toll-access overlays, and the ideological fixation of OA

[brs4@lehigh.edu]

A few addenda penned early on a Monday morning and w/o much time for
editing.

1. With Annals of Math we have a working example of an overlay journal
with links to Davis and to arxiv.org. Arxiv.org is a prime candidate for
the repository. It will take someone high up, responsible for its
administration, to encourage --very explicitly-- its use for overlay
journal purposes.

2. Imho far too much ink is being spilled on disputes about publishing
alternatives when really one part of the infrastructure (arxiv.org) is
already in place, presuming that this repository would be willing to
generalize the base of subjects it deals with.

3. As my NAS presentation suggests, there are two flavors of overlays--one
with open access to tables of contents, the other with modest toll access
to same. I have no problem with low-cost toll access to help fund the
editorial operations overlays (modeled on traditional peer review) will
involve, preferably on the part of university consortia that can scale up
highly efficient editing operations involving lots of journals. And thus I
think open access, while certainly one model worth pursuing, has become
very unfortunately an exclusive focus and even a kind of ideological
fixation. I say this while recognizing that in an ideal world the table of
contents to overlay journals would be open access. But we don't live in an
ideal world. Generous ILL and licensing provisions can obviate the problem
that people see with toll-access being a barrier to dissemination of
knowledge. (Regarding ILL's role, again see my presentation.)

4. Note that even if an overlay journal is toll-access, individuals could
still use the likes of google or OAIster to locate, for free, its papers
they need. The toll would be for accessing a browseable table of contents,
for seeing the non-article material at a publisher website, and for
alerting and other services (such as endnote downloads and organized
linkages to SFX).

5. While working vendor side, I did training at a few service centers for
library network or consortial kinds of places. Such places, with suitable
seed funding as well as low-cost subscriptions, could be a starting place
for such initiatives. None of this is rocket science. It just requires a
lean and mean operation run by someone with lots of business savvy, to get
some working models off the ground. In fact at least one or two are off
the ground already.

6. In general, far too much theorizing is going on. The pieces are in
place for transforming publishing, even if the logistics are daunting. In
the meantime, we librarians will continue to engage in rounds of
cancellations of serials while the publishing world continues to explore
its exclusive fixation on open access and decrying of toll access. We'll
bemusedly continue to watch our email boxes expand with lamentations and
outcries about the sorry state of publishing as so little continues to be
done to remedy the problem.

7. The affordability issue is intimately tied to the access issue. The
latter, because lack of affordability simply translates into lack of
access. The focus on OA may actually, in the end, compromise the ability
to beat the commercials at their own game, and therefore compromise the
ability for people to have affordable and therefore greatly expanded
access.

8. In sum, if open access compromises affordability, as I think it will
(just witness Springer's high charge for OA publishing), then we need to
look at modest toll access to overlays as an alternative to OA. And again,
any such toll access is only for the table of contents and other
paraphernalia of a journal. Open access is still ensured to those
individuals who, knowing an author or paper they want to look up, want to
go straight to the likes of arxiv.org using a suitable search engine.

Brian Simboli