RE: What if open access publishers close down

[Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>]

In response to Jim Robinson and David Goodman:

BioMed Central does what it can to ensure that the material published
remains openly and freely available in all eventualities. But David is
right in pointing out that the preservation of science literature has
always been a library responsibility, not a publisher one. In fact, of all
the publishers I know, none had anything like a complete archive of the
journals they published in print. If they are building an electronic
archive now, it is for the purpose of selling access, not for preservation
per se.

We are realistic at BioMed Central, and provide for eventualities, but we
plan for success. What Jim suggests seems to me like planning for failure,
although I'm sure he doesn't intend it that way. It is of utmost
importance that BioMed Central succeeds. This may seem self-serving, and
of course it would be in our interest to succeed, but success for BMC in
building a sustainable open access publishing outfit would also mean
success for the open access publishing model in general and would
encourage others to embark on similar initiatives, not least scholarly
societies. Let's keep in mind that, as Stevan Harnad doesn't cease to
point out, there are at least 20,000 journals that are not yet delivering
open access. By a sustainable model we mean an economic model that is not
reliant on one subsidy or grant. They can be withdrawn or used up and
sometimes raise questions of independence and level playing fields. We
have seen what happened to PubSci. A sustainable model is built on a
reasonable price for a truly valued and necessary service, paid per
deliverable unit (an article peer-reviewed and published with open access,
in our case).

Open access is making progress, but unfortunately still rather slow. It is
in the interest of scientists and libraries alike that it speeds up.
Librarians can do much to increase awareness amongst scientists of the
benefits to them of open access in terms of dramatically enhanced
visibility and chances to be cited; and to dispel myths such as the notion
that open access journals are not peer-reviewed. They *are* (at least the
BMC ones) and scientists should be encouraged to simply look at the
material published by BioMed Central to see for themselves what the
quality of the material is and compare that with expensive traditional
journals that have very limited circulations. They will be pleasantly
surprised. And libraries would also reap major benefits: drastically
decreased costs (see David Goodman's contribution to this list of 17
January 2003).

Jan Velterop

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James A. Robinson [mailto:jim.robinson@stanford.edu]
> Sent: 17 January 2003 04:06
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Re: What if open access publishers close down 
> 
> 
> I think David and I are thinking along similar lines.
> 
> I think my question was probably not clear.  I was thinking that, even
> though something is open and available, it does not necessarily follow
> that someone is going to be retrieving, organizing, and storing it. I was
> wondering if people had efforts underway to make sure that something which
> may be archived actually does get archived.
> 
> I'm somewhat familier with the LOCKSS project, since it has associations
> with my own department. However, my understanding of LOCKSS is that it's
> meant as a fail-safe, one operating on a grand scale of peer-to-peer
> networking to ensure validity, but still thought it was meant as a
> fail-safe which keeps a static copy of content. Perhaps I'm  mistaken in
> that understanding.

[SNIP]