RE: Economics of open access publishing

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I'd like to expand further on Fred's first paragraph, 
generalizing the arguments.

It will inherently be true, OA or non-OA, that for the journals 
with the best articles, researchers at the major universities 
will contribute articles costing more than the library cost would 
be to subscribe. Phil Davis's Friday posting on this article 
cited only high quality specialized journals at the foremost 
research center in the world for that specialty--and for which 
this condition holds true.

With lower level journals, researchers at the major universities 
will undoubted read some articles, and perhaps even cite some, 
but probably will not publish in.

At universities of a lesser rank, it's exactly the opposite: the 
faculty will probably not be publishing in the first rate 
journals, but will be reading them, and will publish in the 
lesser journals.

This is true not just of rank, but of subject field. A biologist 
might occasionally read an article in a predominantly 
agricultural journal, but would not think to publish there.

I explained this in more detail with respect to one particular OA 
journal, BMC Biology, at 
<http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0510/msg00066.html>

As Fred characteristically knows, but Phil uncharacteristically 
forgets, it balances only over the whole system, not for any 
particular journal or library.

Dr. David Goodman
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

formerly, Princeton University Library


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of "FrederickFriend"
Sent: Mon 5/8/2006 7:01 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Economics of open access publishing

As this article appears to be available only on subscription, it 
is difficult to assess the value of research we cannot read, but 
I make the following points:

1. What the author of this article appears to have done is to 
compare a selection of open access publication charges with a 
selection of the costs of the present subscription system, i.e. 
comparing some publishers' OA charges with library subscription 
payments, which of course are only a part of the cost of the 
subscription system.

2. I am also not sure whether the author has used accurate 
figures on the number of articles for which CERN funding would be 
used, as research undertaken at CERN is funded by many 
institutions across the world. A total picture of particle 
physics research across the world and the cost of disseminating 
that research would give a more accurate picture.

3. The article appears only to cover costs without any assessment 
of economic or academic benefits from either the subscription or 
the OA model. On the issue of large versus small institutions, 
for example, even if the costs of OA are higher (unproven from 
what I can assess of this article) the benefits will also be 
correspondingly higher.

Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
E-mail ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk

----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Davis" <pmd8@cornell.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 2:06 AM
Subject: Economics of open access publishing

> Economics of open access publishing
> Magaly Bescones Dominguez
> Serials - 19(1), March 2006
> http://serials.uksg.org/openurl.asp?genre=3Darticle&issn=3D0953-0460&volume=
> =3D19&issue=3D1&spage=3D52
>
> In this new article published in Serials, the author calculated
> the article costs under two Open Access models: (1) Simple
> model -- the publisher's costs are covered by a single source,
> and (2) Hybrid model -- the publisher's costs are covered by a
> complex combination of two (or more) elements, such as the
> payment by the author, subscription fees, the institution=92s
> affiliation, etc.
>
> "The results shown in Table 4 are very clear. Publication costs
> for CERN under the IOP open access model would be at least nine
> times more expensive than the current subscription fee of JHEP."
> (p. 56), and
>
> "the publication cost for CERN under Springer Open Choice model
> would be at least five times more expensive than the current
> subscription fee" (p. 57).  These results were also confirmed by
> the PLoS model.  The author concludes from her analysis that, "in
> general, the open access models available would be more expensive
> for CERN than the cost of periodical subscriptions." (p. 57)

[SNIP]