Re: Cost of Open Access Journals: Other Observations

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

Dean,

Does this imply that you *can* imagine that a research-oriented department
would willingly accept a recharge for the bill for subscriptions to all
the journals they need or like to have (shared if those journals are also
needed and used by other departments in the same institution)?

Would the economists you have in mind presume that the end-users benefit
from the literature and that there are no benefits to the author, in spite
of 'Publish or Perish' (not: read or perish)? Would the aforementioned
research-oriented department be happy with the idea that their research is
only sub-optimally disseminated?

Would funding bodies be happy with a research-oriented department
unwilling to do everything they can to give their research results the
widest possible dissemination, especially including non-research-oriented
educational (or medical) institutions, and make sure that at least the
funders themselves have free access (not currently the case by a long
shot, see here for an example:  
http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/inquiry/refersubmission.pdf )?

Jan Velterop

On 28 May 2004, at 20:43, D Anderson wrote:

> Other contributors to this list have a much deeper knowledge of the
> politics of academic budgets than I do, but I can't imagine that a
> research-oriented department would willingly accept the burden of 
> paying for access by everyone else, including non-research-oriented 
> educational institutions, commercial enterprises, and the general 
> public.
>
> Economists would argue that the end users of the information, the ones 
> who ultimately benefit from that information, should provide 
> compensation commensurate with the benefits they receive.
>
> Dean H. Anderson