RE: Is OA (Gold) really a desirable goal for scientific journal publishing?

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> However, isn't it also quite possible that, having been 
> constrained for so many years from buying books because of high 
> journal prices, librarians may actually want to spend more on 
> books again and go back to the days when they spent 60-70% of 
> their budgets on books and 30-40% on journals--especially if 
> books do not go digital in the same OA (green) way that you 
> propose for journal articles?

This scenario assumes that libraries would still have the funding 
they had before the rise of OA, when journals were expensive. 
If a large percentage of the scholarly journals for which we now 
pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year were to suddenlo 
go OA, the likely result at my institution would not be leftover 
money in the library's coffers; it would be a redirection of 
funds to other areas where they're needed within the university. 
We wouldn't have more money available with which to buy books; 
we'd simply have less money.

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Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu