Re: Revision to Physical Review B & OA or for-pay

[brs4@lehigh.edu]

Concerning the first point below about a central clearinghouse, whereby
universities would give money to support OA journals to a clearinghouse
that would then funnel them to those journal operations, is how to
incentivize institutions to participate. It would not be of interest to a
college or university from a game theory perspective to contribute to such
an endeavor if it believed other (probably much larger universities with
lots of money) would be the main contributors. This would be unfair to
those large institutions, if indeed they played the game.

The value on the other hand of the subscription overlay model (see my
other liblicense-l message of today) is that it does incentivize
institutions to participate, because they would be paying for
enhancements.

As mentioned in the website cited in the message, a strength of the
subscription overlay model is that, if successful, it forces the prices of
subscription to be low, since the amount that any institution would be
willing to pay for enhanced access to the subscription overlay could not
be excessive (lest institutions would be driven away from participating,
and would just encourage their users to use the free access route to the
same, albeit not enhanced, content).

>From the webpage:

...There is a threshold of pricing for the subscription overlay, below
which institutions will be willing to pay to see an organized table of
contents (or access an aggregation service), and above which they will
not. That threshold will be much lower than the current pricing of the big
commercials. For the simple reason that people will not pay for really
expensive "enhancements" if they can get to the material on a repository
for free.

Brian Simboli


Quoting Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>:

> Following are comments on two separate liblicense-l messages:
> 
> Revision to Physical Review B - Brian Simboli's idea of a central
> clearinghouse for funding for OA journals makes a lot of sense to me.  
> If there isn't a lot of coordination between universities and
> institutions here yet, Brian, maybe it's because we need ideas like this
> to coordinate around.
> 
> On the topic Ann brought up of a vendor selling enhanced searching of
> basically OA institutional repositories:  as long as they are selling
> access to value-added service, not the content per se, this makes
> perfect sense to me.  I don't see open access as being in opposition to
> commercial opportunities at all; the two can coexist nicely.
> 
> One thought on how some of the funding for open access could emerge from
> this combined OA / paying for enhanced functionality:  perhaps some of
> the funding for open access could come from commercial operations which
> are selling the value-add.  How this would work is that the content
> would be OA, except for commercial redistribution.  Since the material
> is OA, the contributions from those selling value-adds would need to be
> quite modest.  That is, one could sell enhancements to free material for
> modest costs, but good luck with outrageous ones.  Nevertheless, perhaps
> OA could eventually be derived from multiple funding sources, this being
> one.
> 
> Comments anyone?
> 
> a personal view by,
> 
> Heather G. Morrison



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