Re: Open access business models

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Regarding David Prosser's ARL model for the transition from
toll-access cost-recovery to the open-access cost-recovery
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g29#4
please note the 1998 critique of this transitional model
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0000.html
as well as the alternative transitional model proposed in
2001:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.1
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2

The points raised therein should be taken into account as otherwise we may
be committing ourselves to waiting passively for events that there are a
priori reasons to expect will not happen.

The gist of the problem is that authors paying for a journal to provide
open access to their own individual articles is exactly equivalent to
authors paying the journal to self-archive for them. Many more authors
today are providing open access to their toll-access journal articles by
self-archiving them themselves (rather than by paying the journal to do it
for them) than are publishing their articles in open access journals.
However, the numbers in all three cases are still far too small.

It does not seem a very promising way to increase those numbers to propose
that authors who do not yet have suitable open-access journals to publish
in, or do not wish to, and who are not yet self-archiving their own
toll-access journal articles, should now pay a toll-access journal to
self-archive them.

It seems more promising to set aside hypothetical models for transitions
between cost-recovery models for now and to concentrate instead on
demonstrating to authors and their institutions and their research-funders
the benefits and feasibility of open-access provision by whichever of the
available means they prefer.

Stevan Harnad