On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 12:24 AM, Arthur Sale <a...@ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> Christian Gutknecht <christian.gutkne...@bluewin.ch> wrote: > > 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 outdated model.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. > > 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). > > Let me make sure I understand this, Arthur: Are you saying UTas has > cancelled all journal subscriptions, and has just just pay per view? > > *[ahjs] Of course not. That would be the height of stupidity until open > access is 100%. * > That seems to be your answer to the question raised by Christian. *But it has enabled us to reduce our subscriptions significantly to those > that are economically justifiable, and to measure this against access > rates. Freed up money can be used for pay per view, and the economics > actually do stack up, Stevan. Nobody reads paper journals any more. For one > thing by the time they get to Tasmania they are obsolete.* > My own campaign for OA began, in 1998 with ritually repeating "subscription/license/PPV" to distinguish the hydra-headed forms of "toll access" from (what eventually became) "OA," meaning the opposite: "toll-free access." Eventually, to simplify, "subscriptions" became the shortened portmanteau for "subscription/license/PPV." If, in the 1990's, it had turned out that the growing institutional library budget crisis that prevented institutions from being able to afford toll-access to all (or most, or much, or enough) of the research their users needed could be solved by simply shifting subscription tolls and license tolls by PPV tolls, I rather doubt that that the subsequent decades of quest for OA (toll-free access) would have ensued. Perhaps it was all just a big miscalculation (or failure to do the right calculation)? (I must say that I rather doubt it, but I certainly have not done the calculations.) I would add, though, that not only has reading journals on paper become obsolete in the online era, but so has the idea of waiting days for PPV access instead of just clicking. Stevan Harnad
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