Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, July 5, 1999
On Fri, 2 Jul 1999, Frank Norman wrote:
> I have been following your perceptive and (to me) convincing
> arguments about the merits and demerits of the e-biomed proposal
> from Harold Varmus et al.
>
> In your posting on June 27th you said:
>
> > Quality control will continue to be an essential service, however, and its
> > costs will be recoverable from S/L/P savings by abandoning the
> > reader-institution-end trade model for an author-institution-end
> > publication-charge model that is far more suited to this very anomalous
> > and special form of literature: the refereed research corpus.
>
> If this comes to pass, I can envisage that the more highly
> prestigious titles (Science, Nature, Cell etc) will demand higher
> publication charges than journals lower down the hierarchy. Indeed,
> it may be that there is a very substantial premium to be accepted
> by the most prestigious titles. One effect of this could be to
> prevent less well-financed research groups from publishing in high-
> prestige journals. They'll be able to access the content of such
> journals for free but will not be able to afford to publish in them.
>
> Is this how you see things working out? How could this outcome
> be circumvented?
>
> Frank Norman
> Acting Librarian
> National Institute for Medical Research
> The Ridgeway, Mill Hill
> London, UK
> http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk/personal/Frank
Nothing like this will happen; it is based on a misunderstanding of
peer review -- and of what it is that makes the prestigious journals
prestigious, and hence makes authors prefer to submit papers to them
rather than elsewhere:
The prestige of the top journals is based on their quality, which in
turn depends on their quality-control standards: They only accept the
very best papers (and their typically high rejection rates and citation
impact factors reflect this). (They are not "designer labels," for the
patina of which a "consumer" is willing to pay more!)
The way high standards of quality are maintained is through rigorous
peer review: One cannot BUY success in that process; authors must EARN
it (by doing high quality work). Otherwise the prestigious journals
would simply lose their prestige (and be replaced by other, more
rigorously refereed journals, that recaptured their standards, and
THEREBY the best papers [no, they will not LOWER their charges to
capture to higher-prestige authors either! this sort of market-thinking
is all based on the wrong, old, reader/consumer-end model: or, to put
it another way, the "competition" in this highly anomalous, nontrade,
research literature is for high-quality papers, not for author-dollars.]).
On the contrary, it is much lower down in the peer review hierarchy, as
one approaches the vanity press, that some abuse of the author-end
system is conceivable: Authors may try to buy their way into the pages
of low-quality journals when they have failed to earn their way into
the high-quality ones. But, frankly, I don't find this at all
worrisome! Vanity publications are apparent to everyone; they wear the
result (low quality) on their sleeves (and their contents, their
authorships, their rejection rates and their impact factors); and such
journals already exist today, where the "subsidy" currently comes on
the reader-institution-end rather than the author-institution-end --
everyone knows which ones they are, and that "caveat emptor" prevails
when it comes to deciding whether to read them or rely on what they
report.
http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html
The costs of submitting to the high-quality journals will be close to
the true costs of implementing peer review, for that is all it will
involve (and the peers do not request or receive remuneration; they
referee according to the Golden Rule: it is only the IMPLEMENTATION of
the refereeing that incurs some cost); it is the vanity press that may
have to bribe referees (at the author's cost).
(Unaffiliated authors, with no institution to fund them out of annual
windfall S/L/P-cancelation savings and no funding agency to cover the
minuscule publication costs can be funded from collective publication
slush funds established for this purpose at the journal or suprajournal
level. So this too should not detain us.)
Let me close with two further points:
(1) It is inadvisable to try to second-guess outcomes in this way; it
is all too hypothetical, and for everything we think of in advance,
there will no doubt be several unexpected contingencies we didn't think
of. This isolated single-variable second-guessing simply helps entrench
the status quo, because so many people have vested interests in
retaining it -- or merely prefer to do and change nothing.
So forget about author-end page charges! They will sort themselves out.
The ONLY salient thing at this moment is the absolutely unambiguous
desideratum that all authors should self-archive their refereed papers
NOW and ensure that no copyright agreement ventures to block that
capability. That will effectively free the journal literature. The rest
will take care of itself.
(2) There is another Harnad, not myself, but a mathematical physicist
by the name of John Harnad (and the one who
first drew my attention to the Ginsparg Archive way back in the early
'90's). J. Harnad has some further recommendations on the subject of
referee answerability and compensation: He recommends that (a) all
referees should be paid to referee papers; (b) payment for a rejected
paper should be minimal (say, $200), but payment for an accepted paper
should be commensurate with the effort of seeing it through the
successive revisions (say, $2000) to successful publication; and, to
avoid the potential abuse discussed above, (c) if a paper is accepted,
the name of the accepting referee(s) should be co-published with it, to
share the responsibility, praise or blame. He feels this would raise
the quality of the refereeing and make the entire process much more
answerable, hence effective, than it is now.
Obviously this proposal is compatible with the transition from
reader-institution-end payment to author-institution-end payment,
but it is an as yet untested peer-review reform proposal; all such
reform proposals need to be tested empirically and practically before
being implemented on any scale. Hence it should not detain us on the
road to freeing the CURRENT refereed literature, such as it is.
(I also think that there is not enough money in the world to pay fairly
for the precious time that referees steal from their own research in
order to do the mostly thankless task of peer review; hence the Golden
Rule is probably the only one we can continue to rely on! SUBMISSION
charges, creditable toward PUBLICATION charges should the paper be
accepted, may not be a bad idea to levy on authors, though, with or
without referee payment, for it to might help raise submission
standards and even revision conscientiousness, hence perhaps even
lightening some of the burden on the work-horse referees; but this too
would need pre-testing.)
Stevan Harnad
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
Mostafa K. Mohamed, AinShams University, Cairo, Egypt, July 5, 1999
I should start with my full support of your efforts and proposed international scientific electronic publishing project. I would only like to see that you have also an international editorial board for each particular speciality that you will include in this overwhelming scientific base (biomedical may cover hundreds of specialities as you propably recognize from the responses to your proposal).
I will be happy to be of any assistance for further development of your efforts.
The electronic exchange of ideas and information has revolutionized the scientific communication and people thousands of miles away can work simultaneously, somoothly, with little cost to acheive a particular task like this.
Sincerely yours
Mostafa K. Mohamed
Professor of Community, Environmental and Occupational Medicine
Faculty of Medicine
AinShams University
Cairo, Egypt
David R. Rigney, Ph.D., GENETWORKS Inc., Austin, Texas, July 5, 1999
As noted by others in their comments on E-Biomed, the plan to provide
full access to the entire biomedical research literature will greatly
facilitate meta-analyses, especially if authors are encouraged to submit
their original data along with their manuscripts. E-Biomed will also
greatly facilitate the interpretation of functional genomic data, such
as those acquired using gene expression microarrays. It is difficult to
comprehend the relation between expression levels of thousands of genes,
without considering the entire collection of publications that link each
gene to all the others. As a practical matter, this may only be possible
by using E-Biomed in conjunction with advanced software tools for
searching within full text publications, analysis involving linked
genomic databases, and computer modeling of complex, integrated systems.
(Related issues are discussed by Dr. Varmus at (http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/021398.htm)
David R. Rigney, Ph.D.
GENETWORKS Inc., Vice President for Research and Development
Austin, Texas
Prof. Peter Csermely, International Research Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, July 5, 1999
Dear Sirs,
as an organizer and representative of the recently concluded
International Forum of Young Scientists (a satellite of the World
Conference on Science) I fullheartedly support your e-Biomed
initiative.
Let me emphasize two aspects of the new project which may ensure that
even the communcations, which have not undergone a peer-review system
will contain interesting and valid data:
-- the possibility to attach comments (I would like to add: comments
from identifyable IP addresses, with name and email-address)
-- the possibility of authors to add responses as well as to change
the text of the manuscript later (in a recorded manner)
-- and as a new requirement: the staff should ensure that all
corresponding authors make a note of any email address changes.
Email addresses of corresponding authors should be regularly
checked in a random manner and those found nonresponding should be
clearly marked as materials where the author can not be directly
reached for comments or other verifications.
It is very delightful and assuring to see that you took all the burden
to establish this new forum which answers to so many of the problems
I raised in my recent Science letter (vol. 284, pp. 1622-23). My own
lab has several important contributions, which would only fit to the
"second" (non-peer-reviewed) part of e-Biomed.
Best personal regards,
Prof. Peter Csermely
International Research Scholar
of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute