Re: 100% Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: a critique

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Dear Joe and Peter and Jan,

The answer is simply that OA has not advanced far enough. No 
research library would cancel a journal with five or ten or forty 
percent OA. Essentially all the libraries than might do so, using 
the limited OA as an additional reason to the history of price 
increases, have already done so, and any additional ones are part 
of the three to five percent of cancellations a year experienced 
by most journals and most big deals.

The only field where OA had advanced beyond eighty percent-the 
minimum point at which Ward's survey showed that librarians are 
now planning to cancel--is high energy physics. This is sometimes 
misrepresented as "physics." It isn't--it is specifically the 
high energy experimental physics that is done at a half-dozen 
specialized laboratories, supported by national and international 
funding.  There are more departments with involved faculty than 
there are laboratories, but they are still only a few hundred. A 
field such as this is patently atypical, and yet it is being used 
as representative in arguments from honourable men.

The major subject of immediate interest for the next month or so 
is biomedicine, with its wide variation in funding and 
publishing, but others will follow. I do not know what will be 
the dynamics of increasing OA in those subjects, and neither does 
anyone else.  First the OA initiatives need to be adopted or 
enacted, and then they need to be successful. This could be one 
year, or ten.  As there a number of possible outcomes, the final 
arrangement could be one I like, but probably will not be--I 
would be foolish to plan for it alone.

The optional OA journals ought to affect this, by facilitating 
publication in accustomed journals, but here again that is only 
one datum, the ten to twenty percent first year rate found by 
OUP. The reality and significance of the lower subscription 
prices promised by some optional OA publishers is hard to 
predict, for there are no data so far.

The development of effective systems for identifying and reaching 
OA versions affects all the plans. It obviously will not be as 
simple as in high energy physics, where there is one place to 
look. But there are many initiatives in progress, from commercial 
& nonprofit indexing services of the most varied nature: from 
Google and MSN and ISI and Elsevier, to RePEc and OACI and DOAJ. 
Biomedicine and chemistry have benefited from the exhaustive 
coverage of published material provided by the existing 
commercial, non-profit, and governmental indexing, and a similar 
standard will be expected of OA--an OA situation that for some 
years will be both mixed and fragmentary.

I know the extremely high quality of many people involved in such 
projects, and my main doubt is whether it will happen next year 
or the following one, and who will get there first. It will be 
much easier once 100% OA is achieved than in the intervening 
years. Publishers who cannot compete with the developers 
mentioned can still help, by including both the link to their 
subscription version and the link to the OA version with their 
bibliographic data. They could help even more by letting the 
published version be used for OA--it would solve most of the 
problems they have raised, and they know it.

If only technical problems were involved, we'd have had 100% OA 
long ago, because even the cumbersome original Varmus plan had a 
workable basic mechanism. The difficulty is with the 
institutional factors, for there are many research institutions, 
publishing scientists, funders, publishers, university libraries, 
and readers. These must all change together, and they are most of 
them inherently resistant to change. That the OA movement 
persists shows the intensity of the demand.

David Goodman,
dgoodman@princeton.edu

The future of librarians will be discussed in the next installment.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, November 24, 2006 5:32 pm
Subject: Re: 100% Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: a critique
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> My question here, then, is a simple one:  If it's "not 
> realistic to expect them to engage in this kind of charity," 
> what significance is there in the claim (correct, as far as I 
> know) regularly put forth by David Prosser and Steven Harnad 
> that there is no "evidence" that OA results in 
> cancellations?The evidence would appear to be irrelevant.  Why 
> then make such a shibboleth out of it?  It seems to me simply 
> to be a distraction.  Why not instead put the time and effort 
> into doing important research, publishing good work,finding 
> multiple ways to find value in high-quality work, and 
> identifyingmeans to increase dissemination of work to a 
> readership who is in a position to appreciate it?  This doesn't 
> rule out OA activity, but it doesn't sound the end of 
> traditional publishing either.
>
> Joe Esposito
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "JOHANNES VELTEROP" <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>
> To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 4:13 PM
> Subject: Re: 100% Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: a critique
>
> David does hit the nail on the head. Even if librarians would be
> able to afford paying for a subscription to material that's
> openly and freely available elsewhere, its not realistic to
> expect them to engage in this kind of charity, and even if they
> wish to, they will not be allowed to by their masters.  Some,
> perhaps, can afford to sit back and wait. Publishers can't, but
> I'm not sure if librarians (esp. serials librarians) can afford
> to just sit and wait, either. David may agree. After all, he put
> a 'perhaps' in his sentence. Their role is one of intermediary,
> and doesn't full OA, with subscriptions cancelled, seriously
> disintermediate them?
>
> Jan Velterop
>
> ----- Original Message ----
>
> From: David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Sent: Wednesday, 22 November, 2006 8:44:16 PM
> Subject: 100% Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: a critique
>
> I am very pleased to see Stevan's long-awaited agreement about 100%.
>
> The next question, asked by the Ware survey but not Beckett &
> Inger, is what will happen at 95% and at 90%, which are levels,
> which is practice can be reached by mandatory self-archiving, as
> CERN has demonstrated.
>
> It seems Stevan would make a rather conservative librarian, for
> about half of libraries would cancel earlier than 100%. Ware
> found (question 15) that 52 percent of libraries would cancel by
> somewhere between 90 and 99%.
>
> But that too is not the exact situation that will be posed in
> Areal life, which is: if at 90% OA, libraries see half of their
> similar libraries cancelling, would they cancel as well? And,
> since libraries do not make the decision how much money they can
> spend, if libary funders -- institutions, boards, legislatures --
> see half of comparable libraries canceling, would they continue
> to allot money for the subscriptions that some libraries might
> nonetheless want to continue? (This has been sometimes referred
> to as the tipping-point problem.)
>
> Of course, we are far from this situation, but I pity the
> publisher who does not start realistic planning for it now.
> Stevan, and I, don't need to, and neither perhaps do
> libraries--we can await the event. Publishers can't.
>
> David Goodman