RE: PNAS Introduces Open Access Publishing Option

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

Carl, 

In any case, your question does not become important until the entire
journal is OA. It was already the case that a library subscription
included material that was freely available, because for PNAS everything
older than 6 months already was OA. So a common publishers' strategy now
is to provide something which is not OA to keep the subscriptions. Whether
libraries will be willing to continue subscribing to electronic journals
whose entire contents is available is a critical question. If they are
(even at a reduced figure, as Bernd-Christoph Kaemper suggests),
supporting the journal financially should not be very difficult. If they
are not willing, it becomes harder, since the full cost of producing PNAS
must be more than $1000/article.

The best resolution of the dispute about whether the cost of a journal
should be supported from the producer/author/sponsor side or the
library/consumer side, ought to be for them to share the cost.

Dr. David Goodman
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
Sent:  Wed 5/26/2004 7:28 PM
To:  liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject:  PNAS Introduces Open Access Publishing Option

I don't think so. I am confident that they will use the raising income
from author charges to reduce the subscription rate to PNAS over time,
just as in the transition scenario envisioned by OUP and David Prosser
from SPARC Europe.

Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library

Carl Anderson wrote:

> Bravo! I guess.  But doesn't this mean that PNAS is simultaneously
> charging some authors for publishing services while the rest of us
> [libraries] still pay for receiving the product?  Better not let the
> commercial publishers get wind of this model.  - Carl
> 
> Carl A. Anderson
> Carl.Anderson@drexel.edu