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Re: Funding OA (Long-Term)



It strikes me that a similar dynamic may work in the OA area that occurred in scholarly book publishing, with a handful of universities (now around 85 in the U.S.) picking up the burden of supporting presses that do the publishing for the whole system. The payback from universities without presses occurred almost solely through their library purchases (with an occasional title subsidy thrown in), while the 85 universities shouldered the major expense for running the system as a whole.

I have never thought that was a very fair arrangement (nor did those who wrote the ACLS-supported Report of the Scholarly Enquiry into Scholarly Communication, published by Johns Hopkins Press back in 1979, and recommended that all universities benefiting from the system pay to help support it through subsidies of various kinds). Perhaps author fees for OA articles may distribute the burden more equitably, but from what I hear Ann Okerson saying, there are some people at the larger universities that fear it won't end up being a much different result in the end.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press