On 15 May 2012, at 19:57, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: > Universities will never collaborate (third law)
So there you have it, the Third Law of Acadynamics. Anybody surprised that private enterprise has stepped into the breach? Another reason why I think that gold CC-BY will win out. PLoS-like, eLife-like, BMC-like, PeerJ-like outfits will prevail, and deliver, with the help of funding bodies, what the scientific community needs. A bit of historical information: the BigDeal, as started in the UK, was originally conceived as a nation-wide deal, top-sliced, with every university and every institution having access to everything that was published. It worked like that for 4 years in the UK, in partnership with HEFCE and covering the material that Academic Press published, and then it fell apart, because universities didn't like the top-slicing, in spite of the fact that a national deal came out cheaper in the aggregate, was easier to contain in terms of price increases (negotiating clout), gave access to every scholar and student, could easily evolve into nation-wide access for which no institutional affiliation was needed at all, and could be rolled out to encompass the material of other publishers. However, it was thwarted by the Third Law of Acadynamics. With all the consequences we have to live with now. The fight for OA is not really one against publishers at all; it is chiefly one against academic inertia. Open access will write libraries out of the equation (what's the point of 'library collections' in an OA web world?), and also institutions. It will be funders who will make OA reality. Funders private and public, who finance the whole scientific enterprise and who realise that OA publishing is part and parcel of doing science itself and therefore of the cost of science. At that point universities don't need to collaborate any longer, and the Third Law of Acadynamics will have lost validity in matters relating to scientific literature. Jan
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