Re: Olbers' Paradox and OA

[Ann Okerson <aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu>]

Just to be quite clear:  I had not suggested (nor did I intend to) that
the price per article would go up and up until it approaches infinity.  
That would have been silly.
  
But I was suggesting that the costs of providing access *over time* might
well be greater than the costs in Year One or Two of an online startup, at
least one of any size and scale and ambition.

Mark suggests that publishers won't need to maintain their backfiles on
their servers -- these functions would be taken up by libraries instead.  
If so, the library community has a lot of work to do and and additional
costs to incur.  But, even if libraries (or government organizations, as
Mark observes) as sites for online journals become the norm... has anyone
seen publishers walking away from the responsibility of maintaining
backfiles (au contraire ... many societies have digitized all their
backfiles and continue to enhance online functionalities)?

That the costs of storage continue to decline is only a part of the
ongoing cost equation.  And, for those who mentioned it, LOCKSS, as
presently conceived, is important, because it allows libraries to cache
ejournals and volumes of particular interest to them, but, at least as
conceived now, it's quite a ways from a long-term preservation system or a
digital library system. (And I'm writing this as a great admirer of
LOCKSS, in which Yale library is an early and enthusiastic member and
participant).

(Of course if the journals publishing system changes from today's peer
reviewed bundle of XXX articles per journal to something else, more
freewheeling, then all bets are off about... everything.  But so far, even
with the newest online titles and most creative business models, the STM
journal concept remains much the same.)

Hope this clarifies my earlier message, Ann Okerson

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Mark Funk wrote:

> 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
> mefunk@mail.med.cornell.edu