Re: Publishers' view/reply to David Prosser

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

Thanks Scott

Yes, these are the figures I was going to look for at the weekend. I am not
a supporter of OA but I agree with Scott that these calculations do not
represent an argument against OA in themselves but, in the context of a
submission to the Select Committee in the UK, they do have a certain force
do they not? If most academics do not want OA (the present situation) or
recognise it as a moral imperative a decision to redistribute funding by
government is unlikely. If most academics and their representative bodies
are pressing for OA, the situation changes. It does not make OA more a good
idea or more a bad idea, but it changes the picture for government and, for
that matter, for publishers and libraries. 

We are all intermediaries. One of the things that struck me about the
verbal evidence given by publishers to the hearings of the committee was
their emphasis (yes including Elsevier) that their business models will
depend on the expressed wishes of their author communities, either
directly through editorial boards or through learned society partners or
by withdrawal of submissions or refusal to referee. I am surprised that so
many librarians take up positions which are very little to do with the
expressed views of their patrons, positions accompanied by funding, and
then spend valuable time setting up repositories, attempting to set up new
journals and "educating" their patrons

I can assert that OA is not wanted by academics in general because a
serious (in collaboration with National Opinion Polls) survey by the CIBER
unit at City University London seems to me to show this - at least in the
preliminary results. I have seen these preliminary results. However the
report of the survey will not be submitted until later this month and the
preliminary results as presented as evidence to the Select Committee
cannot be released until the Select Committee agrees. I shall give
references to the preliminary report and the final report to this list as
soon as these documents can be made available. The evidence to the
committee as a whole should give a fascinating spectrum of the arguments
for and against OA and its implementation. Readers of the list may wonder
why we can see the Elsevier evidence but not most of the other evidence in
view of the fact that disclosure of evidence is banned before release is
given. It is because what Elsevier have on their site is a policy
statement which is substantially the same as the evidence submitted but
not entirely the same. The questions the Select Committee asked were not
all directly to do with OA and it is this part of the evidence that I
understand is omitted from the policy statement.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "T Scott Plutchak" <tscott@uab.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 3:33 AM
Subject: RE: Publishers' view/reply to David Prosser

> The calculations that Anthony refers to can be found in Elsevier's
> testimony to the select committee.  Using ISI data they calculate the UK
> produces 60,000 articles annually out of the global production of 1.2
> million, hence 5%.  UK spending on journals is 82 million pounds; they
> calculate global costs at $3,750 per article, which results in payment of
> 3% of the total.
>
> The point here (not that I'm necessarily defending the calculation) is not
> that the UK produces a majority of scholarship in any area, but that it
> produces more than it consumes, and if the costs for production are tied
> to the article, overall spending from the UK in an OA model would increase
> from the current amount spent on subscriptions.
>
> Following on this line, it seems pretty clear to me that a
> research-intensive institution like my own would end up being responsible
> for a greater portion of the production costs under OA than we are
> currently spending on subscriptions.  For example, my institution
> routinely produces nearly 1400 articles per year indexed in MEDLINE. Even
> at the $1500 figure of PLoS, that's over $2 million, and I spend only $1.5
> million on serials currently.  You can modify the calculations yourselves
> if the $3500 figure (which is widely reported as the estimate from John
> Cox Associates) or the $3750 figure (which Elsevier quotes as coming from
> the Open Society Institute) is nearer the mark.
>
> I do NOT however, think this is an argument AGAINST Open Access.  I am
> very much a supporter of the principles of Open Access, but I think we
> have to realize that in a world in which Open Access becomes the dominant
> model, the economic disruptions are going to be very severe. Open Access
> advocates need to recognize this and start coming up with strategies to
> deal with it.
>
> T. Scott Plutchak
>
> Editor, Journal of the Medical Library Association
>
> Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
> University of Alabama at Birmingham
> tscott@uab.edu