Dear all There are many things to comment on,
Let’s start why I see the libraries as the most powerful player in the game, which hopefully become more active in the next years. Actually I think the awareness among researchers for OA has increased a lot, there had be real progress there. Because it takes some time (that hardly anybody has) and courage to go new ways, I can totally understand the conservative attitude of many researchers to stick with what they know (= subscriptions journals) and what is best practice in their field. And let’s be honest in some fields (like dentistry) there are still no serious Gold OA Journals for those who would like to support OA. Nevertheless most researchers are probably in favor of OA and are willing to contribute (like a boycott) as long it’s done in a collective (like faculty, university or a country) and they see a long time benefit. I think there are these very good examples like Gowers, who has asked colleagues at Cambridge if they could do without Elsevier or the many Dutch researchers who would have been willing to leave the editorial boards if the VSNU not had reached an agreement with Elsevier. Unfortunately I’m not aware than in Switzerland anyone has ever really seriously tried something like that. What I see in my country, is that most library directors constantly fail to inform properly their community and the public about the problems of the current system. If you go to the library websites, you will find no alarming sign that that there is something deeply wrong in scholarly communication. Of course if libraries take a stand against the publisher and cancel subscriptions there always will be someone who has a negative feedback. But I really believe if libraries were about to lay out all the facts (and there are so many) and give insights in their struggle with the publishers there would be support for OA from the faculty. We saw that in the Netherlands. As you probably have heard, the VSNU even has hired a professional marketing company, just to inform the researchers and the public about what’s going on in the negoations. Of course solid facts and good communication is a necessity in such a move. Let’s take again the example University of Zurich. They are paying 1.7 Mio USD for Elsevier subscriptions and at the same time there are about 300 papers published with Elsevier. I think everyone except Elsevier agrees, that it’s a absolutely legitimate requirement from Zurich that they want to have their papers published with Elsevier to be hybrid Gold OA and offset the APCs with the subscription costs. And actually that really happened. The University of Zurich requested that option, but Elsevier turned them down with the argument that publishing and subscription are totally different businesses. So what the library should do now, is go to faculty and inform the researchers and the public about this situation and propose to sanction this bad behavior by at least cancelling the subscriptions. But in addition to cancelling subscriptions, the library should stress that with the free money will provide Gold OA funding (this may include hybrid). And that’s the reason why I think researchers won’t be so upset. You take something away indeed, but you give something back. I think many researchers, who are too busy or too cowardly to take action as individual would appreciate this step as it applies to many. Also it will also encourage others to do so as there is no clearer sign for a change than that. Unfortunately that has not been done in this case. The library probably just thought about the tempting 4.5% price increase instead of the usual 6% and silently renewed the 1.7 Mio agreement for 3 years. So the researchers of the University of Zurich had not chance to understand the problems if they were not extraordinary curious and explicitly asked the library about what’s going on. So right now it’s the library, which decides that the money should go to Elsevier and not to a publisher neutral Gold OA fund. So the library has indeed a certain power. Regarding costs of the alternative with document delivery and pay-per-view I don’t have empirical evidence. But again let’s take the University of Zurich as an example. Let’s say they cancel the 1.7 Mio Big Deal with Elsevier. If you then provide the 800k for Gold OA then you still have left 900k USD for document delivery or pay per view. So assuming the 30$ paper that would be 30’000 papers for 5136 professors and academic staff + 25’000 students. That's almost 10% what Elsevier publishes a year (350k papers). Actually I have not access to data about the usage of journals at the University of Zurich, but I’ve been told by librarians that usually only a third of what they buy with Big Deals is used. But not every download within a subscription model would be converted to a download with pay-per-view or document delivery. I think „ask a colleague“ or „ask the author“ or use the IR, Website of the colleague will kick in very strong. I think we don’t have to wait longer to do that. Also the awareness of the problem will now get down to every researcher which is one of the main benefit of this scenario. Libraries also should get aware that the reading and publishing behavior is changing very fast and libraries are lagging behind with shifting money from subscriptions to Gold OA. The problem there is that libraries usually just measure the usage of their subscription journals, but they are absolutely blind for what’s going on with OA journals (and there’s a lot going on as we know from Heather). At the University of Bern, when counter data was explicitly asked from PLOS, it was found that Plos One was THE most read journal on the whole campus. Nevertheless the library of the University of Bern pays 930k EUR to Elsevier subscriptions but ZERO for Gold OA funding. I hope with my FOI requests (those for the University of Geneva and University of Basel are still pending at local courts) and disclosing the payment, I’ve been able to shift a public focus to this problem. And it doesn’t look so bad. I’ve been told the ministry for research in Switzerland has recently requested the universities to come up with a plan for more engagement for OA. I think the Dutch approach was/really inspiring. Best regards Christian > Am 04.01.2016 um 23:19 schrieb Arthur Sale <a...@ozemail.com.au>: > > I don’t have access to the raw data now apart from knowing that we fulfill > 13,000+ requests a year, but the University of Tasmania has operated a free > unlimited-quantity service for 15 years, funded pay-per-view centrally (ie in > replacement for subscriptions). It is very much used, and regarded as a > keystone of library research support. It simply is not true that academics > are devoted to instant access, and they are prepared to wait a day or two to > read the papers they think are relevant. Of course they use alert services, > metadata, etc in making the judgment, but if they think a paper is worth > reading in full (it may not be after they have read it but nobody cares) they > have no hesitation in using the university’s service. The economics do stack > up, and I am proud to have introduced it in about 1998. > See http://www.utas.edu.au/library/research/document-delivery > <http://www.utas.edu.au/library/research/document-delivery> and > http://www.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/65611/Document-Delivery-Service-online-guide-v10.7.12.pdf > > <http://www.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/65611/Document-Delivery-Service-online-guide-v10.7.12.pdf>. > > For context, the University is in the top ten Australian universities for > research, and in student size modest (27,000 students, 18% of whom are from > outside Australia). > If someone wants to mine the data, contact the University Librarian. > > Arthur Sale > University of Tasmania, Australia > > From: goal-boun...@eprints.org <mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> > [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org <mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>] On Behalf > Of Stevan Harnad > Sent: Tuesday, 5 January 2016 02:24 AM > To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) > Subject: [GOAL] Re: Quo vadere? > > On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Christian Gutknecht > <christian.gutkne...@bluewin.ch <mailto:christian.gutkne...@bluewin.ch>> > wrote: >> Stevan, >> > [ahjs] … >> >> But I really like the idea to let researchers feel that subscription is an >> outdated model. And an easy way to do that without upsetting them too much, >> is to cancel subscriptions and get rid of the Big Deals. With the free money >> the library then can create two kind of funds: One is the Gold OA fund >> (incl. hybrid options but with a cap) and one is the fund for costs >> resulting getting access to documents that are not longer available via >> subscription (like costs for pay-per-view, document delivery, individual >> subscription of a really important journal).. Because librarians constantly >> overestimate the importance of their subscriptions and especially the Big >> Deals where they buy/rent a lot of stuff that is never used by their >> community. I think most libraries would find out that researchers would get >> along quite well with this option > > Christian, I strongly suggest that you look into the actual costs of such a > proposal (replacing subscriptions by pay-to-view costs, per paper). > > We are in the online era, when scholars are accustomed to reaching content > immediately with one click, and browsing it to see whether it's even worth > reading. A scholar may look at dozens of papers a day this way. That's what > they do with their institutional licensed content. You are imagining (without > any data at all) that the cost of doing this via pay-per-view, at the usual > $30 or so per paper, would amount to less cost for an institution than its > current licensing costs. > > Please repeat this proposal once you have done the arithmetic and have the > evidence. (It won't be enough to find out the license costs and the > pay-per-view costs. You will also have to monitor the daily usage, per > discipline, of a sufficient representative sample of researchers. > Until then, subscription cancellation is not an option for institutions > today. (But with universal immediate-deposit > <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/> > it will be.) > >> As Thomas mentioned it’s really easy these days to get to the papers by >> simply asking the author. Also Researchgate and academia.edu >> <http://academia.edu/> close the gap where IRs fail to provide access. > > The ease and immediacy of online access to which institutional authors are > now accustomed is for licensed (+ OA) content. Find the actual user data for > unlicensed, non-OA content. And prepare to discover that copy-requests -- for > which you have expressed pessimism when they are Button-based -- may turn out > to be much less immediate or reliable if they must be mediated by email > address search and waiting to see whether the author responds then when they > are requested. With immediate deposit and the Button, the request is just one > click for the user and one for the author... > > [ahjs] … > _______________________________________________ > GOAL mailing list > GOAL@eprints.org <mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> > http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal > <http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal>
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