In a followup today, Jan Velterop makes the point that he knows Stevan Harnad is a strong supporter of peer review, but their disagreement in fact hinges on another aspect of that system:

…I know that Stevan is a very strong supporter of peer review and so am I. In a way, that is precisely the problem. Stevan wants peer review, but not to pay for the process of formal publishing in peer-reviewed journals. That, he argues, should be done by librarians. I wouldn’t dispute that, but according to him librarians should (or is it just will?) keep the subscription model going and in that way provide sustenance for the formal peer-reviewed journal system.

So in fact I misrepresented Jan’s argument somewhat; mea culpa. All parties agree that peer review is indispensable, and what we are disagreeing about is how to pay for it. Jan¹ is (I think) emphasizing the connection between formal publishing and peer review. These two processes are not necessarily inseparable, but Jan’s argument has the advantage that the current peer review infrastructure is already in place, and we know it works. Stevan (again, on my reading) is arguing that we can achieve close to complete OA, at least of papers not currently in commercial archives, just by doing it using IRs — and then wait to see whether journal subscriptions decline. If they do, journals will simply have to adjust to what the market wants, offering their services as co-ordinators of peer review plus whatever else they find their customers will buy (nice pdf files, advertising, job markets, etc).
Suppose, by way of Gedankenexperiment, we wave a magic Harnadian wand: all researchers from this moment will archive postprints of all their papers; journals that strictly disallow this practice will be shunned. Not only that, but the bulk of archived literature will also be, at the wave of our wand, deposited in IRs by authors working through their own back catalogues. (Note that we have sidestepped the quality control quagmire inherent in posting preprints, with or without corrigenda, and completely ignored the Kitten Herding problem of getting researchers to do, well, anything.)
OK, now what? I simply cannot see university and other administrations continuing to pay journal subscription fees, so what are the journals (and the companies that run them) going to do? Not being a publisher or any kind of businessperson, I don’t know what they will actually do, but it seems to me that our magic wand has left them little recourse: lacking leverage, they will have to either go out of business or sell their remaining wares (including the co-ordination of peer review) for whatever the market will bear. A quick Google search on “serials crisis” reveals that, in many cases, the market will not likely bear what they are currently charging for subscriptions. Journals with significant cachet, like Nature or Science, will probably be able to charge a pretty penny, but smaller fish will have to either drop their rates or leave the pond. It’s the latter that worries me: if researchers force this scenario, they risk losing diversity within the peer review infrastructure. It’s also possible that, if significant numbers of journals close, their review boards will be effectively taken over by other organisations such as scholarly societies — it even seems likely to me that researchers will figure “why pay at all? we can run peer review for ourselves”. I don’t like that idea either; in fact, the more I think about it the less I like it. There is value in having a sizeable chunk of the peer review process co-ordinated by outsiders: commercial publishers respond to different incentives than researchers, and I think that independence is a useful hedge against, well, corruption.
Ideally, from an entirely selfish point of view as a researcher, every existing journal would simply lay off staff and move offices and so on until it could subsist on what it could charge authors for having their work reviewed (plus advertising etc as above). I simply do not know whether the transition would work that way.
So where does that leave governments that are considering mandating OA to publicly funded research? Should they mandate OA without specifying mechanism and risk the problems discussed above, or mandate OA through the existing journal system and risk handing publishers, some (in my opinion, many) of whom are decidedly unscrupulous, even more leverage? I still prefer the former option, because it seems much more likely to me that publishers would gleefully gouge if handed the opportunity than that a mandate which did not specify mechanism would precipitate Peer Review Doomsday as above. For one thing, though I ignored it for convenience above, the Kitten Herding problem is significant. Researchers are conservative in their view of structural change, and reluctant to spend much time on anything but their chosen research problems. Journals will likely control access to their archives for the forseeable future, so they will not lose all leverage at once, and researchers would much rather pay (what they see as) reasonable charges than have to deal with change. There are a number of different publishing models being tried out as alternatives to the subscription-based system. It seems to me that a mandate that doesn’t specify mechanism will make these experiments more pressing for publishers without forcing them into any immediate decision.
Two quick final points in reply to Jan:

If anybody has problems with the harnadian solution, it’s scholarly societies that publish journals.

I think this is because scholarly societies rely on journal income to fund other activities and are fretting over lost revenue, which tells me they do not think they could persuade their members to pay membership fees that would cover the loss. Perhaps, to be frank, we could afford to lose a few such societies.

It is just possible that there may be reasons why researchers are researchers and publishers publishers. Everybody can sow the seed to grow the wheat to grind the flour to bake the bread. Who, after all, needs farmers, millers and bakers?

Quite right, and I do not even want to be a farmer, miller, baker — or publisher. I am happy to buy my bread and my peer review, I just want to pay a fair price.
(It now occurs to me that part of the problem is that, although I strongly suspect I am being overcharged at the moment, I do not know what would be a fair price. I will think and write more about that, but this entry is too damn long already.)

¹ I hope it will not seem overly familiar if I follow Jan’s lead and use first names, it sounds less combative and this is not a fight, it’s civil fucking discourse.

(Attention Conservation Notice: this post assumes some familiarity with Open Access. I’ve included some background links but the essential introduction to OA is by Peter Suber: see his Open Access Overview and also the one-page version thereof.)
In his latest blog entry, Jan Velterop takes an entertaining but (I think) overstated swipe at Stevan Harnad for the latter’s postion on recent moves by publishers to get OA mandates to encompass the paid version, that is, where publishers offer OA on any manuscript in exchange for an extra fee. Harnad argues, if I read him right, that this amounts to a land grab by the publishers, since if their efforts were to succeed the governments in question would be mandating further payments to publishers, on top of the fees and subscriptions they already charge. Since authors can already self-archive, pace Velterop, this really is a kind of alms for the publishers. Velterop takes issue with what he sees as dismissal of the role of publishers in providing peer review and authentication:

Those with a ‘harnadian’ inclination should really not bother publishers at all with their articles. They should just ‘archive’ (read ‘publish’) them in some repository and move on. Shame the articles can’t be labelled as having been published in a peer-reviewed journal, which would make them more valuable and be noticed and taken seriously, but hey, everybody can see them and the publishers just haven’t been able to beg enough cash to publish them.

I think this is a mis-statement of Harnad’s postion in re: peer review. Neither he, nor any serious OA advocate that I know of, has ever indicated that they do not recognise the value in peer review. Harnad’s point, in the post in question, is not about peer review at all but about co-opting a government mandate to direct research funds into publisher’s pockets, when a free alternative is available.
That said, I think there’s more to mandatory OA to publicly funded research (of which, let me state up front, I am strongly in favour) than a simple choice between for-pay or free models. TANSTAAFL. Velterop:

Subscriptions, on the whole, currently sustain the journal system. But they have a downside. They do not, by definition, provide open access. So that’s why new publishing models have emerged that do.
Unfortunately, Stevan derisorily calls these new publishing models PPA, for ‘Paid Publisher-Archiving’. As if ‘archiving’ is what publishers do. Nobody pays a publisher for archiving and no publisher asks for payment for archiving. Publishers ask for payment for having an article peer-reviewed and formally published in a reputable journal.

Well, yes, but remember that researchers provide a good part of the value of peer review — the actual reviews! — to publishers for nothing. Publishers are therefore charging money for co-ordinating the review process and for “formal publishing”, which I take to include archiving and distribution. This is a legitimate charge for legitimate added value, but there is a limit to what the market will bear, particularly as costly print versions of journals move closer and closer to obsolescence. (I haven’t picked up a print journal in years, excepting only those old publications which have not yet been digitized.) At some point it could conceivably become attractive for researchers — perhaps through the NIH, or professional societies, for instance — to co-ordinate the review process themselves, construct a robust search architecture that encompasses the vast majority of institutional repositories and thumb their noses once and for all at the STM publishing industry. (Indeed, when it comes to constructing a global virtual archive, the Open Archives Initiative has done much of the heavy lifting already.) So, let the publishing companies beware. Researchers, if I know my tribe, don’t want the hassle (and we are talking about a mind-bendingly HUGE endeavour, if we are considering moving virtually ALL peer reviewing out of the current commercial infrastructure) — but if pushed far enough, they’ll act.
Harnad and other OA advocates make much of the fact that there is currently no evidence that OA reduces journal subscriptions. I think this may be somewhat disingenuous. Evidence drawn from physics/arxiv is of limited value in making predictions about the much larger and more lucrative (or, from a subscriber’s point of view, expensive) biomed field. Further, if the subscription model still has a much greater market share than any OA based model, it may not mean much if current subscription levels are not (yet) falling as OA grows. Harnad himself has written about the transition from the current system to universal OA:

An alternative outcome [to 100% self-archiving] is that when the refereed literature is accessible online for free, users will prefer the free version (as so many physicists already do). Journal revenues will then shrink and institutional savings grow, until journals eventually have to scale down to providing only the essentials (the quality-control service), with the rest (paper version, online PDF version, other ‘added values’) sold as options.

This is the outcome that strikes me as likely: who is going to subscribe to a journal whose contents can be had for free? I have been saying since the days of E-biomed that OA would mean a significant reduction in the size, both physical and financial, of the STM publishing industry. Don’t get me wrong, I shed no tears over the likely loss of a few companies and shrinkage of the rest; but the important question is how to maintain the integrity of the peer review and authentication system. Will journals (that is, the companies that publish them) simply accept the new order of things and quietly “downsize” until they provide basically just the quality control function? Harnad writes:

In none of these outcomes [see here] is peer-review itself compromised or put at risk; nor do authors have to give up, even temporarily, submitting to their established journals of choice.

Er, well, it may not be quite that simple. If I put my Doom&Gloom hat on, I can see a number of “established journals of choice” simply going out of business, leaving open the questions of what happens to their archives and, more importantly, how do we replace the resulting hole in the quality control infrastructure? We certainly do not want to allow a power vacuum into which will rush the remaining publishers, likely the biggest and some of the worst, gleefully wielding a new near-monopoly. Harnad writes:

Self-archiving could be done virtually overnight.

It could, but it won’t. Getting researchers to work together, even for their own good, is worse than herding kittens. We (the research community, and open access advocates in particular) are NOT going to wave a magical open-access wand and present the publishers with a fait accompli in which they must quietly acquiesce. Government mandates of OA to publicly funded research will go a long way towards forcing their hand, though — which, to return to the original point of this post, is why Velterop is mostly wrong and Harnad is mostly right: researchers should come out strongly against the attempt to have such mandates include what Harnad calls PPA.