RE: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

The short answer to the 'what happens when nobody buys journals anymore?'
is that journals find alternative revenue streams to fund the peer-review
process.  With all the content already free in repositories we would move
from meeting the costs of peer-review through a varying combination of
reader (subscription) charges and author (page) charges to author charges.

(Of course, with this audience it can almost go without saying that the
phrase 'author charges' is shorthand for 'charges paid for from funds from
the author's funding body or institution' in the same way that 'reader
charges' is shorthand for 'subscriptions paid for by the reader's
institution'!)

This is already happening with the journals from BioMedCentral, PLoS, etc.  
These journal owners don't care where else the papers they publish are
available from as the aim is to cover the costs of publication through
publication charges.

There is no reason to believe that peer review will diminish in importance
as more material is self-archived.  So far, the physicists who deposit
their papers in arXiv still subsequently send the same papers to journals
for peer review.  Incidentally, this might also answer Joe Esposito's
question why would '...publishers, at least commercial publishers,
continue to invest money in publishing journals.' They would continue if
they could make a profit in selling peer-review to authors.

Open access journals, selling peer-review to authors, and repositories,
providing rapid and wide dissemination (and placing archiving back in the
hand of librarians) fit perfectly together and I don't see an open access
future in which we have one without the other!

David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail:	david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Fytton Rowland
Sent: 12 August 2004 00:12
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

Stevan's reply to Brian is precisely what one would have expected him to
say, given his previous statements.  Like Stevan, I agree that
peer-reviewed "journals" should stay, though exactly what a "journal" will
look like in the middle-distance future is arguable.  The majority of
journals, as he also points out, are toll-access still.

However, Brian had specifically talked about "in the long run".  The
issue, which Stevan usually specifically excludes talking about, but
others of us may want to think about, is this: What happens if we are all
merrily self-archiving our published papers, and thus no-one needs to buy
journals any more, so they go out of business and thus can't organise the
peer-review and editing processes any more?  Stevan tends to say "let's
self-archive and worry about the other thing if it happens".  Others of us
may wish to do slightly more pro-active crystal-ball gazing.

Fytton Rowland, Loughborough University, UK