RE: Back to basics

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

Dear Rick (and Dean, Joe, Jan and others),

Not all the people to whom the information is important or necessary are
the constituents of libraries which can afford the information. The
"early, country-wide BigDeal arrangements" to which Jan refers were indeed
an attempt to meet this objection. They do not succeed, because the
information which they offer is a very poor match to the information
people need. They would have succeeded if the publishers involved had been
the sole suppliers of academic journals. The complement of the Big Deal
was the partly successful attempt to pay independently publishing
societies to let the Big Deal organizations handle their journals.

This system did work, even in print, in one context--that of the USSR,
which had in essence one publisher and one purchaser. Even here, they only
worked because of the restriction that the information which that
government thought people ought to have was all that was provided.

Going back to the true basics, the solution is to reduce the cost of
publishing the material in the first place. This may not have been
feasible 20 years ago, but it is now. It can in fact be reduced so low,
that the cost of both publication and distribution is an essentially
trivial portion of the expense of research, and can be afforded by even
the individual.  The model, of course, is ArXiv. I think the burden of
proof is on anyone who proposes anything more costly or more complicated.

It is not true that, as Dean Anderson says "The only proven way to drive
down the price ... is to spread the cost over a larger base. Perhaps some
future technological breakthrough will result in lower overall publishing
costs." The technology has been here several years already, and, this time
agreeing with Dean, certainly it "will lead not just to a rethinking of
the publishing process but to a rethinking of the role of the library as
information aggregator." It already has.

As Joe says, "An OA publication will prove to be sustainable when it
sustains itself.  No amount of debate beforehand changes that." It already
has. The experiment has been done and is successful.  A successful
experiment changes the burden of proof, which is now on anyone who
proposes that there are cases to which it does not apply.

(Yes, my skepticism extends to myself: my variation on the funding of Open
Access journals is merely an attempt to fund them with the available funds
under the existing institutional arrangements. It will not be necessary if
we did not attempt to continue conventional publication at its inevitable
expense. It would be much better to spend the money on things that neded
it, like the retrospective conversion of the large amounts of material in
archives and similar sources.) Academic ibraries generally now spend
between 30% and 50% of their acquisition funds on scholarly journals,
primarily in the sciences.  It would help to reduce this to 25%, but it
would help even more to reduce it to 1%.) It would help to have more
money, but not to use it to pay higher prices for the same product. The
cost of distributing the exchange you are now reading is a very small part
of what it would be to publish it in JASIST--for example. I can think of
very few titles for which it would be otherwise.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From:	owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Rick Anderson
Sent:	Tue 4/27/2004 6:46 PM
To:	liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Back to basics

> Would it not be logical if that one subscriber were the author's 
> institution (or the author's funding body)?

Of course it wouldn't.  What would be logical would be for the subscriber
to be the person who wants access to the content.  The problem is that the
logical solution doesn't accord with our (librarians') desire to provide
high-quality information to those who can't afford to buy it for
themselves.  That's why there are libraries -- so that institutions or
communities can buy access to such information at wholesale cost and
provide it to all of their constituents in return for a levy (in the form
of tuition, fees and/or taxes) that amounts to a tiny percentage of the
individual subscription cost.  Voila -- tension between libraries and
publishers.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu