www.the-scientist.com/2007/11/1/52/1/ -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 11/1/2007
Last Visited: 11/27/2007
By Joseph J. Esposito
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This is an interesting article that I need to read in more detail, but could we see a declaration of Joseph Esposito's competing interests, please?
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Joseph Esposito's bio
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Joseph Esposito's bio can be found here, and includes what we consider his potential competing interests:
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by Joseph J. Esposito
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It's fortuitous that Mr. Hodgkinson asks about Mr. Esposito's affiliations.
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Joe Esposito chose his whipping boys of the OA publishing industry with either diligence or extreme luck.The jury is still out on the Public Library of Science venture.It received substantial grant funding at the outset, but I've yet to see an analysis of how the money has been spent in the various criticisms of its burn rate.He casts aspersions on the profitability of a private concern, BioMed Central, on the grounds that as a private company it does not have to publicly disclose detailed financials.
Missing from his analysis are notable Open Access publishing success stories, of which there are many.
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When Joe mentioned Disney, he referred to a brand.
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Joe apparently fails to see that any restrictions on openness are nothing but compromises that do not have a purpose other than financially underpinning the considerable efforts and investments needed for proper peer reviewed publishing.
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Joe gets it right to think of 'attention' as the limited resource in scholarly communication.
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I presume Joe is thinking of Arxiv there, but even Arxiv has a kind of peer review.
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Later Esposito appears at times to conflate ?open access? with ?open archives? ? confusingly both can be reduced to the same initials ? when he writes of authors choosing to make their work available outside of the formal publishing process.This ignores the fact that OA journals are formally published: they have ISSNs, regular publication intervals, they are indexed by the same indexing and abstracting services as the commercial journals.
There is also the association of OA with ?author charging?, and what I have called elsewhere the ?Platinum Route? of subsidised, collaborative OA publishing is ignored ? and yet it is this mode that is increasingly adopted by newly-published journals.And new journals are not the exceptional case that Esposito suggests: they are appearing almost every day and many of them adopt the Platinum Route.Case studies of such journals have appeared in Information Research (http://InformationR.net/ir/), which is also a Platinum Route journal.The ?one click? push that Esposito refers to is not an exceptional situation, but a common one for new open access journals and the notion that this only works at the fringe of scholarly communication is rather silly ? scholarly communication consists of a multitude of ?fringes?, each of little relevance to the rest of the community: like any other scholar in a specific discipline I have no interest in what is published in physics, chemistry, biology, pharmacology, Near Eastern studies, Scandinavian folklore and most of the rest of scholarship, but what is available to me openly within my own discipline is going to be central.
As another commentator has noted the costs of OA publishing are exaggerated, especially if the Platinum Route is adopted.
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Joe Esposito surely knows better than that.
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SUMMARY: Joseph Esposito, a management consultant, says Open Access (OA) is "research spam."But OA's explicit target content is all 2.5 million peer-reviewed articles published annually in the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed research journals. (So either all research is spam or OA is not spam after all!). Esposito says researchers' problem isn't access to journal articles (they already have that): rather, it's not having the time to read them.This will come as news to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied access daily to the articles in the journals their institution cannot afford, and to the authors of those articles, who are losing all that potential research impact. Search engines find it all, tantalizingly, but access depends on being able to afford the subscription tolls.Esposito also says OA is just for a small circle of peers: How big does he imagine the actual usership of most journal articles is? Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' bonuses for publishing profit, even though ACS is supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access only to those who can afford to pay them for it (and for their bonuses). Esposito describes the efforts of researchers to inform their institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying, but he does not attach a name to what anti-OA publishers are doing when they hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent OA self-archiving from being mandated. (Another surcharge for researchers, in addition to paying for their bonuses?)Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors would comply with OA mandates, but he omits to mention that over 80% of those researchers report that they would self-archive willingly if mandated. (And where does Esposito think publishers would be without existing publish-or-perish mandates?)Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not reading time, as he suggests.The only thing standing between the research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed research article output is the time it takes to do the few keystrokes per article it takes to provide OA.That is what the mandates (and the metrics that reward them) are meant to accomplish at long last.
Joseph Esposito is an independent management consultant (the "portable CEO") with a long history in publishing, specializing in "interim management and strategy work at the intersection of content and digital technology."
In an interview by The Scientist (a follow-up to his article, "The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work"), Esposito says Open Access (OA) is "research spam" -- making unrefereed or low quality research available to researchers whose real problem is not insufficient access but insufficient time.
In arguing for his "model," which he calls the "nautilus model," Esposito manages to fall into many of the longstanding fallacies that have been painstakingly exposed and corrected for years in the self-archiving FAQ. (See especially Peer Review, Sitting Pretty, and Info-Glut.)
Like so many others, with and without conflicting interests, Esposito does the double conflation (1) of OA publishing (Gold OA) with OA self-archiving (of non-OA journal articles) (Green OA), and (2) of peer-reviewed postprints of published articles with unpublished preprints.It would be very difficult to call OA research "spam" if Esposito were to state forthrightly that Green OA self-archiving means making all articles published in all peer-reviewed journals (whether Gold or not) OA. (Hence either all research is spam or OA is not spam after all!).
Instead, Esposito implies that OA is only or mainly for unrefereed or low quality research, which is simply false: OA's explicit target is the peer-reviewed, published postprints of all the 2.5 million articles published annually in all the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, from the very best to the very worst, without exception. (The self-archiving of pre-refereeing preprints is merely an optional supplement, a bonus; it is not what OA is about, or for.)
Esposito says researchers' problem is not access to journal articles: They already have that via their institution's journal subscriptions; their real problem is not having the time to read those articles, and not having the search engines that pick out the best ones.
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Esposito says OA is just for a small circle of peers ("6? 60?600? but not 6000"): How big does he imagine the actual usership of most of the individual 2.5 million annual journal articles to be?Peer-reviewed research is an esoteric, peer-to-peer process, for the contents of all 25,000 journals: research is conducted and published, not for royalty income, but so that it can be used, applied and built upon by all interested peer specialists and practitioners; the size of the specialties varies, but none are big, because research itself is not big (compared to trade, and trade publication).
Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' bonuses for publishing profit, oblivious to the fact that the ACS is supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access to those who can afford to pay them for it.
Esposito also refers (perhaps correctly) to researchers' amateurish efforts to inform their institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying -- passing in silence over the fact that the real pro lobbyists are the wealthy anti-OA publishers who hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent Green OA from being mandated.
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