Re: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Gold OA in theory sounds nice, but in practice will it work? As a 
press director who is constantly scrambling to find subsidies for 
individual book titles, I'm not optimistic about universities 
providing a pot of money that, year in and year out, will be 
available to fund Gold OA journal publishing. Nor is this a role 
that most foundations, a few like Wellcome excepted, seem ready 
to undertake.

Indeed, for one discipline, art history, the subsidy sources for 
books have all but disappeared over the past year. Getty, once a 
major funder, announced last June that it would no longer provide 
book subsidies at all.  The Kress Foundation, another major 
source, is no longer providing subsidies directly to publishers, 
has cut back its funding in any case, and is asking some 
scholarly associations to serve as a conduit, where those 
association seem to have the flexibility to use the money to fund 
research and other activities besides publication.

The College Art Association just announced that it was suspending 
book subsidies through its Meiss Fund for 2009-2010 in the face 
of severe budget problems.  The future of art book publishing, 
where most books require subsidies to be published, is now in 
serious jeopardy. Several of the former major players, like the 
presses at Cambridge and Princeton, have either abandoned the 
field altogether or cut way back on their output. There are only 
a few of us serious scholarly art book publishers left in the 
business, and this blow to our major sources of subsidies 
threatens the entire discipline with a bookless future.

In light of what is happening in just this one field, does anyone 
seriously believe that it will be possible to build and sustain a 
Gold OA publishing model in the humanities for journals?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>I was also one of those who in the late 1990s supported the Big
>Deal development, in the UK through the Pilot Site Licence
>Initiative and its successor NESLI, now NESLi2, and I agree with
>Anthony that at the time it looked like a win/win/win situation.
>To many people it looks very different now. I do not want to get
>into a blame situation on the reasons why it looks so different,
>but rather point to the way the WWW and other technical
>developments have transformed the opportunities open to all
>stakeholders since the Big Deal was conceived. Academic research
>is now conducted in ways which are very different from the late
>1990s, libraries are becoming electronic resource centres for far
>more than purchased or licensed content, and reader expectations
>have blossomed into new forms of content use like text-mining or
>data-mining.
>
>So where do we go from here? Any new model has to meet new
>expectations and opportunities, which for librarians and
>publishers means moving away from a silo mentality. It must be
>sustainable and affordable, which means a business model to which
>the world-wide academic community can commit. The best option I
>can see developing to meet opportunities and to be both
>sustainable and affordable is the gold OA publication charge
>model, which through bulk purchase could achieve the economies
>promised (but never fully realised) in the Big Deal model and
>also release the advantages of OA to stakeholders. To some gold
>OA bulk purchase may appear a radical solution, but the way
>academic research is developing that model and certain
>stakeholder roles could soon be by-passed by other more
>fundamental changes.
>
>I shall no doubt be criticised for ignoring the potential of
>self-archiving as the way forward, and by others as ignoring the
>complexities of any fundamental change in the world-wide research
>dissemination model. I am not ignoring those factors - they need
>to be examined carefully - but it seems clear that the Big Deal
>has had its day and we need to explore a viable and affordable
>alternative to meet the opportunities and challenges in the new
>environment.
>
>Fred Friend
>JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
>Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
>(N.B. The views expressed are my own and not necessarily those of any
>organization with which I am associated.)