RE: Reed Elsevier as "Green" publisher

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

What is needed Joe, is 100%. Any research library would want to maintain a
subscription to what its patrons think important until there is OA to
essentially 100% of the literature in a field, and good automatic links
for getting at it from citations to the conventional version.

The only field where this is anywhere near the case, is high energy
physics, which is a very concentrated subject collected by a very small
number of libraries, covered almost totally by a handful of journals, and
possessing an excellent arXiv.  In that subject, reports are that there
have been very few cancellations of at least the journals from the
American Physical Society. I can think of many reasons why this area might
be exceptional; to find out, we shall have to wait until other areas reach
the same point.

For areas in which, say, 95% of the literature becomes OA, there is a
possibility of cancellation by those libraries where the interest is
peripheral. However, if the journals were expensive and peripheral, the
odds are they would have been cancelled long ago.

No one can be sure how the availability of OA, and self-archiving in
particular, will affect the rest of the system. For example, Stevan Harnad
has said that he thinks it will not necessarily harm the journals; I
myself feel otherwise, that once OA becomes a full success, there may be
little need for journals in the conventional sense, but only as overlay
journals to the repositories, serving a quality-control and editing
function. (By overlay journal I mean a web-published list of links to
those articles in the repositories submitted to the journal, and meet its
standards for scientific merit and technical quality. Some blogs seem
capable of that function; they suffer because many of the items that they
would want to link to are not OA.)

We shall see. The key step is to convince all the scientists and other
scholars to publish in such a manner that their material will be open,
either in repositories or OA journals. I, personally, expect that we shall
see within a few years.

Dr. David Goodman
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From:	owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Joseph J. Esposito
Sent:	Mon 5/31/2004 1:08 AM

1.  Does anyone know of any library cancellations of journals because of
the availability of some or all of the articles in such journals in self-
or institutional archives? ...

2.  Assuming cancellations because of self-archiving are negligible or
nonexistent, at what point, if ever, would one expect such cancellations
to begin?

Joe Esposito