On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, David Goodman wrote: > The fastest solution will be for a library to preferentially use > its money to help pay author fees, leaving the few most used > subscriptions and relying on resource sharing for the others. The > membership pricing dilemma is solved by paying by the article, just > as the subscription dilemma is. The greater availability of funding > in this manner will soon induce the switch. While we libraries act > like a captive market, we are prisoners along with the publishers.
The "membership" dilemma is most definitely not solved by "paying by the article," nor by "leaving the few most used subscriptions and relying on resource sharing for the others." But, as I have no stake at all in experiments between libraries and publishers on direct conversion to paid Gold OA (except inasmuch as they might distract from or delay the momentum toward the adoption of Green OA mandates), I will merely repeat why "just doing it" is not the solution to the dilemma: (1) An individual institution's annual individual-journal subscription-renewal commitments are based on actual annual journal (or article) usage and needs on the part of institutional users (real and perceived). (2) An individual institution's annual individual-journal "membership" renewal commitments are not (because an individual institution's authors do not submit an annual quota of papers to an individual journal, nor do that journal's peer-reviewers accept an annual quota of papers from that institution). (3) Though less obvious, this is equally true for "big-deal" fleets of journals from a single publisher, and corresponding annual institutional fleet submissions and acceptances. (4) So the conversion from subscriptions to "memberships" does not scale -- neither individual-journal by journal nor individual-institution by institutions, nor even fleet by fleet. (5) Although Prisoners' Dilemmas are already notoriously difficult to resolve pair-wise, it is even less likely that they will be simultaneously resolved by multiple publisher/institution pairs. (6) But even if all institutions should agree with all publishers to convert all annual subscriptions to annual "memberships" this year, there is still the question of whether the divergences between subscriptions and "memberships" in (1) - (4) above would sustain the membership commitments in subsequent years, rather than leading to institutional defection and the journal's inability to make ends meet. (This is in fact the chief deterrent to immediate conversion from the publishers' point of view: institutional libraries can afford not to worry about their own likelihood of defecting next year!) This is the kind of second-guessing of what the other Prisoner will do that makes it into a Prisoners' Dilemma. <counterspeculation> My own view is that of course there will eventually be a universal conversion to Gold, but not on the basis of annual institutional "membership" quotas, analogous to and inherited from annual institutional subscription quotas. That way leads only to an Escherian "impossible figure," as described above. Stable Gold OA fees will be levied, independently, on the individual articles submitted and published, not on annual institutional quotas, analogous to and derived from annual institutional subscriptions. But those individual, independent author-fees will nevertheless be paid for out of the subscription cancellation savings of the author's institution. Those cancellations will be driven by mandated Green OA, which will at first grow anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal, hence without generating cancellations; but eventually, as it approaches 100% Green OA universally, across all fields, institutions and journals, cancellation pressure from the availability of Green OA will first cause journal downsizing and cost-cutting, phasing out the obsolete pre-OA inessential (paper edition, publisher's PDF, access provision, archiving). The only essential journal function that will be left then will be the service of peer review, certified by the journal's name and track-record for quality standards. It is only if and when Green-OA-induced cancellations, having forced the downsizing to the essentials, go on to make subscriptions unsustainable as a way of making ends meet (even when downsized to just peer review alone), that there will be a conversion to Gold OA, with those self-same annual institutional cancellation savings themselves serving as the source from which to pay for the institution's Gold OA costs (per article: no "memberships"). And (most important), the per-article fee for that Gold OA will be much lower than what is being proposed and charged today (in the form of Gold OA fees, or hybrid Gold OA fees, or "membership" fees), because journals will have downsized, under growing pressure from Green OA growth, to being merely peer-review service providers/certifiers: Their current access-provision functions will all be gone -- offloaded onto the distributed worldwide network of Green OA Institutional Repositories. No more paper edition or PDFs to provide, or be paid for. Fleets of journals under the same publisher (if they still exist) will only exist in order to benefit from the economies of scale, in implementing peer review across multiple journals. </counterspeculation> Is there a shortcut? an alternative to the hypothetical Green-OA-mediated long-term process and outcome I have just described? Can there be a direct transition to Gold OA today, by converting institutional subscriptions into institutional "memberships", without the mediation of Green OA mandates, Green OA, cancellation pressure from Green OA, and downsizing? Publishers and Institutional Libraries are certainly welcome to try! OA is OA, whether 100% Green OA or 100% Gold OA. And there is certainly no turning back from 100% Gold OA, from one year to the next, any more than there is from 100% Green OA! But, as I said, this is a Prisoners' Dilemma. David Goodman has singled out one strategy that the Institutional Library (Prisoner A) might choose, if the deal David contemplates were offered by the Journal Publisher (Prisoner B). It remains only to see how the other Prisoners decide to play -- first this year, and then next... Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan. 99-106. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/01/greenroad.html Stevan Harnad