Actually, as far as I can recall, the idea of 'hybrid journals' was first proposed by David Prosser of SPARC Europe in 2003, as a way for publishers to move towards 100% conversion to OA David will no doubt say if this is not so Sally Sally Morris South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
_____ From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: 16 December 2013 20:29 To: goal@eprints.org Subject: [GOAL] Re: Jeffrey Beall Needlessly Compromises Credibility of Beall's List Le lundi 16 décembre 2013 à 14:34 +0000, Graham Triggs a écrit : On 14 December 2013 20:53, Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca> wrote: Which terms have been introduced by the publishing industry? The majority of the terms that I see regularly were introduced - or at least claimed to have been - by scholars. Who introduced "hybrid journals"? "who introduced "delayed open access" - an oxymoron if there ever was one? What about Elsevier's "universal access"? etc. etc. The publishing industry has been fairly quick to make use of the variety of terms though - some in attempting to best engage with and understand the needs and desires of the academic community; others to preserve their business models for as long as possible. Fairly quick indeed! :-) [snip (because irrelevant] Profits alone are not a good measure of whether the public purse is being pillaged or not. They are just the difference between revenue and costs. At which point: 1) Publisher revenue does not just come from the public purse - sales to privately funded institutions, personal subscriptions, reprints, advertising... 2) For everything that they do (which may or may not be appropriate), the publishing industry is very, very good at reducing costs. Ultimately, the public purse is not necessarily disadvantaged by engaging with for-profit industries; although it could benefit from ensuring there are competitive markets. You can argue that the publishing industry could stand to reduce it's profits by charging less - but there is no guarantee that an alternative would take less money overall from the public purse. Profits alone begin to indicate where the problem lies, just by comparison between publishers. Enough money comes from the public purse in many countries (Canada, for example, or most European countries) to justify my anger. As for point 2, it is quite laughable. Why does not Elsevier reduce its profit rate then? The answer is that each journal is a small monopoly in itself. And in monopoly situations, what is the incentive to reduce pricing? >From free and low cost access programmes, through APC waivers, and charitable partnerships, the publishing industry does a lot more for developing nations than the picture you are painting. Having looked fairly closely at programmes like HINARI, I beg to differ. The publishing industry is very creative when it comes to growing fig leaves. Is it perfect? No. Could more be done? Probably. Can the industry do it alone? No. It would be a lot cheaper if the industry got out of the way. If you want to see the situation improve, then it's going to take funders and researchers to work with the publishing industry. I would rather see funders support publicly supported efforts such as Scielo or Redalyc in Latin America. The publishing industry does not need yet another subsidy to begin expanding its potential markets. Or you could try and ignore the industry entirely. But simply depositing research in institutional repositories does not necessarily solve developing nation's access problems, and does not necessarily solve their publishing problems. Your last point is correct, at least until now. Laws such as the one recently passed in Argentina may help further. But you are right: in developing nations, the best way is to avoid the industry entirely and develop evaluation methods that are a little more sophisticated than the impact factor misapplied to individuals. Jean-Claude Guédon _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal
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