RE: "Overlay Journals" Over Again...

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Uh, just who is this "larger population" supposed to be, and what 
will motivate it to step forward and provide the necessary funds 
for this "central approach"?

One lesson we have learned from over 100 years of university 
press publishing is that the few supply the benefits for the 
many. Some 80 universities pay the costs of having university 
presses whose publications benefit the entire scholarly 
community. The other 3,000+ institutions of higher education all 
get a free ride.

What reason is there to believe that there will be more equitable 
distribution of support for OA publishing than there has been for 
traditional market-based publishing?

Maybe this "larger population" needs to be "taxed" in some way?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>The best way to both remove any conflict of interest and develop 
>a scalable peer review support infrastructure on a less 
>expensive OA server platform is to have a central server for 
>materials supported by a centralized payment scheme.  One 
>collection agency (imagine something like SPARC, or SCOAP3 by 
>discipline) could make direct payments to the hosting service 
>(reducing the overhead now found in the multiple/redundant 
>payments from each and every current subscription organization). 
>How we efficiently funnel funds from a few big government 
>revenue sources and endowments to this agent is a key question, 
>but SCOAP3 is showing this approach might be viable. Remove 
>author fees and use central revenue support, as the readers have 
>a great deal to gain from the material and should share in the 
>support costs.
>
>One central server (or a few mirrored servers for backup) 
>removes the redundancy, extra effort and unnecessary duplication 
>within an institutional server model.  This central approach is 
>best for published material ... locally developed teaching and 
>research material can still be housed on institutional servers 
>if we can guarantee long-term support.
>
>(My belief is that discipline based servers have a better chance 
>of long-term support as budgets get tight -- as there is more of 
>a societal commitment to these collaborative approaches.)
>
>Peer review separated from payment by authors, subsidized by the 
>larger population, and housed on the most economical platforms. 
>Overlay is apparently a loaded term, so let's remove it from the 
>conversation but keep the conversation on target to show that OA 
>WITH PEER REVIEW servers will impact commercial journals.
>
>David