Heather, my comments are interspersed on two paragraphs of your recent post.
Happy New Year. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia ... [Heather] Libraries. Currently, library subscriptions account for about 80-90% of the financial support for the scholarly publishing system, with 68-73% coming from academic libraries alone. (Ware and Mabe, 2009). I argue that transitioning this economic support from subscriptions to open access is key to a successful transition to open access. Library budgets need not be the only source of support, however they should be one of the main sources of support. Librarians have a lot of experience negotiating terms including pricing for subscriptions which can easily translate into open access negotiations. [Disclosure: this is my day job]. The SCOAP3 project is doing just this, transitioning one sub-discipline from subscriptions to open access. [Arthur] I assume you mean the project SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access in Particle Physics Publishing) discussed in http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/223_elpub2008.content.pdf and http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers/scoap3_09april.shtml. There are a lot of things with the SCOAP acronym. Unfortunately high energy physics does not offer a transferable model for most disciplines, for several reasons. Do you have any experience in your day job of transitioning a discipline or initiating the process? I ask because there is a quite solid move in my university at transitioning from some subscriptions to on-demand acquisition of toll-access articles. Especially in specialized journals. Adding OA publishing fees to such a scheme might be feasible. ... [Heather] One model that might be optimal for reasons of fiscal prudence, which is the approach of N.I.H. and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, I understand, is to allow researchers to use grant funds or some portion thereof for dissemination purposes, without specifying that these be OA article processing fees or if so, how much. This gives the researcher an incentive to look for cost-effective alternatives, to use the remaining funds for other purposes, for example sending grad students to conferences to present on the research. [Disclosure: I'm a grad student, and have many friends who are grad students]. This approach also avoids the possibility of the research funder setting an overly generous trend. [Arthur] Giving researchers one-line freedom over their grants is no solution, because (a) there are very strong competitive needs for these funds, and (b) researchers see journal publication as traditionally free to them. Only people with an institutional perspective see the costs. Separate funding (eg Library, Government, funder) seems to be necessary to persuade researchers to see a level playing field between reader-side and author-side fees. _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
