Re: Berkeley faculty statement on scholarly publishing

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

As David knows as well as I do the lack of reading in the literature on
Open Access among most faculty is minimal. This is a totally subjective
position but I bet it is his experience as it is mine. Both of us teach in
information science departments (him more than me). Keeping up to date
with the evidence-based literature would be easy (because there is so
little of it and the Cornell calculations are among the rare examples) if
it were not so difficult to try to work out what is evidence-based and
what is a reiteration of claims made to gain impact.

I am sure David is correct that the Berkeley profile is different from the
Cornell profile but there is certainly no firm evidence for a university
like Berkeley that can justify the bald assertion that an OA environment
will cost less for that university. It will be interesting to see whether
or not the library advocates within Berkeley provide the evidence they
gave to faculty.

David is of course one of the few thinkers proposing OA who actually try
to model the future. Others suggest that it is unnecessary and even
incorrect - so far have we got from normal academic principles.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2005 12:47 AM
Subject: RE: Berkeley faculty statement on scholarly publishing

The Berkeley statement talks about OA in general, not merely OA Journals.

The work Anthony mentions discussed OA journals only, showing that for the
particular large research libraries studied the cost for OA Journals, with
the university paying publication fees "on behalf of the author", was
higher than the current cost with the university paying subscription fees
"on behalf of the reader"

Explicit warning was given against assuming the conclusions held for other
similar universities. For the university I know best, the conclusion would
not hold. As Berkeley also does not have a medical school (which typically
has a large output of papers per author) the conclusion might not hold
there either.

But for authors anywhere there are many forms of OA publishing less
expensive than OA Journals. If Berkeley faculty were to publish primarily
in repositories such as arXiv, as in some fields many of them probably
already do, then the costs would be much lower.

If they were to subscribe only to the publications they truly needed, and
relied on Green OA access to those that perhaps might be needed, the cost
to them would also be much lower.

[SNIP]

If Berkeley is as it was when I was a graduate student there, the faculty
are quite capable of educating themselves, and also of making use of the
good analyses done by librarians, such as the authors of the very work
Anthony refers to.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu