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Re: On Parasitism and Double-Dipping

At 7:25 PM -0400 5/12/08, Stevan Harnad wrote:

And universities will of course use a portion of those windfall
savings to pay the publication costs of their own research output.
I wish I had as much faith as Stevan that the "of course" follows from his preceding argument. The cynic in me says that it is just as likely that universities will use the "windfall savings" to expand their football stadiums!

Maybe universities in Britain act "rationally" in this way to move available funds toward supporting research as a top priority. The history of higher education in the U.S. suggests that this is not always the top priority that probably everyone on this listserv would wish it to be.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

I don't think the position of Ian Russell (Chief Executive, ALPSP) is quite as clear to everyone as Ian himself thinks it is, but I do think we are getting there, and the number of words needed is now quite small:

Dear Ian,

You are looking for an advance guarantee from universities that
mandate OA self-archiving that they will pay publishing costs,
should subscriptions ever collapse. By way of support, you cite the
Wellcome Trust, which makes such a guarantee, now.

Well such a guarantee certainly is not forthcoming from
universities, nor should it be. Wellcome, as a research funder, has
mandated self-archiving *and* offered to pay Gold OA publishing
costs out of some of its research funds, under current conditions,
at current asking prices (when subscriptions certainly have not
collapsed).

Universities are not research funders, they are research fundees,
and research providers. They also subscribe to journals. As such,
they are currently paying for publication costs via subscriptions,
which have not collapsed.

When universities mandate self-archiving, they are mandating the
self-archiving of their *own* (refereed) research output. When they
pay subscriptions, they are buying in the refereed research output
of *other* universities.

If and when subscriptions ever do collapse, what that means is that
universities will no longer be paying subscriptions, and those
annual windfall savings will be available to them to pay the
publication costs of their own refereed research output. And
universities will of course use a portion of those windfall savings
to pay the publication costs of their own research output.

(I say "only a portion of those windfall savings,: because
"publication" will then [i.e., "post-collapse"] mean only peer
review implementation costs, not all of the other products and
services that subscriptions are paying for today: producing and
distributing the print edition, producing and licensing the only PDF
edition, fulfillment, archiving, advertising. The post-collapse
costs of publication -- peer review alone -- will be much lower.)

In other words, there is nothing for universities to guarantee to
pay today, when subscriptions are still sustainable, and still
covering all publishing costs, including peer review. And they
certainly don't yet have any loose change from cancellations to pay
the current asking price for Gold OA.

So let's wait for subscription collapse -- if and when it comes --
to free up the universities' funds to pay the cost of having their
own research output peer-reviewed and certified as such by the
journal's title and track record. Until then, those costs are
covered by existing subscriptions, and the only thing missing is not
fee-guarantees but open access -- which is exactly what university
self-archiving mandates (like Ian Russell's alma mater's,
Southampton's are intended to ensure (but Harvard's mandate is not
one to sneeze at either!)

[To repeat: It is open access to current refereed research that
needs to be ensured, not publishers' revenues, on the current
cost-recovery model and current asking prices. Publishing is a
service to research, not vice versa.]
[SNIP]