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

Dear Rick Anderson,

Thank you for your thoughtful answer to my question: "Why would the author have to fund OA publishing?" I agree that the question of who should pay is a difficult one. However, I am interested in learning more about the different proposed answers and their rationale. Perhaps an author-pays model is the only one that works with OA and peer reviewing, but it seems to me that a much more creative solutions to this problem might exist.

Another question, and this can be for everyone and not just Rick Anderson, if anyone feels inclined to discuss it, is, why is it so expensive to publish research? Is most of the money being spent on promotion of the journal title? Administrating those who peer review articles (it is my understanding that peer reviewers themselves often do so for free)? The cost of printing the articles on paper? The cost of keeping the article in a main FTP server? None of these things (in my mind) quite add up to the amounts that I have seen quoted ($1,500-2,000 or more per article).

Thanks to everyone on the list for helping to educate me about this topic. I really enjoy all the different points that people bring up here.

April Younglove
Technical Services Specialist
Linfield College Library, Portland Campus
ayoungl@linfield.edu

--On Sunday, May 20, 2007 7:36 PM -0400 Rick Anderson <rickand@unr.edu>
wrote:

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