Re: July issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Peter has supplied an excellent overview of the NPG vs. UC 
showdown against a backdrop of the development of the STM 
journals crisis going back many years. He's a strong proponent of 
OA as a long-term solution to this crisis, but I wonder why he 
hasn't considered here one other possibility, viz., having 
universities use the infrastructure that they have already 
created and directly control to publish STM journals at prices 
that they would consider reasonable? I'm thinking, of course, of 
the 80+ university presses in this country that are already in 
place and have the knowledge and experience--if not currently the 
capital--to do STM publishing just as many of them now already 
publish journals in the humanities and social sciences?  Rather 
than create entire new bureaucratic mechanisms to fund Gold OA, 
or to support OA journals based in universities (but outside 
university presses), wouldn't it be simpler, and more cost 
effective, to fund university presses adequately enough for them 
to take over much of STM publishing? Recall that the oldest press 
continuously in operation, Johns Hopkins, began by publishing 
journals in mathematics and chemistry. Somewhere along the way, 
especially after WW II, the business of publishing STM journals 
migrated outside the academic community to become a very 
profitable commercial enterprise. But there is no reason, in 
principle, why it cannot return to where it started. And this 
change would be far less disruptive to established practices and 
principles, in copyright and other arenas, than the route to OA 
will inevitably be. If universities directly controlled the 
business, presumably they could operate it in such a way as to 
keep price increases in some reasonable relationship to inflation 
and could provide more transparency about the costs of the 
business overall.

Sandy Thatcher



At 11:11 PM -0400 7/2/10, Peter Suber wrote:
>* Announcement (cross-posted) *
>
>I just mailed the July issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
>This issue takes a close look at the conflict between the
>University of California and the Nature Publishing Group over
>NPG's proposed price increase for next year.  UC told its faculty
>that it's ready to cancel NPG titles and call for an
>author/editor/referee boycott of NPG.
>
>The roundup section briefly notes 126 OA developments from June.
>
>July 2010 issue
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-10.htm
>
>How to subscribe and unsubscribe to the newsletter and discussion
>forum.
>http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/soan
>
>The current and back issues are all open access, of course.
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm
>
>Peter Suber
>Senior Researcher, SPARC
>Berkman Fellow, Harvard University
>Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
>Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/