Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Sandy,

In your list of possible sources for OA fees, you left out 
corporate sponsorship, as in "This article brought to you by the 
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company."  The trouble with free is that it 
potentially turns all communications into a third-party marketing 
mechanism.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandy Thatcher" <sgt3@psu.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 2:54 PM
Subject: Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

> Anthony can speak for himself, but I will borrow a page from 
> his notebook to make a few observations myself.
>
> In his latest SOAN newsletter Peter Suber borrows an 
> epistemological argument from John Stuart Mill to make the case 
> that OA will help "take the friction out of the system as far 
> as we can." I'm not sure he has provided a correct 
> interpretation of Mill (who was more meritocratic and elitist 
> than Peter makes him out to be), but that is an argument for 
> another occasion. Here, in responding to Ahmed, I would observe 
> that OA may remove some friction from some parts of the system 
> while introducing it elsewhere.
>
> Let's assume that there are five possibilities for paying OA 
> fees: 1) from the author's own pocket; 2) from the author's 
> department; 3) from some central administration source; 4) from 
> the library's savings on subscriptions reallocated to pay fees; 
> and 5) from external grant funding, whether foundation or 
> government.
>
> I won't comment about 4 and 5 here other than to mention that, 
> for 4, there is no assurance that such savings would be 
> redirected to subsidizing OA rather than, say, plowing it into 
> digitization projects (which seem to be endless in number) or 
> (as university presses would prefer) buying more monographs and 
> that, for 5, such funding is rarely available for publishing in 
> the humanities and not so available for social sciences either 
> as it is for the sciences.
>
> For 1, we reintroduce into the system all the inequities that 
> exist between rich and poor schools (and better and less well 
> paid faculty) and enhance the role of extraneous factors (such 
> as the patronage that might come for a faculty member married 
> to a wealthy heiress). Faculty who can afford fees will be 
> better able to publish more articles in more prestigious (hence 
> more expensive) journals. How does that serve the goal of 
> leveling the playing field of publishing?
>
> For 2 and 3, the differences between rich and poor schools will 
> also be heightened. E.g., one way richer schools now compete 
> with each other is to offer packages to new hires up front of a 
> set amount to pay for a variety of research activities, from 
> attending conferences, traveling to do field research, all the 
> way to paying fees to publishers. The faculty at richer schools 
> will get bigger packages enabling them to pay more and higher 
> fees. But such packages are awarded in advance of proof of 
> productivity, so some faculty will use up their funds in being 
> very productive while others will not because they don't prove 
> to be as productive. One wonders what becomes of such unused 
> funds, but in any event they won;t help pay for the system, 
> whereas faculty at poorer schools who might turn out to be 
> highly productive will be deprived of the opportunity to 
> publish as much as they might otherwise be able to do. Thus, 
> Gold OA results overall in a reduction of productivity, not an 
> enhancement of it.
>
> Other schools will decide to use a system whereby faculty have 
> to apply each time they want a grant to pay a publishing fee, 
> either to a department or to a central administrative unit. 
> This will create all sorts of extra costs in running the 
> bureaucracy necessary to make all the decisions, and it will 
> undoubtedly lead to a lot of politicking and influence-peddling 
> as faculty compete for the limited resources to pay OA fees. 
> (How will the pot be divided among the sciences, social 
> sciences, and humanities, for instance?)  They will be thus 
> constrained in their freedom to publish where they would 
> prefer, and there may be a cost to journals, too, in having 
> peer-reviewed some articles whose authors are not then 
> successful in raising the funds from their university sources 
> to pay the fees. Will OA advocates have the honesty to tally up 
> these additional administrative costs in their cost/benefit 
> comparisons with the current system?
>
> So, while I am happy to agree with Ahmed that the current 
> system leaves much to be desired, I am far from convinced, as 
> he is, that "Gold OA publishing will indeed lower the total 
> cost of the scholarly journal communication system." Costs may 
> be saved in one area only to reappear in another. I hope those 
> who talk about "efficiency" will know where to look to identify 
> all the new costs as well as the savings.
>
> P.S. And don't forget, as Anthony and others have often 
> mentioned, that any Gold OA (or Green OA) system removes the 
> entire commercial sector from contributing much to the costs of 
> supporting the publication system, beyond fees that their 
> employees who wish to publish are required to pay (unless fee 
> discrimination is introduced between the profit and nonprofit 
> sectors to make up the difference). More of those costs, even 
> if they turn out to be lower overall (as I question), will have 
> to be absorbed by universities.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press