RE: University of Maryland's Open Access Deliberations

[<jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

It is not because something is not quantifiable that it does not 
exist. Limiting one's vision to the quantifiable must create a 
very restricted, not to say impoverished, vision of human 
activities indeed. There is a famous passage in Saint Exupery's 
Little Prince about this point.

How do you quantify your love for your significant other? By 
calculating the energy for each caress, counting the number of 
caresses and then calculating the amount of oil needed to produce 
this energy at the current price? Good luck in your 
relationship...

To put it yet another way, value for civilization does not limit 
itself to economic value. If kids somewhere are touched because 
they understand a poem better through a piece of literary 
criticism, and if that kid's life is then to be changed in subtle 
and beautiful ways because of that reading, I believe that 
constitutes value for civilization and I believe no price can be 
assigned to it. But if that reading prevents this kid later to 
turn into a suicide bomber, that piece of literary criticism 
could have the value of the Twin Towers.

Number fetishists and market fundamentalists, as we can see all 
around us, are destroying a lot of value all around us. Value 
quantified in the trillions. How inspiring!

jean-claude Guedon


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Thu 4/30/2009 8:01 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: University of Maryland's Open Access Deliberations

How does one even begin to measure the "economic value" of OA 
for, say, a work of literary criticism or a monograph on Hume's 
philosophy? We scholarly publishers would dearly like to believe 
that spreading our specialized content freely worldwide would be 
a benefit to civilization, but this is an article of faith for 
us, not something we have any easy way of quantifying 
economically.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>More work needs to be done (and is being planned) on the costs
>and benefits for institutions of all sizes from the various
>scholarly publishing opportunities now available, but there is no
>indication from existing work that OA publishing will not prove
>to be good value. One important element in any such model is that
>the economic value of benefits is included, not only a simplistic
>comparison of existing library expenditure on journals with the
>cost of OA publication charges.
>
>Fred Friend
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Phil Davis" <pmd8@cornell.edu>
>To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
>Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 2:04 AM
>Subject: Re: University of Marlyland's Open Access Deliberations
>
>>  Okerson, Ann wrote:
>>
>>>  [MOD NOTE:  Surely one of the less compelling reasons for
>>>  having authors publish in OA journals is that academic
>>>  libraries, at least in the western world, would save money on
>>>  subscription prices?  Even if such a thing were known to be
>>>  true?  Is it time that we base our arguments on something other
>>>  than the dated rhetoric of the "journals pricing crisis?"]