---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 94 05:51:45 EDT
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: Subversive Proposal
-----

From: lrg96@acs.org (Lorrin Garson)
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 94 15:49:33 EDT

Stevan,

Re below, by all means post to a wide list of interested parties. I'd
sincerely love to discover someone/somehow to reduce journal production
costs so that a majority of our expenses were printing/paper-distribution.

Regards, Lorrin

Publications Division,  American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C.
E-mail: lrg96@acs.org    Phone: (202) 872-4541   FAX (202) 872-4389

> From: lrg96@acs.org (Lorrin Garson)
> Date: Mon, 27 Jun 94 19:51:40 EDT
>

> Regarding the phrase "(which I estimate to be less than 25% of paper-page
> costs, contrary to the 75% figure that appears in most current publishers'
> estimates)" from your proposal below, do you mean that printing costs are 75%
> of the total publishing costs?  If so, I can assure you this is certainly
> incorrect in scientific/technical publishing.  Our experience at the American
> Chemical Society is that printing and paper costs are about 15% of total
> manufacturing costs and the "first copy", or prepress costs are about 85% of
> the total.  Could you clarify what you mean?  I'd be very interested on what
> basis you make your financial estimates.
>
> Lorrin R. Garson
-----

Dear Lorrin,

Yes, in fact, the data you have often presented were among the ones I
had in mind when I challenged the 75% figure (though many other
publishers have come up with figures similar to yours 70-85%).

I challenge it on two bases, and they are these:

(1) The calculation according to which the "per-page" savings would be
only 25%, leaving 75% still to be paid for is based on how much
electronic processing will save in PAPER publication. The entire
superstructure is set up to hurtle headlong toward print on paper, so
if you recalculate that budget and leave out the print-run and a few
other things, you find you're left with 75% of the original expenses.
Solution? Exorcise everything having to do with going into paper, from
the bottom up. Budget an electronic-ONLY journal, and the per-page cost
will come out much, much lower (if anything, my 25% is an
OVER-estimate).

To put it another way: Your way of doing the figures is rather like
challenging the advantages of automobiles by calculating how much
they would save on horse-feed.

(2) But, if that is not enough, I also speak from experience: I edit
both a paper and an electronic journal. Although the two are not
entirely comparable, and the paper one undeniably still has a much
larger submission rate and annual page count, the true costs of the
electronic one are an order of magnitude lower even making allowances for
this. And this is not because anyone is working for free, or because
the Net is giving the journal a free ride (it gives -- as I delight in
showing audiences in (numerical) figures -- an incomparably bigger free
ride to porno-graphics, flaming, and trivial pursuit, and THAT is much
riper for being put onto a trade model than esoteric scholarly
publication, the flea on the tail of the dog, which I believe we would
all benefit from granting a free ride on the airwaves in perpetuum).

If we charged PSYCOLOQUY's readership (now estimated at 40,000) their
share of the true costs, they would have to pay 25 cents per year (down
from 50% a couple of years ago, as the readership grew and costs
actually shrank; and thanks in part also to centralized subscriber-list
handling at EARN, much of it automatized, as well as to developments
such as gopher and world-wide-web, which are rapidly replacing the
subscriber model by the browser model altogether in electronic publication).

PSYCOLOQUY is subsidized by the APA, which is also a large psychology
paper publisher. I don't know what proportion of the APA's or ACS's
publications are esoteric: I am NOT speaking about publications on
which the author expects to make money from the sale of his text. But
for that no-market portion of the literature, re-do your figures with
the endpoint being a URL file in WWW for all those published articles.
Reckon only the true costs of implementing peer review, processing
manuscripts (electronically), editing, copy-editing, proof-reading,
etc., and then finally electronic archiving and maintenance. I predict
that you will be surprised by the outcome; but this cannot be reckoned
by striking a few items from the ledger based on how you do things
presently.

Best wishes, Stevan

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad
Editor, Behavioral & Brain Sciences, PSYCOLOQUY

Cognitive Science Laboratory
Princeton University
221 Nassau Street
Princeton NJ 08544-2093

> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 1994 16:28:49 +0100
> From: "Paul F. Burton" <paul@dis.strath.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: Subversive Proposal
>
> A note to thank you for the notice of your "subversive proposal", but why
> be subversive about it?  I've suggested at two conferences this year that
> universities should take back the electronic publication of work done by
> their staff (most of it research carried out with public funds), though I
> have not been as direct as your proposal  :-).  My personal view is that
> commercial publishers are running scared of electronic publishing, which is
> why they seem to be involved in so many projects.
>
> It seems to me that this is an idea whose time has just arrived.  Do you
> think that the Follett Report proposals could include a feasibility study
> of this?  I'd be interested in discussing the idea further with you, if you
> have time.
>
> BTW, I seem to have two addresses for you (Southampton and Princeton) so
> I'm sending this to both, as I'd value your comments.

Dear Paul,

It is indeed a subversive proposal, and here's why: Many of us already
share the DESIRE for electronic publication in place of paper; the
question is, How to get there from here? Life is short. The subversion
is in not trying to do it directly, by taking on the all-powerful paper
flotilla head-on. Forget about electronic publishing. Leave the
"publishing" to them. Simply archive your PREprints (on which you have
not ceded copyright to anyone) in a public ftp archive. Let EVERYONE
(or a critical mass) do that. And then nature will take its course.
(Everyone will, quite naturally, swap the reprint for the preprint at
the moment of acceptance for publication, and before paper publishers
can mobilize to do anything about it, the battle will be lost, and they
will be faced with an ultimatum: either re-tool NOW, so that you
recover your real costs and a fair return by some means other than
interposing a price-tag between [esoteric, no-market] papers and their
intended readership, or others will step in and do it instead of you.)

This IS subversive. Direct appeals (whether to authors or to
publishers) to "publish electronically" are not subversive; they have
simply proven hopelessly slow. And at this rate (esoteric) paper
publishers will be able to successfully prolong the status quo for well
into the forseeable future -- to the eternal disadvantage of learned
inquiry itself, which is the one that has been suffering most from this
absurd Faustian bargain for the centuries that paper was the esoteric
author's only existing expedient for PUBLICation at all.

Paper publishers, by the way, are, quite understandably, looking for
much less radical solutions. These compromises are mostly in the
category of "hybrid" publication (paper and electronic), and they share
the fatal flaw of (esoteric -- remember, I am speaking only of
esoteric, non-trade, no-market) paper publication: requiring a price for
admission to a show that has virtually no audience, yet is essential
to us all!

I have no animus against paper publishers. It's natural for them to do
whatever they can to preserve the status quo, or something close to
it. But necessity is the mother of invention, and my subversive
proposal would awaken their creative survival skills. And if they wish
to survive (in esoteric publication -- I cannot repeat this often
enough: what I am proposing is NOT applicable to literature that
actually has a market, one in which the author really has hopes of
selling his words, and a market is interested in buying them, for there
there is no Faustian pact; it is in the interests of BOTH parties,
author and publisher, to charge admission at the door -- if, as I say,
publishers wish to survive in ESOTERIC publication, they will have to
change from a trade to a subsidy model for recovering the substantially
lower true costs of electronic-ONLY publication).

My claim that the true per-page cost of electronic publication will be
25% of current per-page paper costs rather than the 75% that has been quoted
over and over, has been challenged (by Lorrin Garson of the American
Chemical Society) and I have attempted to support my estimate above.

We can discuss this any time (we ARE doing so right now). I'm at
Princeton till end of August, then at Southampton. Both email addresses
will continue to reach me.

Stevan Harnad