RE: Potential positive spiral in transition to open access

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

Dear Peter

You say that you do not know of 'a single major US nonprofit 
publisher who has or is considering an open access model'.

Obviously, I don't know your definition of 'major', but the 
American Physical Society publishes the open access 'Physical 
Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beam'.  They also have 
their open access 'free to read' programme.

PNAS has a hybrid 'author pays' open access option.  As does 
Plant Cell (from the American Society of Plant Biologists) - the 
primary research journal in plant biology with the highest impact 
factor.

These are just off the top of my head and so apologies to the 
other organisations offering similar programmes.

Best wishes

David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Peter Banks
Sent: 18 June 2007 23:20
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Potential positive spiral in transition to open access

While I understand the painful position librarians are 
in--limited dollars chasing more, and higher priced, journals--I 
hope we would look at research and its application at the level 
of society and scientific progress, not library budgets.

>From that viewpoint, your proposal is likely to amount to a net
negative for science.

First of all, the entire discussion of open access diverts 
attention from the overriding factor compromising scientific 
progress--the simple lack of investment in research. The 
Washington Post recently described the disastrous state of NIH 
funding (see 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052700794h),

biomedical research spending has not kept pace with inflation 
since 2003. Only about 1 in 5 projects is now being funded. Open 
access is not a kind of alchemy that can release gold from an 
insufficient commitment to research funding. Unfortunately, that 
is how is has been sold on Capitol Hill.

Second, your advocacy of a "a volunteer / in- kind support model" 
would be a misapplication of the skills of highly trained 
scientists. While successful volunteers models do exist, over 90% 
of such journals in the DOAJ are region-specific, and often 
published sporadically. They are not the kind of formalized, 
structured publishing products that niche journals from major 
publishers are. In some fields, a loosely organized, 
publish-when-we-get-around-to-it model may work. If we want 
rigorously reviewed, regularly published, carefully edited 
journals using standard nomenclature, however, it is unrealistic 
to think that these can be created by scientists in their spare 
time, or with student help. Nor would this model be a positive 
thing--do we really want cancer researchers spending their time 
and energy in the mechanics of publishing rather than searching 
for a cure for cancer?

Finally, I fail to see any rationale basis for zeroing in on 
subscriptions costing more than $1000. This approach would make 
no distinction between little-used titles in backwater areas of 
science, or titles like Brain Research, which is edited by some 
of the most distinguished neuroscientists in the world in a 
critical area of science. Does anyone for a moment think that 
Brain Research--which includes 66 issues per year (something the 
general media neglects when comparing the price of the journal to 
that of a car)--could be produced on a "volunteer/in-kind support 
model"?

The problem with reading press releases and blogs of those one 
agrees with is that it masks reality. The reality is that there 
is very little movement toward open access. There is certainly 
growth of open access, especially internationally, but no net 
conversion of traditional publishing models to OA. For example, I 
know of not a single major US nonprofit publisher who has or is 
considering an open access model (though JCI has combined a 
subscription model with free access). Nonprofits are the natural 
allies of freer access, and, indeed, have made freely available 
many more papers or much greater significance than the titles in 
the DOAJ--more than 1.7 million papers on HighWire vs. about 
135,000 in the DOAJ. They have done this while charging modest 
subscriptions.

The failure of OA to catch on among those who share some of its 
core values lies in the knowledge that scholarly publishing is a 
serious business that deserved to be taken seriously.

Peter Banks
Banks Publishing
Publications Consulting and Services
Fairfax, VA 22030
pbanks@bankspub.com
www.bankspub.com
www.associationpublisher.com/blog/


On 6/13/07 5:05 PM, "Heather Morrison" <heatherm@eln.bc.ca> wrote:

> The economics of transitioning to open access is a challenge -
> but not one without tremendous benefits, not only for access,
> but for the economics of scholarly communication, in my
> opinion.
>
> This is a topic I explore in a recent blogpost, A Potential
> Positive Cycle:  More Access, More Funds.
>
> Abstract
>
> Hypothesis: a process of transitioning to open access can
> unleash funds, creating a positive cycle of increasing access
> and freed funds to create more open access; the very opposite
> of the negative serials pricing spiral of recent decades, which
> featured increasing prices and decreasing access.
>
> As support for this hypothesis, this post looks at the
> potential for open access if libraries were to focus on
> high-priced journals (US $1,000 or more for an institutional
> subscription), and succeed in working with their faculty to
> convert just 10% to a volunteer / in- kind support model.
>
> It is estimated with such a scenario, that individual libraries
> could save up to $450,000 US from their budgets after spending
> on open access journal support is factored in. The cumulative
> savings for libraries are potentially huge; for example, if the
> ARL libraries subscribed to just a quarter of these journals
> each, the annual savings for ARL would be in the order of $13.8
> million annually. This would only be a fraction of the savings
> for libraries, as ARL is only a subset of libraries, albeit
> large ones. The true collective savings for libraries would
> have to factor in libraries around the globe, including
> libraries in Europe and the somewhat smaller libraries in North
> America. If these savings were invested in further open access
> initatives, libraries would save even more, freeing up more
> funds to create more access.
>
> For details and calculations, please see the full blogpost at:
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/06/potential-positive-cycle-
> more-access.html
>
> While the focus of this blogpost is freeing funds for more open
> access, the same theoretical approach could be used to free
> funds to restore funding for scholarly monographs, humanities
> and social sciences, etc., that was lost in recent decades due
> to the serials pricing crisis.
>
> Comments?
>
> Any opinion expressed in this post is that of the author alone,
> and does not reflect the opinion or policy of BC Electronic
> Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.
>
> Heather Morrison, MLIS
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com