---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 15:00:23 -0500
From: David Goodman <dgoodman@PHOENIX.PRINCETON.EDU>
Subject: Re: Clarification of "parasitism" and copyright (Stevan Harnad)

Most of us  are attached to the idea of peer
review. Indeed, even those who wish to change peer review radically almost
always wish to retain it in some form, however diffuse.

But the question of how to pay for peer review is not distinct from the
question of what form it takes. Extending on Stevan's argument, if we
could reduce the costs of it to zero, we would have a totally free system.
(Except for the trivial costs of distribution.)

If we did, we would not need to be concerned with the question of who
should pay for it.

 How to accomplish this is another question to be
settled in the proper fashion by experimentation and analysis, not verbal
argument. I do not want to reopen the question of the various
possibilities for this on this forum. I do want to remind everyone that we
should in planning our new information world not assume any impassable
barriers. I do not know whether whatever system we eventually adopt will be
the truly best--it may well prove expedient to accept less than that.  I
doubt whether  the final  model we adopt -- not to speak of the
best possible system-- will be any of the specific proposals
anyone has made so far.

I remain of the opinion that Stevan's proposals are the best
way to proceed for the immediate future, and there is nothing to be gained
by waiting until we solve all the possible issues.

David Goodman
Research Librarian and
Biological Sciences Bibliographer
Princeton University  Library

dgoodman@princeton.edu            609-258-7785

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 03:55:55 +0000
> From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGPRINTS.SOTON.AC.UK>
> Subject: Clarification of "parasitism" and copyright
>
...
>
> So the "parasitism" is not a copyright issue. It is another issue, and
> a double one: (a) How to pay the essential costs of peer review? and
> (b) How NOT to pay for any MORE than the essential costs of peer review,
> if that is all researchers want and need?
>
> And here the growth in the practice of author/institutional
> self-archiving can perform two functions: (i) it immediately frees
> access to the entire refereed literature and (ii) it puts pressure on
> journals (subscription cancellation pressure, because of competition
> from the author's self-archived free version) to cut costs and downsize
> to the essentials (peer review) while at the same time creating the
> institutional revenues (the windfall savings from cancellations) to pay
> for those essential costs, as a SERVICE, on the institution's OUTGOING
> research papers, instead of as a PRODUCT: the institution's INCOMING
> library serials subscriptions.
>
> Finally, the reason I now favor institutional self-archiving over
> central self-archiving is that the university is the natural entity to
> drive, mediate, reward, and benefit from the transition: It is the
> university and its researchers and research output that benefit from
> maximising their research impact by making it freely accessible to all
> would-be users by self-archiving it. It is the university and its
> researchers and research that benefit from having all refereed research
> from other universities freely accessible to its researchers (something
> its library serials budget could never have afforded) and it is the
> university that stands to gain from the annual windfall savings from
> serials cancellations, only a portion of which (~10-30%, or $200-$500
> per paper) will need to be re-directed to cover peer review costs per
> outgoing paper, once the journals have downsized to the essentials.
...
>
> Stevan