Journal cancellation rates are currently almost impossible to judge, at least for the big publishers because of the "big deals". The big deal subscriptions mean that many libraries are subscribing either to whole publisher archives/fleets or at least to whole subjects. In those circumstances institutions cannot unsubscribe from individual journals until and unless sufficient journals could be included to drop the price of the remaining necessary journal subscriptions to below the big deal cost.
All the cancellation (because of Green OA) talk is entirely speculative and pretty much impossible to model (because so many other things are also changing at the same time) that we must focus on cutting through the Gordian knot of "transitions to sustainable publishing" by mandating Green OA (Immediate Deposit/Optional Access where necessary) and let the disruptions to publishing take its course as it may. Some argue that publishing and journals are so important to academia that we must be careful not to undermine them. I make the opposite evaluation: journals and peer review are so important to academia that if Green OA (so far as we can tell from some pretty decent evidence quickly achievable by Mandates [and only by mandates]) causes significant disruption to journal publishing viability, that the relevant communities would quickly find a way to ensure the survival of the important avenues of communications by means other than the current subscription model. -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
