Re: Varmus in the Chronicle (RE: Copyright and OA: New York Times and Chroni

["Heather Morrison" <hmorrison@ola.bc.ca>]

Another area where cost savings can confidently be expected with open
access, particularly for publishers, is authentication.  With open access,
there is no need to spend enormous sums of money to develop and/or
purchase, maintain and support complex authentication systems.  If there
is sufficient movement towards open access, it is likely that there will
be less pressure on academic institutions to develop more sophisticated
authentication systems.

Perhaps there would also be some savings for large academic institutions
in legal costs involved in reviewing contracts, dealing with breach or
potential breach situations, etc.?

a personal view by,

Heather Morrison

liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu writes:

>There's one area at least where cost savings can confidently be expected:
>distribution costs.
>
>>From the viewpoint of the library, all research libraries have one and
>usually more professional position dealing with e-journals. In my
>experience about 3/4 of the work consists of negotiating contracts,
>licensing, and payment, and resolving access difficulties. (The remainder
>is cataloging, and usage statistics). Indeed, I offer an entire course
>each year at Palmer on how to do this administration.  
>
>>From the point of view of the publisher, it is usually estimated that
>e-journal distribution expenses are about 10-15% of the total price.
>Undoubtedly most of it is the cost of running the server and the cost of
>providing the necessary secure backup, but some is in administering the
>access rights. (And, again in my experience, if a publisher's system
>fails, this is the weak point.) All of these costs this could be
>eliminated.
>
>There are other possible savings: Interlibrary loan would no longer be
>needed, at least for current journals. Many complicate consortial
>arrangements would be unecessary--at least for this purpose.
> 
>I accept that there would be some cost of administering author payments,
>but I would expect this to be much simpler. Perhaps those publishers who
>now charge submission fees can elucidate this point.
> 
>David Goodman
>Associate Professor
>Palmer School  of Library and Information Science, LIU
>dgoodman@liu.edu