RE: Thoughts on the House of Commons report (Chesler)

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

Dear Adam, The problem is with the model and consequent costs of
scientific publication: we can no more adopt an unaffordable model, than
we can accept an inadequate but cheap one.

The funding of scientific societies is a separate question altogether.
Although such societies are one good way to organize the publication of
scientific results, they are not the unique way, and their internal
problems cannot be the main influence on the general question, any more
than the internal concerns of any other producer.

There is no reason the readers of a chemical journal, who represent many
subjects and many countries, should be required even in part to subsidize
the other activities of the ACS.  To the extent that these activities are
for the specific benefit of the members, the members should pay. To the
extent that they are of general educational or scholarly benefit, they
merit specific funding appropriate to their needs.  To fund them on the
basis of their merit as publishers is to hamper their more specific
functions. They are indeed not primarily for "pumping out journal issues."

Dr. David Goodman
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From:	owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Adam Chesler
Sent:	Thu 7/22/2004 5:43 PM
Subject: RE: Thoughts on the House of Commons report

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