Re: Industrial use and library costs

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

On 4-May-04, at 6:05 AM, David Goodman wrote:

4. If it is judged that commercial organizations will receive the use of
OA journals at too low a rate, there are many solutions, including
differential subscription charges for print--a very common practice
differential rates for author/organization funded articles differential
membership rates--another very common practice.

Here are some ideas on how the corporate sector could contribute to an
openly accessible scholarly literature:

Voluntary contributions (donations) to fund open access publishing or
archiving.  Perhaps this could be most effective where entire industries
stand to benefit from open access in a particular discipline.  For
example, the chemistry industry has been mentioned recently, with the
American Chemical Society a major publisher.  If these kinds of groups
could get together to achieve open access, all would benefit.  It should
be quite easy for corporations to quickly achieve both direct savings -
the total amount of the donations needed should be much less than what is
paid for by subscription (open access requires no sales efforts, complex
legal negotiations, or access control mechanisms, after all) - and
indirect savings, through tax relief.  To avoid the possibility of undue
corporate influence on the research process, a blind approach, perhaps
through a foundation, might be best.  For the same reason, the total
contribution of the corporate sector should be a low percentage, as it
likely is now, so it would be best to approach the corporate sector as one
of a number of funders.  In order to minimize the potential of dropouts
due to games theory like effects, this approach would probably work best
as an endowment approach to facilitate initial start-up or change-over
costs; an endowment rather than ongoing funding approach would also
contribute to minimize corporate influence on research.

Another approach to corporate funding for an overall open access system of
scholarly literature would be a voluntary tax.  Don't laugh!  What I'd
suggest is that corporations that apply for tax relief due to research and
development costs should show either direct benefit to society (make the
results of their R & D openly accessible), or, if they prefer not to do
this, a voluntary contribution to open access scholarly publishing would
be a requirement to deduct R & D costs.  Again, I think the overall
contribution of the corporate sector should be low, so this need not
involve huge numbers.  The advantage of this approach is that it should
target fairly directly the corporations that would benefit the most from
open access.  In order to ensure that funds are used efficiently, I would
propose a "flow-through" approach with every dollar received going as
directly as possible to those who need to efficiently publish as many
scientific articles as possible (research universities, non-profit
scholarly societies, charitable foundations that fund research).  Since
this approach would be most effective at a global level, perhaps one of
our governments could bring this forward to a future round of multilateral
negotiations?  Please note that I am not an expert on taxation...

Yet another approach would be an extremely small tax on the corporate
sector as a whole to fund open access publishing; I'm sure that a very
tiny portion of the taxes currently paid would make a substantial
difference, not only for the producers and publishers of open access
scholarly articles, for also for the entire corporate sector as a whole,
which would benefit greatly from open access.

None of these approaches are mutually exclusive, of course.  Perhaps
voluntary contributions to get things started would allow time for
governments and corporations to work out and implement the taxation and
administrative details, which would result in ongoing funding a few years
later.

A personal viewpoint!

cheers,

Heather G. Morrison
Project Coordinator
BC Electronic Library Network
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Phone: 604-268-7001
Fax: 604-291-3023
Email:  heatherm@eln.bc.ca
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