Re: How to fund open access journals from available sources

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

This is somewhat orthogonal to David Goodman's message about how to fund
OA.  What occurred to me as I read that message is that the funds required
for operating an ejournal or journals do not include only current expenses
for manuscript management, peer review, editorial work, technology, and
all the other components of publication, but (at least in e-world) also
need to support ongoing maintenance of a growing journal file.  (I'm
guessing that in p-world this was less of an issue because most publishers
did not or do not keep much if any back stock around; but in e-world the
file grows and the it seems to me that the responsibilities associated
with the backfiles also remain and grow.  And should the journal cease, 
there would be no further income...)

If that is true, i.e., if there is an additional cost to managing a
growing online collection (such as provision of access, migration,
preservation, upgrades), then today's per-article fee for OA has got to
take that future set of needs into account.  This suggests that current
fees, which are pegged to current costs will have to grow to cover
retrospective content and access to it.

Or is my momentary "insight" just plain off-base?

Ann Okerson/Yale Library

###

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, David Goodman wrote:

> How to fund open access journals from available sources
> 
> This is the outline of a plan using available money without requiring
> changes in the academic world to provide funding for true open access
> journals. It is based on the example of a single publication produced by a
> non-profit society. (This plan is inspired, in part, by Ross Atkinson�s
> earlier posting on this list, and by discussions with the students in my
> doctoral seminar at the Palmer School of Library and Information Science.)
> 
> There are three components: voluntary payments by libraries, voluntary
> charges to authors/universities/sponsors, and economies arising from open
> access publication.
>
[SNIP]
>
> Dr. David Goodman
> dgoodman@liu.edu