Re: message to liblicense-l

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

How is "political will" going to "redirect" the income stream 
that comes from private companies now in the form of 
subscriptions for their R&D departments when they will be "free 
riders" on a pure OA system? Sure, they'll be happy to pay fees 
for their own researchers to publish in STM journals, but my 
guess is that they pay a lot more into the system now than they 
would through author fees in an OA system. What kind of 
"political" solution is there to this potential problem of 
underfunding?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press


> Joe,
>
> I have to admit that I don't know what the precise definition is 
> of 'a lot' (neither do I know what Scrubs is or how you can turn 
> it off -- and perhaps we should keep it that way), but I think 
> we can safely state that for most articles there are more 
> readers than authors (some of the articles in Arxiv, with 
> hundreds of authors, may well be exceptions to this). The issue 
> is not so much that there are many readers 'out there' for most 
> articles, because there are most probably not, but the issue is 
> the assumption that all potential 'real' readers are at 
> institutions that have a subscription to the articles in 
> question and not 'out there' without access.
>
> The Shakespeare quote is very amusing, but isn't the question 
> more something like this: "If I pay for an insurance policy, 
> will I get an accident?" Precisely because you don't know you 
> take out insurance. Precisely because we don't know who can or 
> will read specific scientific research articles we ought to have 
> open access.
>
> We need to find a way for journals to provide economically 
> sustainable open access. The fact that we don't have open access 
> is a kind of 'collateral damage' of the traditional subscription 
> system. With the internet and its functionalities we can have 
> structural and economically feasible open access as soon as we 
> have enough political will to redirect the existing money 
> streams for scientific literature. Maybe political will is one 
> of those spirits that won't come when you call them. You may 
> have a point there.
>
> Jan Velterop