Re: Back to basics

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@worldnet.att.net>]

I happen to agree with much of Jan's post, so my comments here are not
intended to serve as a head-on-head debate.

On the issue of who should pay, the argument that the sponsoring
institution should shoulder the costs is compelling, except for the
unhappy problem of what to do with the free riders, those institutions and
individuals who read more than they write (and hence with an author-pays
model would come out ahead financially).  An extreme example of this would
be the huge number of multibillion-dollar chemical companies, who spend
millions for the journals and abstracts of the American Chemical Society
(which, by the way, is a not-for-profit professional society).  With Open
Access, what is free to an impecunious researcher in sub-Saharan Africa is
free to the Vice President of Business Development of Eastman Chemical or
BASF.  Is this corporate welfare or what?

As for sustainability, this is one of those proof-is-in-the-pudding
issues. An OA publication will prove to be sustainable when it sustains
itself.  No amount of debate beforehand changes that.  Venture capitalists
and foundation grants officers have to engage in this kind of debate
because it is their business to capitalize the future.  But the rest of
us?  Do we really want to suggest that experimentation is a bad thing?  
If we can't do experiments in new publishing business models, perhaps we
should cease to experiment in particle phyics and cellular biology.  When
did the academic community become so stubbornly anti-intellectual?

But we already have instances of sustainable OA journals, though they have
managed to make things work by acting like start-up entrepreneurs:  low
overhead, clever financing, the addressing of a new (not an established)
market, and so forth.  A favorite example:  Ed Valauskas's FirstMonday
(firstmonday.org), an online, peer-reviewed journal on the Internet.  As
for quality, Valauskas published Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the
Bazaar" (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/index.html,
the seminal work on open-source software development and, by extension,
the spiritual grandfather of the OA movement.

Perhaps it is time to stop thinking about OA as a binary issue:  Open
Access, yes/no.  Rather, we are headed for a pluralistic future, with
innovations coming about because of the clever and energetic work of
individuals.  For the Web, iPod, and Google we had a Berners-Lee, a Jobs,
and a Brin and Page respectively.  Will the next Doug Englebart please
stand up?

Joe Esposito


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jan Velterop" <velterop@biomedcentral.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 10:56 AM
Subject: RE: Back to basics

> Dean Anderson wrote:
>
> > Libraries, in particular, create a dilemma for publishers. The mission
> > of libraries is to serve their patrons by providing an information
> > resource to as many people as possible. That means that libraries will
> > seek to make one copy of a subscription available to large numbers of
> > patrons. If this logic is followed to its ultimate conclusion, the
> > number of subscribers would dwindle down to one, and that one subscriber
> > would make the publication available to everyone else.
>
> This is precisely the reasoning behind the early, country-wide BigDeal
> arrangements. There would be one subscriber, paying a substantial amount,
> and everybody in the country would have access. The reasoning behind Open
> Access takes this a step further. Just one subscriber in the *world* would
> be paying, a modest amount, for one article at the time, and making that
> article available to the rest of the world. The ultimate inter-library
> loan. Would it not be logical if that one subscriber were the author's
> institution (or the author's funding body)?
>
> Voila. Open Access. And at the same time, in my view, a demonstration that
> Open Access has to be regarded as inherently sustainable.
>
> Jan Velterop
> BioMed Central