Re: Future of the "subscription model?"

[Rick Anderson <rick.anderson@utah.edu>]

>The only point on which I think Rick is on the wrong track is in 
>looking towards purchase at the article level as a replacement 
>for lost content. As he points out, that model brings punitive 
>pricing. Much more effective in providing large-scale 
>single-article access will be an open access model, which 
>provides users with the content they need - and no more than 
>they need - at an affordable price for the world-wide academic 
>community.

I'd hate to disagree with someone who agrees with me so 
substantially, so I won't. I'll only point out that although I'm 
a publicly-declared agnostic on the issue of long-term 
sustainability of most OA models (and have publicly registered my 
concern about the unintended consequences of redirecting research 
funding from experimentation to dissemination), from an end-user 
standpoint I think OA is wonderful. You certainly can't beat the 
per-article pricing.

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Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
University of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu