RE: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

In the context of David's point about the value added by publishers when
content is effectively free, there might be other services that could be
attractive as well as peer review. The recent offer by JISC providing
access to the Royal Society of Chemistry's digital archive might provide
an interesting case study http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_rscarchive.html

This is licenced access, not open access, to back files rather than
current publications, and the offer applies only to the UK education
community.  However, the options of an annual fee to access the archive on
the RSC site or a small one-off payment to download the archive to a local
institutional site, will provide some clues as to the sort of features
that users may be willing to pay for. I haven't investigated the RSC
interface, but presumably it will offer features that might not be
available locally, such as search, CrossRef linking, etc. The announcement
specifically notes that the RSC's network is 'secure', and this might be a
selling point, although given the price differential I guess many
institutions might think otherwise if this is the only point.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256     Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865

At 17:54 12/08/04 -0400, David Prosser wrote:
> 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