Re: Changing the game

[Jean-Claude Guedon <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

The whole world of scholarly and scientific publishing is 
subsidized; it is subsidized in and out and in a whole lot of 
ways, some obvious, some tacit, some invisible, etc.. Exactly 
like research. Because let us not forget that all research is 
subsidized. it is not a business. At least not in the 
universities and public research centres.

And publishing is an integral part of the research cycle. And 
that is exactly as it should be.

So, no need to seek "surpluses" or "hidden subsidies" or 
whatever. All these forms of behaviour are part of the game, at 
least in the area of publicly-supported research.

All research subsidized by public money should have its research 
published in Open Access with subsidized journals (which is 
exactly what the SciELO model proposes).

All research supported by foundation money should have its 
results published according to the rules laid out by foundations, 
but if we judge from the Wellcome Trust and other similar 
foundations, it looks like they prefer OA to toll-gated 
publications. Not difficult to understand why!

If private companies support research, let them decide where they 
want the research to be published, or not decide at all, and let 
the authors decide. And if some of those research results 
produced by private money in universities end up locked up behind 
access licensing fees, well, that is just too bad... too bad for 
the authors who lose visibility and too bad for the university 
that does not get the institutional recognition it deserves. It 
may even hurt the very company funding the research because 
toll-gating results slows down science and these companies need 
as much science as possible in the areas they subsidize. 
Leveraging results by subsidizing some researchers is a clever 
investment, but if this strategy is then partially neutralized by 
toll-gated publishing, it is plainly stupid.

If some private publishers, such as Hindawi, want to build a 
business model based on OA, fine! Whether they make a profit or 
not, however, is totally irrelevant to the OA principle. If 
Hindawi should fail (which i do not wish for a minute, of 
course), it would not even begin to hurt OA in general. it would 
simply hurt a particular business approach to OA. But business is 
not the whole of the universe (thank God! says this atheist).

It is all so very simple once we abandon the pretense that 
scientific publishing is commerce. And that is the reality that 
the digital transition is pressing upon all of us.

It is all so very simple!

Jean-Claude Guedon

Le vendredi 25 septembre 2009 a 16:42 -0400, Sandy Thatcher a 
ecrit :

> Along with Stevan Harnad, I wonder how such initiatives really
> will change the economics of the system overall, especially in
> the short term.  Universities will still be paying for
> subscriptions for many journals and now adding fees in addition,
> both for new OA journals and for journals that offer OA
> selectively on payment of the fee. For the latter, the bottom
> line is more money out the door, unless the publishers really do
> reduce subscriptions rates somehow in proportion to the number of
> articles for which OA fees are paid (and since the finances of
> commercial publishers are not open to the public, how will one
> ever really know?).
>
> And, for OA journals like PLoS, do we know what profit margin is
> being built into its business model (or, as we call it in the
> non-profit world, "surplus")?  Does Hindawi tell us what its
> profit margin is?  If the immediate future for scholarly
> communication just ends up costing more overall (and we should
> also take into account all those hidden subsidies provided for
> university-based OA journals that do not charge fees), what then?
> Has the game really changed or just readjusted the pieces on the
> chessboard?
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press