Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

The May edition of SPARC enews features this story about
UC-Berkeley's initiative to help faculty pay open access fees:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/articles/memberprofile-berkeley.shtml.
The story also reports on earlier efforts along these lines by the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of
Wisconsin at Madison.

My question about these initiatives is: does anybody really expect
this kind of promotion of open access to change the landscape of STM
publishing, now dominated by commercial publishers? As I understand
them, these programs do not limit the payment of fees to fully open
access journals or to journals operated by non-profit organizations.
So, in theory, commercial STM publishers could simply substitute such
fees for subscription monies they now earn, without in any way
affecting their profit margins. Indeed, unless they were to decrease
their subscription prices in some direct proportion to the fees
received to pay for selective OA (as, for example, Oxford University
Press is doing), their overall profits would even increase more.

How does this change the overall economics of STM journal publishing?
It does, of course, make more content more widely accessible to users
wherever an Internet connection is available, but it seems to me that
it doesn't change one whit the burden on universities for sustaining
the system of STM publishing. It merely substitutes OA fees for
subscriptions. Is this any more sustainable long term than the
current model?  The sums provided by these programs are also
pitifully small in comparison with the real costs of publishing
articles (about which there has been a lively debate on another
thread on this listserv) and the number of faculty who have
publishing needs at UC and these other campuses.