please post.......please excuse if this was sent before

[claudia love <prbusiness967@yahoo.com>]

Although I am currently taking time off to raise my child, substantial
experience in STM publishing and academia gives me much insight and
knowledge of components that will be part of any open access type
operations.

Let me say, unequivocally, Open Access will be at least, if not more
costly, than than the subscription model, once all the necessities of
funding it and maintaining it have been realized (and they will escalate
as the process moves forward)..  That is an absolute that is not
realistically acknowledged. There are also many issues for the research
community that are not well addressed or necessarily beneficial.

Even though they may be well intentioned, there is no such thing as a free
lunch, and the open access models will require huge capitalization, but in
less traditional ways.

The glaring problem with the current subscription model is that libraries
have caved to the publishing giants and, despite some protestations, they
do not have the courage to refuse to buy the packages that eat up their
budgets.

Until libraries can rely on a number of sources for their publications and
choose just what they want at reasonable prices, they can expect to be
"gouged" but in different ways from the various sources that currently
position themselves as not for profit or for the public good.

If librarians took as much time selecting individual journal titles and
rejecting the multi-thousand dollar deals as they spend on list servers,
they could have an important effect on journal publishing...for the
benefit of all concerned.

Claudia Love