Re: How to fund open access journals from available sources

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@worldnet.att.net>]

Would we be talking about Open Access if subscriptions were $5 a year?  
Well, I sure hope so.  I know for a lot of people the appeal of OA is the
perceived savings (wrong in my opinion); and for others it is the
possibility of broader access (also mostly wrong in my opinion).  The real
appeal of OA is that it permits you to do so much more with the text of an
article.  OA articles can be seamlessly integrated and aggregated,
simultaneously searched, linked to citations and semantically similar
texts, and wired into OPACs.  And much more than I can imagine.  OA is one
part of the evolution from author-based fixed expression to
community-based dynamic expression. We have to begin to conceive of
articles not as "papers" but as nodes on a network.  It's time that we all
began to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <rickand@unr.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 1:16 PM
Subject: Re: How to fund open access journals from available sources

> > Is there a body of knowledge that demonstrates the long-term economic
> > viability of the subscription-based method of providing access to
> > scholarly journal articles?
>
> Yes.  The long-term viability of the subscription model is demonstrated by
> its continued success over the past few centuries.  The economic problem
> isn't with the subscription model itself, but with recent pricing trends.
> (Would we be talking about OA if the STM publishers all dropped their
> subscription prices to $5 per year?)
>
> Rick Anderson
> rickand@unr.edu