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

["Velterop, Jan, Springer UK" <Jan.Velterop@springer.com>]

That's the trouble with money. If you spend it on one thing, you 
can't spend it on another. If you spend it on one thing, you 
'remove' it from funds for other things.

But money spent on 'gold' OA is not 'removed' from research, 
particularly not if you understand and accept that formally 
publishing the re sults is integral to doing research. Then 
payment for 'gold' OA is just part of the necessary spending of 
the money on research. If you do n't accept that formally 
publishing results is integral to doing research, just publish 
them informally on the web then, without involving journals, 
publishers -- or costs.

Formal, peer-reviewed publishing carries costs and has to be paid 
for. Either directly, with money, ensuring open access ('gold' 
OA), or i ndirectly, by transferring copyright (but then 
accepting that publisher must be able to monetise that copyright 
in order to cover their co sts by selling subscriptions -- and, 
as it is a cost-related system, that prices may be inversely 
proportional to subscription levels).

Jan Velterop


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Rick 
Anderson
Sent: Mon 5/21/2007 1:36 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Critique 
of PRC Study

> 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.

Gold OA will remove money from research to the exact degree that 
it causes funding to be redirected from the support of research 
to the support of publication and distribution.  A dollar can 
either support a dollar's worth of the former or a dollar's worth 
of the latter -- no matter how you parcel it out, it's still only 
a dollar.

And:

> Why would the author have to fund OA publishing?  Why wouldn't
> the library or the University fund the publishing?

An "author-funded" model doesn't actually assume that, in most 
cases, the author will pay out of her own pocket.  The assumption 
is that the author will usually get the money from someplace 
else, either from a granting agency or from her institution. The 
question -- and it's a difficult one -- is whether such an 
arrangement would result in a net gain or a net loss in benefit 
to the scholarly community and the world at large.

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