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

["Indiana Univ. Math. J." <iumj@indiana.edu>]

I should like to focus on just this part:

"a self- or institutional archive run on a cheap Linux box by a part-time
systems administrator"

The virtue (or lack of it) of any proposal rests on how doable it is. In
my opinion, an institutional archive run on a cheap Linux box by a
part-time sys op simply tells me that ...

(a) either someone has no real experience with all that is entailed (I'll
be happy to get into operational details if need be, but I do not want to
fill the kitchen with smoke), or

(b) someone has really low expectations and assigns low priority value to
this institutional archive (where "low expectations" may mean, for
example, "If we lose 10 percent of the stuff archived because someone did
not use gtar, so be it, we still got 90%", or "If we now and then lose a
disk because there was no redundancy and no backup SYSTEM in place, the
sysop just backed up according to his own little script, well, we
tried...", or "If we cannot read a file that was archived 5 years ago
because the executable for it has changed and we overlooked keeping the
old executable, well, who could have foreseen that...?", or "I am positive
that that paper must have been archived, but it will take me a good part
of the day to find it and restore it because blah blah blah...", or "well,
that's not a paper, that's a database, so we err when we archived it as if
it were a paper", or...)

Administering a cheap Linux box is not the same as maintaining a long-time
archive on a cheap Linux box: the latter entails much, much more than the
former.

Best, Elena Fraboschi

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Joseph Esposito wrote:

> Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:10:10 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: Do governments subsidize journals (was: Who gets hurt by Open 
> 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 Chicago economist to describe how government can be completely withdrawn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