On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Jan Velterop (BioMed Central) wrote:
> On the issue of spending and money it may be good to point out that even
> if exactly the same amount of money were to be spent on a reverse business
> model (pay for dissemination rather than for access) as is currently
> being spent on subscriptions and access licences in the conventional
> model, the benefits of a reverse model would easily be superior, as it
> would ensure full open access to anyone, anywhere, which the conventional
> model does not. The benefits would be greater for the Have-Nots than for
> the Harvards (to use Stevan Harnad's terminology), but even for the
> Harvards the benefits of open access are substantial.
Jan is quite right about this. To repeat: Even if exactly the
same amount of money were exchanging hands as in the present,
access-toll-based system, that money would still be far better spent from
the author-institution-end, as own-research output costs, rather than
from the author-institution-end, as others'-research buy-in costs --
with everyone's research output thereby becoming openly accessible,
toll-free, to everyone, thereby maximizing its accessibility, visibility,
and usage, and hence also its research impact.
But this has to be put in context too: Since when has this been true,
and why? Only since the online digital access era, and only because
on-line distribution and access is so much more powerful, productive
and ubiquitous than on-paper distribution and access could ever be.
http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001580/index.html
So why don't all journals simply redirect their existing charges to the
right parties, and all problems will be solved, the open-access era
upon us, and everyone far better off then before?
Because there is not necessarily a balance between the providers of
the research output and the users of the research input. An instant
transition could mean windfall savings for some user-institutions and
sizeable new costs for some provider-institutions (the average
charge for publishing an article today being about $2000, summed across
the collective access tolls paid by those institutions who can afford
toll-access).
But, fortunately, that is not all there is to it, for the
online era has not only made it possible to maximize research
access/visibility/usage/impact through open-access, but it has also
made the whole process of peer-reviewed research publication much
less costly, by making many inessentials obsolete: The cost
per paper of the peer-review alone would be only $500. That
leaves a buffer of 75% to balance out any possible inequities
between net provider-institutions and net-user-institutions:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0346.html
> The fact that a reverse, open access, model doesn't have to cost nearly as
> much as the conventional model (for a start, all costs and efforts to keep
> users out could be scrapped), is a welcome side-effect to all but
> conventional publishers, but not the crux of the matter, at least not for
> scientists and scholars.
I again agree: The crux of the matter for scientists and scholars
is that open access is optimal for their research, maximizing itd
access/visibility/usage/impact. But how to get there from
here? Fortunately, researchers don't have to worry about or wait
around for model-changes (or for the founding of new open-access
journals for those fields not lucky enough to have the Biomed
Central Journals already). They need only self-archive their
research output right now, in their own institutional Eprint
Archives. That will guarantee instant open-access -- leaving
the rest of the transition free to proceed at its own pace:
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html#B1
Stevan Harnad
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
or
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess
the Free Online Scholarship Movement:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
the OAI site:
http://www.openarchives.org
and the free OAI institutional archiving software site:
http://www.eprints.org/
Received on Mon Oct 07 2002 - 17:15:58 BST