RE: Open access: a must for Wellcome Trust researchers

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

Neither libraries nor researchers are stupid. 

Scientists will develop publishing methods suitable to their needs.  We
have no reason to predict that they will be inferior.  If they truly want
peer review, there are multiple ways to acomplish this independent of the
nature of the dissemination.

Why should we assume that the existing institutional arrangements are the
highest attainable peak of perfection, either technical or economic?

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

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Joseph J. Esposito
Sent: Wed 10/5/2005 8:55 AM
Subject: Re: Open access: a must for Wellcome Trust researchers...

.  In the middle term, as the amount of OA content grows, we will see the
availability of OA articles influence decisions to cancel certain
subscriptions (why pay for what you can get free?--and, I insist, contrary
to the assumption of so many OA advocates, librarians are not stupid),
starting with third-tier journals and moving inexorably into second-tier
ones.  (I doubt the first tier have anything to fear for quite a while.)

In a declining market, less capital will be invested in new journals and
the appetite to underwrite peer review will diminish.  With fewer formal
channels available to publish research, research which will continue to
grow year by year, more researchers will publish informally, with little
or no formal peer review process.  This will result in a mass of research
literature findable by Google, and it will initiate new forms of
post-publication (more properly, "post-posting") peer review.  There will
be new costs attendant to this, and entrepreneurs will identify ways to
serve this evolving market.  They always do.

What OA leads to, then, is the deterioration of the legacy publishing
industry, the growth of unsifted materials on the Net, the
disintermediation of libraries (via Google et al), and a suite of new
business opportunities.  ... Joe Esposito