"Overlay Journals" Over Again...

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

The "overlay journal" notion is and always has been an inchoate, 
incoherent idea. Physicists thought that since they were happy 
just  using the Arxiv version of preprints and postprints, the 
"journals"  could be phased out, and the peer-review could be 
"overlaid" on Arxiv.

But the journals are sustained by subscriptions, and therefore 
the  costs of implementing the peer-review are paid by 
subscriptions. What  does it mean to subscribe to an "overlay"?

The answer is obvious: An "overlay" is just the service of peer 
review, its outcome certified by the journal-name and 
track-record. So  why not call it what it always was: peer 
review, not "overlay  journal." We all understand the difference 
between a print text and an  online one, and we don't much care 
any more.

And with nothing to subscribe to, it is also obvious that the 
(minimal) expense of peer review per paper will have to be paid 
up- front, on what is now called the Gold OA model.

So far so good. The journal-name persists, as the quality-level 
"brand- name," and the peer-review is paid for via Gold OA 
peer-review service  charges. But where is the resultant paper 
archived and made accessible?

For the papers in Arxiv, we know; but that's just 500,000 papers 
in 18  years, in a few fields. There are 25,000 peer-reviewed 
journals,  across all fields, publishing 2.5 million articles per 
year.  Where  are the papers on which the peer-review is to be 
"overlaid"?

The natural candidate is: in the authors' own institutional 
repositories (IRs). The unrefereed preprint is deposited in 
Closed  Access (or maybe even darker, so that even the metadata 
are not  publicly visible until and unless the paper is accepted 
by a journal).  The submission to a journal goes pretty much as 
it always did, except  that instead of mailing the journal a 
manuscript, you email the URL  and password, so the editor and 
referees can access it in your IR  (while it is dark to everyone 
else).

If and when the paper is successfully revised and accepted, the 
lights  are turned on, it becomes OA in the IR, and is tagged as 
published by  the journal that accepted it.

Then you don't have "overlay-journal" articles; you just have 
journal  articles, as you always did, peer-reviewed by the 
journal that  accepted them. Yes, they are online only, but we're 
all used to that.  We don't call the online edition of print 
journals "overlay editions."  And we don't call the growing 
number of online-only journals, who no  longer generate a 
print-run at all "overlay journals," with the  overlay being on 
top of the journal's own online archives, or the  archive of the 
libraries subscribing to them.

In other words, once the shock and romance of online editions is 
behind us, we realize that peer-reviewed journals have always 
been  (trivially) "overlay journals," in that peer-review and 
revisions were  always "overlaid" on the original unrefereed 
draft, regardless of  whether it began or ended on paper or 
on-line.

Nor is this mere semiology; for thinking in terms of "overlay 
journals" rather than just peer-reviewed online-only journals 
with  distributed archiving and access-provision, we miss the 
fact that the  only real substantive components are the fact that 
articles need to be  OA, and there needs to be a way other than 
subscription fees to pay  for the cost of the peer review.

On even more exotic ideas, such as

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged 
Transition.  In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the 
Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. 
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/

Stevan Harnad

PS Please don't even get me started on "disaggregated 
journals"... http://bit.ly/S7

On 25-Jun-09, at 10:26 PM, Sue M. Woodson wrote:
> But didn't the commercialization of peer-review came about
> because scholars didn't find it worth their time to organize and
> run the peer review-process. The Max Plancks of today don't edit
> journals they way he edited Annalen der Physik. Physicists today
> are willing to do the reviewing but they are not always willing
> to do the organizational work -- finding the reviewers, prodding
> them to get the work in, etc. And, if you think about it, that's
> not really a good use of their time. The questions remain: Who
> will do that work? and Who will pay to have that work done?
>
> Sue Woodson
> Welch Medical Library
>