Caveat Lector

The author of last week’s open-access citation-advantage article has been getting strong pushback from Stevan Harnad. His latest response is well worth reading (except for one small quotation that is fortunately easily skipped).

For my part, I can be reasonably impartial as regards green-vs.-gold models of open access, because I am assured useful employment either way; I can run a repository or typeset journal articles, if it comes to that. My ox is gore-proof.

That said—in the main, I agree with Eysenbach. It’s a complicated world. There is no one clear definition of open access (and what is with this pregnancy metaphor, anyway?). There is no easy road to it; both green and gold roads have serious bumps to contend with. The scattered nature of self-archiving assuredly does cause discovery difficulties compared with nice, neat journal packaging.

I do, however, want to quibble with one section near the end of Eysenbach’s statement:

As to Harnad’s statement that the advantage gold-over-green will wash out as self-archiving repositories become more interoperable, I would also dispute this notion. If the advantage of gold-OA is delivered through community building (building networks of peer-reviewers, networks of users, and promoting the content to the right users) and promoting the journal site and its content (by press releases, participation in conferences to build relations with readers and authors etc.), then this advantage cannot be simply washed out by a vast interdisciplinary repository of articles where no such efforts are undertaken (surely, you could have people doing the same for subject areas in a repository, but then these people can be called editors, and you are reinventing OA journals).

A few unexamined assumptions underlie this: that community-building and promotion are unique to the journal model of information dissemination, that post-publication selection measures are functionally equivalent to pre-publication selection measures such as editing, and that green-OA cannot come up with other attractions. I’m not happy with any of those assumptions.

I’m not convinced, first, that journals are the community-building tool they once were, or even that communities form around journals at all these days, be they promoted howsoever expertly. For a tart and cogent explication of how scholars and practitioners now communicate in non-journal-mediated fashion, see Karen Schneider’s memorial for Mary Jane Anderson. This ties into the growth of grey literature for me. “Communication” is tied less and less to book and journal publishing; what’s still tied to the formal publishing model is careers.

(In passing, I would very much like to see a study of the demographics of grey-literature producers. My hypothesis would be that tenured scholars and researchers lean toward grey literature—and its increased speed and lesser hassles—over those who still have to prove themselves to tenure and retention committees. It’s quite possible that the study has been done and I just haven’t happened across it, of course; grey-lit is not my area of expertise.)

Community is where you find it. I suspect that a growth area for scholarly societies intimidated by all this open-access business is, indeed, community—a gated section of the Internet on which to talk turkey. Do I think scholars will pay membership fees for that? I surely do, given a few hotshots to seed it with. Do I think that article citations will circulate in this viral fashion, largely irrespective of the article’s publication venue? Of course I do; blog links do (don’t they, Dr. Eysenbach?). Social software is roaring onto the scene; it’s absurd to think that will have no impact on academia.

As for promotion, secondly—promotion of what to whom why? This is a complicated idea. Promotion of the journal to libraries for purchase? (Obviously less relevant in an open-access world, but promotion to libraries for further promotion to patrons is likely to loom large in future.) Promotion of the journal to scholars in the field? Promotion of the journal to scholars in related fields? Promotion of the field itself to e.g. funding bodies and university curriculum designers? I need to understand what is being promoted to whom before I can usefully opine on whether and how green OA can play a role.

Nonetheless, I think green OA can exert some countervailing pressures. Interdisciplinarity is a major one; it’s easier for scholars to find related other-field materials via the big OAI-enabled interdisciplinary soup than to try to trace them through still-siloed journals and article databases. As journals themselves start interoperating better, this advantage may decrease, but I do think it exists and I do think it matters.

Thirdly, I do not agree at all that filtering and selection post-”publication” are equivalent to acquisitions editing; someone who combs repositories for discipline-specific materials worthy of recommendation is not a “journal editor.” (She’s a lot closer to a library collection developer.) There’s quite a chasm between “this is worth saying” (which is the journal editor’s credo) and “this is worth reading” (which is the collection developer’s).

In fact, I think this distinction is fascinating and worth pondering, because it may be one future of peer review—throw it all out there and let the experts (including librarians!) winnow through it. How we enable that winnowing, how we record it, what weight the ineluctable tenure-and-retention committee gives it, this all remains to be seen… but I do believe these questions will gain salience within the decade.

Finally, I believe green OA carries certain advantages that gold OA could conceivably match but probably won’t, mired as it is in the journal model. As data-librarians tell us, the entirety of the scholarly enterprise cannot be boiled down to ink (or pixels) on a journal page. It’s much easier for green OA to make a stab at capturing the rest of the data than it is for gold. Data formats, preservation, migration, storage capacity, bandwidth—these are my headaches, not a journal publisher’s, and I’m closer to the faculty doing the work to boot, so I can advise in ways that a journal publisher can’t (and probably doesn’t want to).

In short, green and gold open access should not really be considered competitors; they are complements, and a great deal of the green-vs.-gold fuss verges on the ridiculous. I look forward to more thoughtful work and commentary such as Eysenbach’s.