RE: Cost of Open Access Journals: Other Observations

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

Carl, 

Using data from the D-Lib article by King et al,
http:www.dlib.org/dlib/october03/king/10king.html, the average faculty
member in science reads 216 articles per year, with about 40% coming from
the library collection. I assume a post-doctoral fellow or an graduate
student reads this many (in my experience such groups usually read more
than the faculty). with perhaps 80% coming from the library.

Then a large university with 300 science faculty and 1200 science
postdoctoral fellows and graduate students (assuming an average document
delivery fee of $35 including copyright), would spend $8.2 million for
journal articles in the sciences alone. This is considerably higher than
current budgets for science journal subscriptions.

All the factors in the above paragraph are subject to considerable
qualification. For example, in smaller institutions, the proportion of
graduate students and postdoctoral fellows would be lower; nonetheless the
relative use and budget holds for most or all research institutions.

Most important, this does not have any relation to the question whether,
for rarely used titles, whoever pays would not save by obtaining
individual articles--that is a separate and more complicated analysis.

In corporate libraries, as distinct from academic, all expenses are
generally charged back to the requestor.

None of this bears on the main argument, but since C. Anderson mentioned
the possibility, and the King et. al. numbers were partially obtained from
his university, the numbers might be appropriate.

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


-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Carl Anderson
Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2004 12:43 AM
Subject: RE: Cost of Open Access Journals: Other Observations

Libraries don't typically make the end user pay (directly) at all, and
certainly not in any proportion relevant to individually received benefit.
That's sort of how and why libraries came about, isn't it?

The only model that sensibly matches Dean's prescription is individually
negotiated pay-per-view transactions between publishers and end users.

Carl A. Anderson Director of Electronic Resources Drexel University
Libraries 215-895-2771 Carl.Anderson@drexel.edu