On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 1:02 AM, Eric F. Van de Velde <eric.f.vandeve...@gmail.com> wrote: > > [One] may disagree with the argument for IRs as a way to combat rising > journal prices. However, it is definitely an argument that has been used, > misguided or not...
IRs (if and when filled by mandating Green OA) can eventually have an effect on journal prices too (see abstract below). But first they have to be filled by mandating Green OA. > > IRs are intricately linked to journals in the minds of researchers, academic > administrators, and publishers. I think you are finding out how difficult it > is to (arch)evangilize a disconnect between the two. Yes it is devilishly difficult and is taking an unspeakably long time. But no matter how intricately things may seem linked in people's minds, it's still essential to sort out the real causality, in place of the imagined one. Mandating Green OA will definitely, directly solve the access problem. The connection to the affordability problem is much more subtle, indirect, and hypothetical: Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15753/ ABSTRACT: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.
