RE: Sub-sidy/cription for ArXiv: Collaborative Business Model Changes Funding Structure

["Nat Gustafson-Sundell" <n-gustafson-sundell@northwestern.edu>]

I don't expect local repositories to ever offer quality control. 
Also, users have said again and again that they prefer discovery 
by subject, which will be possible for semantic docs in local 
repositories or better indexes (probably built through better 
collaborations), but not now.  I agree that it would be great if 
local repositories were more used, and eventually, the systems 
will be in place to make it possible, but every study I've seen 
still shows local repository use to remain disappointingly low, 
although some universities are doing better than others. 
Inter-institutional repositories by subject area (however broadly 
defined) simply work better, such as arXiv or even the 
Princeton-Stanford repository for working papers in the classics.

Currently, universities are paying external middlemen an outsized 
fee for validation and packaging services.  These services can 
and should be brought "in-house" (at least as an ideal/ goal to 
develop toward whenever the opportunities can be seized) except 
in cases where prices align with value, which occurs still with 
some society and commercial publications.  To the extent that an 
arXiv or the inter-institutional repository for humanities 
research which will be showing up in 3-7 years moves toward 
offering these services, they are clearly preferable to old 
fashioned subscription models (since the financial support is for 
actual services) and current local repositories which do not 
offer everything needed in the value chain (as listed in Van de 
Sompel et al. 2004).  I remember when I first read an article 
quoting a researcher in an arXiv covered field who essentially 
said that journals in his field were just for vanity and 
advancement, since all the "action" was in arXiv (Ober et al. 
2007 quoting Manuel 2001 quoting McGinty 1999) -- now think about 
the value of a repository that doesn't just store content and 
offer access.

Do I think the financial backing will remain in place?  It 
depends on the services actually offered and to what extent 
subject repositories could replace a patchwork system of single 
titles offered by a patchwork of publishers.  Universities could 
save a great deal by refusing to pay the same overhead over and 
over again to maintain complete collections in single subject 
areas (not to mention paying for other people's profits).  More 
importantly, more could be done to make articles useful and 
discoverable in a collaborative environment, from metadata to 
preservation, so that the value chain is extended and improved 
(my sci-fi includes semantic docs, not just cataloged texts, and 
improved, or multi-stage, peer review, or peer review on top of a 
working papers repository).  I think there's been plenty of 
'chatter' to indicate that the basic assumptions in conversations 
between universities are changing (see recent conference 
agendas), so that we can expect to see more and more practical 
plans to collaborate on metadata, preservation, and , yes, 
publications.  My head spins to think of the amount of money to 
be saved on the development of more shared platforms, although, 
the money will only be saved if other expenditures are slowly 
turned off.

Sandy mentioned in another post that she would hope for arXiv 
like support for university monographs.  I think this is coming 
too (I'm an optimist) given discussions toward a shared access 
platform, shared discovery services, and so on.  She also 
mentioned a talk by Patrick Alexander where he mentioned that 
every monograph published includes over $5000 in just overhead. 
Clearly, a lot of this overhead (for both monographs and 
journals) can be saved with a properly implemented collaboration, 
but the world will need to change for lots of people, and not 
necessarily in good ways (for them)... but that's a whole other 
bag of beans.

Open access and NFP publications which do offer the full value 
chain have been proven to have much lower production costs per 
page than FP publishers and they do not suffer any impact 
disadvantages -- and these are still operated on a largely 
stand-alone basis, without the advantages that can be gained by 
sharing overhead.

We do need to move toward something more sustainable.  I think, 
ultimately, yes we can rely on universities to keep supporting 
scholarly communications. That's what they do.  But I don't think 
it is realistic to continue relying on or propping up our 
mid-twentieth century models.  We do need more efficient systems. 
Maybe local repositories really are the way to go, since then 
each institution has more control over its own contribution, but 
the collaboration and the support will still need to occur to 
support discovery (implying metadata, both in production and 
development of standards and tools) and preservation.  I suppose 
another problem with local repositories, however, is that a 
consensus is far less likely to unite around local repositories 
as a practical option at this juncture -- the case can't just be 
made with words, you need the numbers and arXiv has them -- and 
while I am interested to see strong local repositories emerge, 
there is greater sense in supporting what can be achieved, since 
we need more steps in the right direction.

-Nat

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 5:26 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Sub-sidy/cription for ArXiv: Collaborative Business Model Changes
Funding Structure

Re: Cornell University Library Engages More Institutions in Supporting
arXiv

Collaborative Business Model Changes Funding Structure
http://news.library.cornell.edu/news/arxiv

On 22-Jan-10, at 11:10 PM, Nat Gustafson-Sundell wrote:

> This is actually an Open Access sustainable funding model and
> could very well become THE model (or one of the leading models)
> for scholarly communications, depending on the enhancements
> (say, if these included more formal quality control) eventually
> ... although I expect the old dogs will keep circling around
> the old models as long as there is anything to bark about.

Voluntary institutional sub-sidy/cription as a sustainable model,
through all economic times, tough and tender??

Here's an alternative model whose sustainablity is less founded
on blind faith:

Institutions have many self-interested reasons for wanting to
host, archive, manage, monitor, measure and showcase their own
research article outputs. The annual scale of their own local
article output is also manageable and sustainable at the
institutional level, within its existing infrastructure:

       Carr, L. The Value that Repositories Add
http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2008/11/value-that-repositories-add.html

       Swan, A. The Business of Digital Repositories
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14455/

       Harnad, S. Institutional vs. Central Repositories
http://bit.ly/62M14a

Hence what will happen is that instead of trying to sustain a
central repository like Arxiv -- most of whose costliness derives
from the fact that it is a single direct locus of deposit and
archiving from all institutions, worldwide -- direct deposit and
hosting will instead be offloaded onto the distributed network of
institutional repositories, with Arxiv becoming merely another
central harvester, providing global search services (sustainable
if it provides functionality that can compete with other OAI
services or Google Scholar).

But voluntary sub-sidy/cription will no doubt sustain things for a
while. (Things do seem to catch on rather slowly in this domain...)

Stevan Harnad

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Philip Davis
> Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:53 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model
>
> ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model The celebrated
> e-print service will now rely on annual library donations, while
> its long-term business plan is still in the works.
>
> see:  http://j.mp/5dvINB