Gold OA funds as generalised "subvention funds"?

["Richard Poynder" <richard.poynder@gmail.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito
Sent: 05 June 2010 01:05
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Interview w/Sarah Pritchard, Univ. librarian, Northwestern U.

Joe Esposito wrote:

Make the text free online and sell the print version?  How long 
will that tactic last?  Is no one in the OA world paying 
attention to what is happening with the Amazon Kindle, the Apple 
iPad, and even the Barnes & Noble Nook?  And the gorilla has not 
yet entered the market: Google Editions, due probably in July. 
Book professionals are now forecasting that in five years, 25% of 
the book market will be electronic. How can anyone expect to sell 
print under these circumstances?  Is the academy the only segment 
of the society that does NOT believe that books are going 
digital?

Please, test this for yourself. Buy an iPad, put 3-4 books on it, 
and then tell me what this will do to your future consumption of 
print.

Whatever the virtues of OA, financing it through anticipated 
print sales is not a long-term strategy.

***

Richard Poynder Replies:

Personally I remain agnostic on this issue.

But perhaps a more salient point made by Sarah Pritchard in the 
Information Today interview is that university presses - 
particularly those focused on the humanities - invariably have to 
be subsidised in order to be able to carry on publishing. In this 
regard Sarah Pritchard makes an interesting suggestion about the 
use of the so-called Gold OA funds that are being created at a 
growing number of universities 
(http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_journal_funds).

Her suggestion is that these funds should be used not just to 
support author-pays OA, but as more generalised "subvention 
funds". As she puts it, "[T]he model I see is one in which you 
have a pool of money that can be considered research funds. These 
funds might be used for page charges in a commercial subscription 
journal, they might be used as a subvention for a university 
press, or they might be used to pay OA charges. All three of 
those things are basically undergirding the same process: getting 
the material out there."

http://www.infotoday.com/it/jun10/Poynder.shtml

Richard Poynder