of open access that has been proposed is clearly detrimental to the broad interests of mathematicians. But open access has become an obsession for many that has blinded otherwise thought­ful people into acting against their own interests. That is a real down­side to new technology that may do the most damage in the long term. This is a downside that already affects us.

Don’t believe me? Just check out those large commercial publishers who are all beginning to embrace open access. They are creating sepa­rate corporate units, just to promote and implement open access. They can do that—they have the resources. They know that no matter how the business model changes, they will be able to take advantage of it to make money—lots of it. Surely publishers who have raised subscrip­tion prices for years will feel equally free to raise author charges in the future. Change is good for large corporations, who have the resources to invest in change; it is a lot harder for the little guys who operate on a tight budget and make a tiny profit. This is especially bad for math­ematics, which has traditionally relied on more small and independent journals than any other discipline. If open access is so great for us—if open access is about to solve all our problems—why are the commercial publishers jumping on the bandwagon?

6 Summing Up

Are there disadvantages to electronic journals? Of course there are. Should we advocate abandoning the digital age because of those dis­advantages? Of course not. And in any case, the digital age is here to stay, no matter what we advocate. But as we move forward into the new age, we need to make clear the principles that should underlie our scholarly literature.

I believe in formulating clear policies about the integrity of scholar­ship. I believe in fighting to keep decision making in the hands of schol­ars. I believe that no one should own ideas for too long—scholarship belongs to all of us and moving walls should be universal. And I be­lieve that scholars, and not accountants, should measure the value of scholarship.

But I believe most of all that we must stay focused on these real problems as the world changes around us, and not be distracted by fads—especially fads that will hurt mathematics (and scholarship more generally) in the long run.

The digital age will dramatically change the way in which we dis­seminate scholarship in the future . . . but we have to guide that change so that it makes things better and not worse.

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[1] Based on a talk given at a conference in Aveiro, Portugal, 2006.
[2] The survey collected data from 89 of the 123 member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries during November and December of 2005.

[3] These data were derived from Mathematical Reviews.

[4] The term of 28 years was standard for more than two centuries after copyright was invented, and therefore has historical meaning. See Notices of the AMS 51(3), March 2004, p. 309.

Measuring Journals

By John Ewing

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), attributed

The impact factor was created in the late 1950s as a way to measure a journal's value by calculating the average number of citations per article over a specific period of time. Since citations generally reflect the interest of scholars in an article, the impact factor ought to reflect the average interest in articles appearing in a journal. This seems to be a sensible use of citations.

But the impact factor has far outgrown its original purpose. A recent article [4] on the impact factor asserts that "impact factors have assumed so much power ... that they are starting to control the scientific enterprise" and that they "play a crucial role in hiring, tenure decisions, and the awarding of grants." The same article quotes Eugene Garfield, the creator of the impact factor, who laments: "We never predicted that people would turn this into an evaluation tool for giving out grants and funding."

People misuse the impact factor because there are no explicit principles governing its interpretation. The impact factor is used to measure the value of things for which it was never intended (articles and authors, for example), and it is used to make faulty comparisons between unlike objects, including journals themselves.

This is not a new problem. For decades, scholars have complained about...... MORE

(Also published in the Notices.)

The Orthodoxy of Open Access

Based on a debate that was held at the Society for Scholarly Publishing on Open Access. August 2004. Also found in Nature Forum.

Snow White was working around the cottage one day when she got word of a terrible cave-in at the mine of the seven dwarves. She frantically rushed to the mine, peered down the dust-filled shaft, and called out: ‘Hello there, are you all right?’

A distant voice came back: ‘I believe the politicians when they say we can solve our healthcare problems, fix Social Security, increase defense spending, pay down the debt, balance the budget, and still cut our taxes’. Snow White looked up.

‘Whew!’ she said… ‘at least Dopey is alive’.

We hear a lot about Open Access (OA) these days at publishing conferences, in scholarly magazines and even in the popular press. Advocates have tried to shape the debate as merely a call for experimentation, claiming they are only promoting a new business model: OA, they say, can be achieved by a simple shift of costs from subscribers to authors; OA is another model for paying the costs of publishing; OA is so obviously good for scholars that surely no-one can object.

The debate, however, is neither about experiments nor about business models. This debate is about single-minded beliefs—an orthodoxy that is promoted with religious fervour. A few quotes illustrate that fervour:     MORE

Misdirection

About the debate on Open Access, which distracts us from the real crisis in journals -- exorbitant prices. 

Journals publishing is in crisis. For years, subscription prices have increased rapidly, often at annual double-digit rates. Prices for some journals have tripled in the past ten years, and the average increase is now close to ten percent. The budgets of university libraries have fallen far behind, forcing librarians to cancel subscriptions. Publishers have used declining subscriptions as a rationale to increase prices even more. And the literature has expanded, creating fatter journals (and yet more reasons for publishers to increase prices). Scholars and librarians have become increasingly unhappy about the state of affairs, and they demand action.

So what action do they suggest? They want to change the way in which publishers collect the money. Go figure. Instead of collecting money through subscriptions, they plan to charge authors a fee — perhaps $1,500 per article (although higher amounts are suggested). We are told that the real problem is access to information, and that we should focus our attention on making material more accessible. Magicians call this technique misdirection, and it's at the heart of all tricks. Are open access advocates really trying to trick everyone?

No—this misdirection is caused by a mistake.

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A Modest Proposal: Copyright and Scholarly Journals

I am a reactionary—at least when it comes to copyright. The first copyright law in 1709 provided protection for up to 28 years. In most countries today, copyright extends for 70 years beyond an author's life, which means copyright can extend for more than 150 years! The period of 28 years was a compromise between anarchy (zero) and perpetual monopoly (infinity). It balanced the rights and interests of publishers, authors, and the public. The balance worked.

Modern copyright law seems to work for novels, music, and movies, but it doesn't work well for scholarly journals. Journals record the knowledge of one generation for the next—they are long-term affairs. Recently, scholars discovered that copyright was a major impediment to making the older literature available online because obtaining permission decades after a journal was published was often impossible. And scholars realize that these difficulties will increase as we migrate to new formats in the future. For scholarly journals, copyright protection is an obstacle, not a safeguard.

We cannot change the laws that protect novels, movies, and music for the sake of scholarly journals. Publishers have persuaded both themselves and lawmakers that our present copyright laws provide the right balance for these creative works, and we are unlikely to change their minds. We should look for practical solutions, not ideological jousts.

What's a practical solution? Be reactionary—revert to the older traditions of copyright, without changing the law. We should urge scholars when publishing journal articles to dedicate their work to the public domain after 28 years.1 Until then, authors and publishers control their work as at present (perhaps giving free access much earlier). After 28 years, the work belongs to the world, in keeping with the historical traditions of copyright.

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Copyright and Authors

For three centuries, publishers have touted the virtues of copyright and the need to protect authors. Authors must be treated fairly, they say. Authors must be rewarded for their work. And copyright is the tool by which publishers can do this. The benefit to publishers is incidental.

The argument is illustrated clearly in a recent article by Peter Givler, the Executive Director of the American Association of University Presses (Givler, 2003). The essay has the title "Copyright: It's for the Public Good." In his essay, Givler is condescending. ("The academics and librarians I know are smart, interesting, delightful people, but they do have some peculiar ideas about copyright.") He is a little smug. ("I think I understand academic values well enough, and the challenge of trying to make this scholarly publishing business serve those unbusinesslike ends has made my career interesting...") And he is sometimes misleading. ("Shakespeare, whose works are so well known, yet whose texts exist in so many versions, furnishes an instructive example of the perils of authorship before copyright."1 ) He ends his essay with a rousing declaration that paraphrases Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg to say copyright is "good law precisely because it is such a powerful force for public good."

Of course, some aspects of copyright are good, both for authors and for the public. Without copyright, publishing would fall into anarchy, as it has at certain times in the past. Large parts of our modern world—literature, movies, and music—depend on copyright. Even esoteric scholarly publishing depends on copyright (in spite of recent suggestions to the contrary by some ill-advised members of Congress who want to do away with copyright for all federally funded research). But copyright is not for authors, and copyright is not about fairness. Copyright is a complex system of laws and traditions, created to balance the rights and interests of three groups involved in publishing— authors, publishers, and public.

Not so, writes Peter Givler. He claims that copyright is simple and self-evident: ...MORE

(Also appeared in First Monday)