RE: Thoughts on the House of Commons report

[Adam Chesler <a_chesler@acs.org>]

I'll only comment on point #5:  learned societies offer numerous benefits
beyond subsidized journals.  And that wide range of benefits, to members
and to research at large (via educational programs and the like) are
largely funded by journal subscriptions.  Remove those journals and those
subscriptions -- and the relatively modest surplus they generate -- and
you eliminate those programs as well.  It's facile to assume that funding
from alternative sources (meetings, advertising) are easily substituted:  
if they were, subscription costs to society publications would be even
less than they are now.

The point is, there's more to a society than pumping out journal issues.

The question that I keep coming back to is, is the problem with the
subscription model, or is the raw expense associated with paying for it?
And if it's the latter, then open access (at least as currently
defined/practiced) won't resolve the problem, because the money presently
available to institutions for buying published material isn't going to
increase when it's used to subsidize the publication of that material via
"memberships."  Most society journals represent a reasonable cost and
generate modest surpluses that go right back into the community.  
Discarding the model, and removing that source of funding, eliminates far
more than annual access fees.

Adam Chesler
American Chemical Society
a_chesler@acs.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Friend [mailto:ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk]
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2004 4:08 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Thoughts on the House of Commons report

As Rick acknowledges, these are complex issues, so it is difficult to
reply succinctly and accurately. However, these are my brief replies to
Rick's points:

1. Making publicly-funded research publicly-available does not imply any
diminution in the author's IP rights. Nor does it limit the author's
academic freedom to publish in whatever journal they choose.

2. An institutional repository has many roles, not necessarily long-term
preservation. The parliamentary report envisages the high long-term
preservation costs being borne by the British Library, with low normal
recurrent costs for university repositories.

3. Walk-in users are frequently permitted in UK licences but overall their
access to content is less than that of registered university students and
staff.

4. Most UK libraries do not keep re-shelving statistics for paper volumes.

5. If an academic only joins a learned society to get a subsidized copy of
the journal, what does that tell us about the importance of learned
societies in academia? I believe learned societies have a valuable
function and their value must be more based upon something more than a
"freebie".

Frederick J. Friend
E-mail: ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk