Re: How to fund open access journals from available sources

[jcg <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

Anne Okerson's reasoning would be correct if preservation and updating of
files were the sole responsibility of journals. However, this needs not be
the case. Libraries have played a crucial preservation role in the print
world; if the Lockss project fulfills its promises - and I feel there is a
very good chance that it will - libraries working in a networked manner
around the Lockss protocol and software will take care of digital
preservation, not journals.

In passing, one of the more frustrating dimension of the Lockss project
has been the DRM issue. With open access journals, this issue is
simplified to a very large extent. This tends to show that open access
digital documents, because they can be preserved in an easier, and/or
more, robust fashion than toll-gated documents, will tend to survive more
as time goes on. And that is another important issue to keep in mind.
Because very few copies existed of many Greek and Latin documents, much
was lost. Whereas Lockss thinks in terms of dozens of institutions to
preserve its documents, Elsevier can only use a few proprietary mirrors.
Striking a deal with one more institution - namely the Dutch Royal Library
- did not enhance this survival value all that much more, especially if we
take history's long view (I am thinking centuries here).

Jean-Claude Gu�don

On Fri April 16 2004 07:03 pm, Ann Okerson wrote:

> This is somewhat orthogonal to David Goodman's message about how to fund
> OA.  What occurred to me as I read that message is that the funds required
> for operating an ejournal or journals do not include only current expenses
> for manuscript management, peer review, editorial work, technology, and
> all the other components of publication, but (at least in e-world) also
> need to support ongoing maintenance of a growing journal file.  (I'm
> guessing that in p-world this was less of an issue because most publishers
> did not or do not keep much if any back stock around; but in e-world the
> file grows and the it seems to me that the responsibilities associated
> with the backfiles also remain and grow.  And should the journal cease,
> there would be no further income...)
>
> If that is true, i.e., if there is an additional cost to managing a
> growing online collection (such as provision of access, migration,
> preservation, upgrades), then today's per-article fee for OA has got to
> take that future set of needs into account.  This suggests that current
> fees, which are pegged to current costs will have to grow to cover
> retrospective content and access to it.
>
> Or is my momentary "insight" just plain off-base?
>
> Ann Okerson/Yale Library