Do governments subsidize journals (was: Who gets hurt by Open

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Access?)
Reply-To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-edited-by: liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 19:15:00 EDT
Sender: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.2 -- ListProc(tm) by CREN
Precedence: bulk

I think we have a forest-and-the-the-trees problem in this debate over
whether or not some journals, and the ADA journals in particular, are
subsidized by the government.  I will leave it to a University of Chicago
economist to describe how government can be completely withdrawn from the
marketplace, but as a practical matter, there is some degree of subsidy in
just about everything.

What we should be looking at, however, for the purposes of this argument
is the gap between total costs and subsidies, and on this point, which I
think is the essential one, Peter Banks is of course correct.  
Government, for all its wiliness and indirectness, does not pick up the
full tab for most journals.  I happen to believe that the gap is, on
average, very significant.  Therefore advocates of Open Access who believe
that OA can come about simply by shifting governemental expenditures from
one column to another are wrong.  More money is required.

But -- this is the point where OA discussions get speculative and even
loony on both sides.  Some OA advocates believe that the total cost of OA
journals would be much less than the total cost of proprietary journals,
especially once the profits are sucked out of the system.  So perhaps from
this perspective there would be no gap.  If you think of one of Stevan
Harnad's formulations -- a self- or institutional archive run on a cheap
Linux box by a part-time systems administrator -- then perhaps one could
envision significant cost reductions.  But no one I know (except for
Harnad) believes that OA should be less featured than proprietary
publications.  Most people apparently believe that in scholarship, more is
more.

OA skeptics, on the other hand, assert that once the profit motive is
stripped from the system, all hell will break loose in terms of no
meaningful cost controls.  In other words, the gap in governmental funding
may already be large, but OA will make it larger.

My own view is that both sides of this argument ignore the creativity of
individuals when they are given new tools to play with.  OA will inspire
new features, new services, and over time a more expensive system.  Is
that bad?  I don't think so. But it won't be cheap.

At the very least, let's stop insisting that Peter doesn't know how to add
two numbers together.  Clearly, he does.  How about a midsummer's
resolution to aim a little higher?

Joe Esposito

On 7/27/05, David Goodman <David.Goodman@liu.edu> wrote:
> Dear Peter,
> 
> I have, as you suggested, looked at the funding sources for your authors.
> In the most recent issue of "Diabetes," July 2005, there are 40 articles.
> 
> 20 of them have one or more US government sponsors
> 21 have one of more non-US governmental sponsors
> 7 have one or more US non-profit organization sponsors
> 20 have one or more non-US non-profit sponsors,
> 2 have one or more US industry sponsors
> 10 have one or more non-US industry sponsors.
> 
> of these 40,
> 
>      2 have only industry sponsors
>      9 are either NIH internal authors, or have only NIH as a sponsor,
> 
> (Many had multiple sponsorships; I did not count author addresses as
> sponsors unless no sponsor was listed.)
> 
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> Associate Professor
> Palmer School of Library and Information Science
> Long Island University
> dgoodman@liu.edu