Charles
To be fair, I think if you look back on the threads on this list serve and
LibLicense you will see that Peter Banks has always been quite clear both
when he was in charge of the publishing program at the American Diabetes
Association (ADA) and more recently as a consultant, that Gold OA was not in
his view a sustainable model and not as good a model as the subscription
based approach, and he has been clear why he holds that view.
And at the risk of putting words in his mouth, that self archiving presents
a threat to the revenue streams and profitability or publishers, or in the
case of the non-profit society publishers their surplus revenues.
And before anyone further seeks to characterise Peter as a chiselling
profiteer and spokesperson for the large commercial publishers, they might
want to look at the subscription price list for individuals, members and
institutions of the ADA. For Diabetes, their main scholarly journal (2000+
pages per annum) this is from a low of $175 for members, $350 for
individuals, $700 for institutions and $1500 for a site licence.
http://www.diabetesjournals.org/subscriptions/cost.shtml
An institutional site licence to Diabetes which can serve of course multiple
researchers is therefore about the cost of a 2 year warranty extension on my
car.
I believe, and I think this view is shared by many people who have inhabited
the world of libraries and scholarly publishing for any significant period
think that Gold OA represents a threat to profit levels and Green OA
represent a threat to revenues and profit levels.
That^Òs why the more interesting question is how any non-subscription based
scholarly publishing endeavour gets paid for and who pays for it.
You can argue till you are blue in the face about the merits of OA but if
you want it to happen then you need to go and make it happen; BioMedCentral,
Hidawi and PLOS are all trying to make it happen and turn it into a business
or in the case of PLOS perhaps a charitable endeavour. They therefore offer
a way forward that preserves many of the traditional virtues of the current
set up, but overcomes the problem of the reader or library needing to pay.
They offer an alternative business model. The market will decide if that
model [or any hybrid model such as those offered by the predominantly
subscription based publishers] is successful or not.
Those who are pro-OA but opposed to author/funder pays for practical or
ideological reasons still need to demonstrate theoretically or practically
(and my preference is for practically) how their model works.
If as it would appear some people think that running a journal can be done
for a total cost of $509 then great, lets see these journals and lets see
researchers submit to them. IE let the market (in this case the researchers)
decide.
Chris Beckett
Director
Scholarly Information Strategies Ltd
Oxford Innovation Centre
Mill St
Oxford
OX1 0JX
T: +44 1865 812058
email: chris_at_scholinfo.com
-----Original Message-----
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG] On
Behalf Of C.Oppenheim
Sent: 30 January 2007 08:40
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Re: PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access: excerpts from article
in Nature Magazine
Mr Banks, please don't patronise me. I wasn't referring to patient education
but to your failure to use statistics. From your reply, it is clear I know
a lot more about the use of statistics than you do. Just be honest and say
what you really think - that OA may well damage the profitability of journal
publishers.
Professor Charles Oppenheim
Head
Department of Information Science
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leics LE11 3TU
Received on Tue Jan 30 2007 - 13:25:30 GMT