Industrial use and library costs

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

1. As we still have no verifiable data for the proportion of industrial
use, some estimates of the factors involved will help define the data
needed: There would be expected to be variation by subject to subject. I'd
expect a higher industrial use in chemistry than in mathematics.  I'd also
expect lower industrial use for less important journals: universities have
been by themselves carrying the burden of minor titles.

2. Can we get real data, not approximate and unverifiable percentages:  
Jan: having said 5%, please verify it by publishing the figures for
downloads to the BMC open access journals, and for subscriptions to your
paid titles. Crispin, having said 25%, please release figures justifying
it.

Joe, having asserted that this data must be kept confidential for
competitive reasons, show an hypothetical example where it makes a
competitive difference.  The only plausible one I see is to conceal a
rapidly falling market share in some sector so that it does not fall
further.
  
3.  I share Mr. Anderson's view that some clinically oriented journals in
biomedicine have revenue structures such as he described. In such cases,
open access should be very easy, because of the many additional revenue
streams.  This is highly atypical; very few STM research titles have a
non-trivial amount of display advertising.

4. If it is judged that commercial organizations will receive the use of
OA journals at too low a rate, there are many solutions, including
differential subscription charges for print--a very common practice
differential rates for author/organization funded articles differential
membership rates--another very common practice.

5. The larger & more research oriented an university, the more it gains
from OA, which gives the researchers and students access to titles not
affordable or outside the institution's primary interest. This is parallel
to the well-known fact that such institutions make the greatest use of
ILL.

Libraries in research university also benefit, since the combination of
library subscription and author/sponsor payments relieves the library of
having the sole financial burden. If the library from its existing journal
funds had to pay for the entire cost of OA journals, the very largest
would pay more. But since libraries are not the primary source of funding,
this concern will not materialize.

6. There is one group of institutions whose finances would suffer. They
are large research institutions in the developed world, where the science
faculty publish a great deal, but have no grants to pay publication fees.  
The size of this group is zero.

Dr. David Goodman 
Associate Professor, 
Palmer School of Library and Information Science, LIU
dgoodman@liu.edu