RE: Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> Personally, I am skeptical of the idea that external funding 
> agencies will be able or willing to subsidize Open Access 
> journals on a large scale over an extended period of time.

It's also worth asking whether they'd even provide a net benefit 
to society by doing so.  For example, the NIH has an annual 
budget of $28 billion.  If it were to set aside .5% of its budget 
to subsidize publication, that would reduce the amount of money 
available to fund actual research by $140 million.  In return, 
everyone in the world would get free access to publications 
arising from the remaining research -- but would the world as a 
whole benefit more from free access to the publications, or more 
from the $140 million in research that could have been conducted 
if the funding weren't tied up in publication subsidies?

I'm not suggesting that the answer to that question is obvious; 
only that the question is worth asking.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu