Olbers' Paradox and OA

[Mark Funk <mefunk@mail.med.cornell.edu>]

Ann has pointed out a cost aspect of OA that has not been mentioned
before:

At 12:01 AM -0400 4/17/04, Ann Okerson wrote:
> 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.
I am reminded of Olbers' Paradox in astronomy:

Assuming the universe is infinitely large and would then contain an
infinite amount of roughly uniformly distributed stars, then should not
the night sky be blazing with light from these stars? That is, even if the
farther stars are fainter, their number increases with distance, thus
there should be an enormous amount of star light reaching Earth. The
reality is that the night sky is relatively dark.

In OA, assuming an infinite numbers of articles, and the need to maintain
their availability for an infinite length of time, it appears that the
per-article acceptance fee for an OA article would need to approach
infinity. But I doubt that it will. Just as Olbers' Paradox can be
resolved in a variety of ways
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox), OA access costs can be
kept fairly low. Here are two resolutions:

*Storage and access costs are decreasing rapidly, and show no signs of
slowing down.

*Maintenance of older OA articles will likely be assumed by multiple
partners (e.g., the U.S. National Library of Medicine is already hosting
both OA and older non-OA articles on PubMed Central. I can easily envision
other entities, both governmental and educational, doing this as well.)

Can others add other resolutions to Okerson's Paradox?

--
Mark Funk
Head, Collection Development
Weill Cornell Medical Library
1300 York Avenue
New York, NY 10021
212-746-6073
mefunk@mail.med.cornell.edu