RE: Berkeley faculty statement on scholarly publishing

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

The Berkeley statement
talks about OA in general, not merely OA Journals.

The work Anthony mentions discussed OA journals only, showing that for the
particular large research libraries studied the cost for OA Journals, with
the university paying publication fees "on behalf of the author", was
higher than the current cost with the university paying subscription fees
"on behalf of the reader"

Explicit warning was given against assuming the conclusions held for other
similar universities. For the university I know best, the conclusion would
not hold. As Berkeley also does not have a medical school (which typically
has a large output of papers per author) the conclusion might not hold
there either.

But for authors anywhere there are many forms of OA publishing less
expensive than OA Journals. If Berkeley faculty were to publish primarily
in repositories such as arXiv, as in some fields many of them probably
already do, then the costs would be much lower.

If they were to subscribe only to the publications they truly needed, and
relied on Green OA access to those that perhaps might be needed, the cost
to them would also be much lower.

The full statement of principles is open, at

http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/news/statement_of_prin_for_web.pdf

The full webcast of the conference is apparently not yet available, but
considering the main speakers
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlypublishing/speakers.html and the
topics of the breakout sessions, at
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlypublishing/breakouts.html a wide
range of possibilities appears to have been discussed.

If Berkeley is as it was when I was a graduate student there, the faculty
are quite capable of educating themselves, and also of making use of the
good analyses done by librarians, such as the authors of the very work
Anthony refers to.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Anthony Watkinson
Sent: Thu 5/5/2005 8:25 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Berkeley faculty statement on scholarly publishing

When I tried to access the URL given here I was told it was forbidden.
Could we have some open access to this statement?

I am also puzzled by the statement by Professor Agogino about lower costs
to the university. Has Berkeley done a study that has come to a different
result from the Cornell and other studies (showing higher costs to the
university under an OA regime) or has Professor Agogino been badly
"educated" by her library?

Anthony Watkinson