Re: practical solution

[Janellyn P Kleiner <jkleiner@lsu.edu>]

Question: Why shouldn't money come from academic departments to 
pay publishing fees? Author fees are not new. They've been around 
for decades and to my knowledge, were never paid by libraries. 
It's only recently, that libraries have been brought into 
subsidizing author fees and only a limited number of libraries 
have agreed to do that. With the rising costs of these fees, how 
many libraries continue that funding is questionable. 
Historically, publication fees have been paid by researchers' 
grants or by their academic departments since publishing is an 
integral part of the promotion and tenure process. Libraries have 
the expense of selecting, housing, binding or providing 
electronic access, to publications. For the most part, libraries 
have not been in the publishing business and lack the expertise 
to have a substantial role in that endeavor.

Though a central publishing organization ideally sounds good, I 
don't think that it's workable. I cannot visualize libraries 
seeing paying author fees as their basic mission. Additionally, 
such an organization would have to be more complex requiring 
selling the concept, organizing the organization, staffing it, 
evaluating which fees would be supported and which 
wouldn't........in other words, you'd have a centralized, funded 
peer group.  And you'd have to have a staff of fund raisers to 
ensure that substantial funding was available. You'd also need a 
staff of educated "peers" to determine which publications were 
worthy of funding because it's a given that all would not be top 
quality. And, you need a way to archive everything publishable. 
Start-up costs would be enormous.

It's only my opinion but I think it's more likely that publishing 
will evolve into a combination of OA journals and commercial 
journals with some society journals in the mix. OA is an 
honorable concept and one I would like to see come to fruition. 
Information, particularly when funded by governmental agencies, 
should be available to all at no added cost. I've been an editor, 
a reviewer, an author, and winner of national publishing awards. 
I'm still waiting to see the added value that commercial 
publishers always insist is present. What is added is strictly 
mechanical or involved with distribution. In today's electronic 
age, those functions can be carried out efficiently and 
inexpensively.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's an easy path or solution to 
achieving the goal of total open access. There are tremendous 
profits made in the scholarly publishing arena and those 
publishers are going to fight to maintain their dominance. That's 
their mission and their job.  With new OA journals, some may be 
funded by foundations and I think that's a reasonable option. 
Others may be able to thrive on author fees. I think it's likely 
that Internet families of researchers will cluster together -- 
some already have. By "families" I mean researchers with common 
interests who publish online within that circle. The evolution 
has already begun. Researchers and the marketplace will determine 
the end result.

Jane Kleiner
Associate Dean of Libraries for Collection Services
The LSU Libraries
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
E-Mail: jkleiner@lsu.edu