RE: Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Critique of PRC Stud=

[Jean-Claude <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

Library budgets come from specific budgets within each
university. It certainly does not come from grant money and when
universities manage to extract overhead from research grants - a
practice which is not universal by the way - that money does not
go into the library budget. If some of overhead money ends up in
library budgets, this is not through a direct path. Even at the
government level, money for university budgets does notalways
come from the same ministries. For example, in Canada, research
grants come from research councils that report to Industry Canada
- a Federal ministry. University budgets, on the other hand,
(including libraries) come from ministries of education that
belong to provincial governments.

In France, libraries report to the ministry of culture while
universities report to some variation of the education nationale.
Local agreements, campus by campus, allow some degree of
coordination between the libraries and the universities, but it
is rarely perfect and many research units prefer to build their
own documentation centre. There again, various sources of money
are involved. And although it is all public money, it does not
come from one single source.

Yes, a "joined-up" approach would be more rational, but many
obstacles lie in the path of this vision and these obstacles are
country-specific.

As a result, no one can make a general, sweepingg, statement that
gold OA would remove money from research. It all depends on how
the money is parcelled out.

Jean-Claude Guedon

Le jeudi 17 mai 2007 a 18:27 -0400, Velterop, Jan, Springer UK,
wrote:

> I'm still puzzled. The library budget money come from where?
> Possibly from the same sources as grant money? Possibly from
> 'overheads' taken off grants by the institutions?
>
> Isn't it time for some joined-up approach?
>
> Jan Velterop
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Rick Anderson
> Sent: Wed 5/16/2007 11:40 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: RE: Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Critique of PRC Study
>
>> While I can agree with much of what Rick Anderson says here,
>> his last sentence is puzzling. As one of the serious problems
>> of Gold OA he quotes "the significant amount of money that a
>> widespread Gold OA solution would redirect from needed
>> research."
>>
>> How so? Why would publishing become more expensive when the
>> way to sustain it changes? If one thinks that Gold OA would
>> redirect a significant amount of money away from needed
>> research, what about subscriptions? Don't subscriptions do the
>> same? Doesn't any money that sustains journals?
>
> The money that currently supports commercial journals comes
> from library budgets and from individual subscribers, not from
> granting agencies.  If all of the expensive journals to which
> my library subscribes were suddenly to move to an author-funded
> OA publishing model (and therefore become freely available to
> the public), the most likely scenario is that my institution
> would (quite rationally) drastically cut the library budget.
> The savings would be redirected to other areas of the
> university where they are sorely needed, and authors would
> write their publication costs into their grant proposals.
> Money from granting agencies that would have supported research
> will thereby end up subsidizing free public access to the
> research results.
>
> Is that a good thing or a bad thing?  It depends: will the
> general public benefit more from universal free access to a
> smaller amount of research or from toll-based access to more
> research?  The answer may vary -- but there's no way that
> redirecting research funds towards publication can fail to
> reduce the amount of research done.
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
> rickand@unr.edu