Dear Rick, I generally place much more emphasis on "gold" OA Journals than Stevan does. Even I do not see how the percentage of journals that were OA Journals could initially increase by more than 5% to 10% each year, including both the change in existing journals and the replacement of conventional journals by new OA journals. What would be needed to go faster would be generalized academic consensus on how to transfer the necessary funds. I myself think such a transfer would not be that difficult to implement, but we are not dealing with one person, but with all the universities, research institutes, and funding bodies world-wide. I think such agreement most unlikely, given the nature of these institutions, however much I wish it otherwise.
It is possible that it might be publishers who would initiate the conversion, and might therefore drive it faster. Considering that the publishers the most open to the idea regard a change of one single journal a year as a major event, I think rapid progress even less likely, however much I wish it otherwise. I think such a conversion will eventually be necessary, because I do not see how the cost spiral of conventionally-paid journals can be avoided, and experience shows the yet smaller likelihood of libraries receiving sufficient funding to cope. This spiral had been present in the past without green OA, and will continue in the future, regardless of green OA. All that I ask of green OA is that it keep general free access open until we can do the whole system better. As I said, Stevan obviously thinks more of green OA than just that. But we do not have to agree about the best future direction to agree that the best present direction -- indeed the only practical present direction -- for us to have OA is to get the fundamentally rather modest change to green accomplished now -- it's almost the end of 2004, so I will suggest we aim at 100% by the end of 2005. Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University dgood...@liu.edu -----Original Message----- From: American Scientist Open Access Forum on behalf of Stevan Harnad Sent: Tue 12/14/2004 9:37 PM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Rick Anderson wrote: > My question remains: do we want to encourage the development of Gold journals? > If not, if the existence of Gold journals doesn't really matter, then I guess > there's not an issue in my mind. Yes, we should continue to encourage the development of Gold journals. As one of the people who originally proposed the author-institution cost-recovery model already a decade ago Harnad, S. (1995) Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis? Serials Review 21(1) 70-72 (Reprinted in Managing Information 2(3) 1995) http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001691/00/harnad95.quo.vadis.html I can hardly be described as discouraging Gold journals! But I definitely discourage the vastly disproportionate emphasis they are getting today. ... Stevan Harnad