RE: Suber's refutation of universities paying more for OA

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

Substitute PLoS Biology as a more realistic comparison to Cell, 
tell your mathematicians to publish in the Princeton/IAS 
supported Annals of Mathematics, and things look a little 
different. I see it as the need for more excellent large OA 
Journals, and for many small departmentally-produced excellent 
ones. The first good ones stand as examples of what can be 
accomplished.

Argument by carefully selected bad or good examples may be 
effective forensically, but it is not a scientific approach to 
the solution of problems. Other besides Phil have used such 
arguments for various disparate positions --some with much 
greater length and frequency-- and they do all make amusing 
reading.

The cost problem is real, but perhaps we have been looking at it 
too restrictively.  We discuss author-funded titles, but it was 
never the intent that the author would pay personally. We've 
sometimes said "paid on behalf of the author," and I think that 
too falls short, for there cannot be expected to be one source 
that will pay for all.  We should be meaning "paid at the 
producing end, the part involving the author and the publisher 
with editors as the intermediaries, rather than at the consuming 
end, the part involving publishers, and readers, with libraries 
as the intermediaries."

I hope nobody has seriously suggested that the practical model is 
to transfer simultaneously all the necessary money from library 
subscriptions to author fees. I recognize there have been 
suggestions (many from BMC, in earlier years) that BMC could be 
funded entirely by library memberships. Phil is correct that this 
is absurd, and it was known to be absurd much earier than BMC 
admitted it.

Rather, the suggestion ought to be that some of the money ought 
to be available from the cancellation of library subscriptions to 
remaining journals of extremely high cost, middle or low 
prestige, and low use. It would hardly be fair to list a few 
here, but see Bergstrom's <http://www.journalprices.com/> or 
<http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/> We want to preserve Cell and 
JACS, but do we really want to preserve all the others?

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

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Phil Davis
Sent: Sun 6/4/2006 5:41 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Suber's refutation of universities paying more for OA

Peter Suber's refutation of the three studies (Davis, Walters, 
and Dominguez) in his last newsletter is based on the 
Kaufman-Wills survey of the DOAJ journals, which show that the 
majority of OA journals do not charge any author-side fees.  I'm 
particularly encouraged by these conclusions, since it means that 
I can encourage our faculty to publish in cheaper journals!

Instead of the Journal of the American Chemical society, I can 
tell our chemists to publish in Acta Chimica Slovenica. Instead 
of Cell, I can tell our biochemists to send their manuscripts to 
Acta biochimica polonica, and Instead of New England Journal of 
Medicine, I can tell our medical researchers to publish in Acta 
Medica Iranica.

Unfortunately I can no longer recommend BioMed Central journals. 
Since they raised the author processing fees in 2006, their 
journals are now more expensive than our calculations for 
subscription-based journals.  I also cannot comment on any of Mr. 
Suber's calculations, since he didn't use any to be able to come 
to his conclusions.

--Phil Davis