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Re: The Value of OA (resend)

If it is truly "a matter of redistributing the money," then we in fact would have enormous savings, as this would permit us to eliminate the economics profession entirely. We would not need speculation (and faculty appointments and research publications and books and conferences) to study why a shift in an economic model changes people's behavior. Cost is a constant, right? People don't do things differently, based on their incentives, correct? Scholarly communications is a closed system, locked up tightly like a "clean room" project in a laboratory, and not subject to any outside influences such as (to choose some of the more trivial examples) human inventiveness, changes in demography, developments in the fields studied themselves, or the atavistic tendency of some people to search for a good seat when they enter a theater.

Heaving the irony to the side, we really have to get beyond the notion that we can change one thing and everything else will remain the same; it is not a matter of choosing the red jelly beans over the yellow jelly beans (itself an act that may have large, unforeseeable consequences) but of whether there will jelly beans at all. Oh, there will be some sweetmeats in their place, but we really don't know what they will look like, and to say that we do implies a dangerous lack of humility.

Joe Esposito


On 4/13/07, David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu> wrote:
We can have it as either cheaper or more expensive depending upon
the quality we want. If we accept arXiv only publication, with
after-the-fact peer review, it can be very cheap indeed; If we
aim for the same price as the present system, we should get the
same quality. There is no inherent reason why it should cost more
one way than the other. It is not a question of costs; it will
only be a question of costs if you insist on keeping the present
system as a base and adding additional complications.

this is what the present publishers want to do. They want to do
everything as expensively as they now do it, and then add on
costs.  There is no reason why anyone else should pay the least
attention. The money can be fixed, and the bidding be for who can
produce the best product for the price while making it
universally available. Elsevier will figure out how to publish at
competitive prices.

It is a matter of redistributing the money,and concern about this
is also unnecessary. The academic system just like the publishers
wants to do everything as it now does, and then consider the
additional costs to do more. Frankly, there is no reason to pay
the least attention here either. If he money available is frozen,
and the minimum requirement is that all publications be
universally available in some form, they will do it a best they
can, and the best schools will compete for who can do it best,
just as they do with everything else in the academic world. And
Yale will figure out how to pay to maintain its quality.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 5:39 pm
Subject: Re: The Value of OA (resend)
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu


Tony, of course, can speak for himself.  My view is that we are
talking about (a) siphoning off of funds from research and (b)
higher costs associated with an OA regime.  This last point is
the one that the economically challenged don't seem to
understand as they debate the merits of Green and Gold OA when
the world is already moving to Platinum.

For the record:  of course, a number of commercial publishers
indeed are pigs and I have long been an advocate of many forms
of OA publishing.  I just don't believe it will be any cheaper.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 2:14 PM
Subject: RE: The Value of OA (resend)


Tony

As my colloquialism has caused you such disquiet I unreservedly
withdraw it and am happy to replace it with 'very small'.  I
hope you find that less loaded.  However, I do still consider
1% 'very small' compared to 99%.

Your post does raise the question of what the cost of scholarly
communication is to society.  Are you suggesting that 1-2% of
research costs is significantly greater than what society is
paying under the current subscription-based system?  If not,
then we are talking about a redirection of existing funds,
rather than a siphoning-off of funds that could be used for
more research.

David

--
Joe Esposito