Re: A Prophylactic Against the Edentation of the RCUK Policy Proposal

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

A few years ago I went to a presentation on institutional repositories
where a librarian involved in setting up an IR told his audience that, of
course, the "real reason" for advocating IRs from the point of view of
librarians would be that it would enable them to cancel journals. This as
at the UKSG and he had clearly forgotten that someone like me might be in
the audience. UKSG is not a meeting for librarians only. However I do not
need to be anecdotal.

The more honest advocates have always claimed that a full acceptance by
the academic community of institutional repositories will destroy the
subscription model and that some publishers will go to the wall. A key
document in the SPARC arsenal (though difficult to find now if one goes in
through the SPARC home page) is the position paper on institutional
repositories by Raym Crow. You can find it at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html. He models the future after
institutional repositories are in place and used and examines the impact
on publishers both commercial and not-for-profit. Speaking about publisher
fears, he writes:

"It would be disingenuous to suggest that such publisher concerns are not
real. Still, however disruptive the effect to existing business models,
the responsibility of universities lies in generating original scholarship
and disseminating knowledge, not in maintaining the market status quo or
protecting the financial security of publishing company shareholders. In
any event, the systemic inertia inherent in the traditional scholarly
publishing paradigm suggests that one need not fear the precipitous
collapse of commercial academic publishers. The best of them will adapt
and survive under new models and will continue to perform a valuable
albeit changed role in scholarly communications."

Table 2 on scholarly communication in a new disaggregated model does not
seem to leave much space for a role for publishers but let that pass. I
hope I have made the point. Publishers should be worried because they are
told they should be worried. They should also be worried on behalf of the
academic community they serve. There is little or no evidence that
academics want to overturn the existing model.

There is of course no "scap of empirical evidence"  because so far
academics have not take much notice of the "education" they are receiving
and not not self-archiving enough. The conditions are not there. That is
why people like Dr. Prosser want to try to force them (us) to deposit.

It is complete nonsense to talk about Physics. In some areas of physics
most peer-reviewed papers were in a preliminary form deposited in ArXiv as
preprints. This is informal communication. The digital revolution has
enabled preprints to become eprints. It is hardly surprising that the role
of journals had been unchallenged in that discipline. As far as we know
cancellations have not been higher than cancellations in other
disciplines.

At present there are few postprints in ArXiv. If all the content of a
physics journal in its final form was in arXiv any librarian would be
tempted to cancel.

Anthony Watkinson

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2005 7:22 PM
Subject: RE: A Prophylactic Against the Edentation of the RCUK Policy
Proposal

> You can call it unfortunate if you want, and you can ask us to invest
> our life savings if it makes you feel better (and I'm not sure that I
> would invest all of my life savings in any one industry - surly as a
> consultant you would advise against putting all you eggs in one
> basket!).  But all Stevan is asking for is one scrap of empirical
> evidence, one single hint that 'self-archiving will lead to journal
> cancellations'.  With all of your years' experience can you give Stevan
> that?
>
> Also, you appear to be rather confused about what is being required. You
> suggest that publishers are being asked to '"Give this away". Actually,
> authors are being asked to self-archive.  The publishers are not being
> asked to do anything at all.  Of course, if the publishers are not happy
> publishing self-archived papers then they have every right not to
> publish them.  But it is the author that is being asked to deposit (and
> the funding body or institution has every right to make that a condition
> of grant) - the publisher is not being asked to do anything!
>
> David C Prosser PhD
> Director
> SPARC Europe
> E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk
> http://www.sparceurope.org
>
> -----Original Message-----

Joe Esposito wrote:

> JE:  This is a very unfortunate statement.  The only valid metric is for
> proponents of Open Access to invest their life savings in the companies
> that publish research journals, in order to prove that they do not
> believe that OA will hurt the financial performance of publishers that
> accommodate OA.  I have no quarrel with those who believe that OA will
> hurt traditional publishers, and no quarrel with those who experiment
> with different forms of publishing that happen to be OA (e.g.,
> arXiv)--and no quarrel with funding bodies that require OA publication
> of funded research.  But to say to a publisher, "Give this away; you're
> not going to feel it at all," is simply ridiculous.
>
> Joe Esposito