Re: How to fund open access journals from available sources

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <chief-exec@alpsp.org>]

I disagree.  To my mind, the underlying problem is the ever-growing gap
between research funding (and thus researchers/ research projects, and
thus research papers) - doubling over every 15-17 years or so - and
library funding.  Even if journal prices and profits were as low as they
could be (without journals actually going out of business), this gap would
still continue to grow, though crisis point would be postponed (as I
suspect it already has been, to some extent, by imaginative licensing
models which give access to more content for more people, and by
moderation of many publishers' annual price increases)

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
E-mail:  chief-exec@alpsp.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <rickand@unr.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 10:16 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