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

[Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com>]

Your argument would hold water were it true that essentially all 
costs of publishing are now borne, directly or indirectly, by the 
government. However, this is not true, at least not for the 
journals that are at the center of Capitol Hill's love affair 
with open access. Medical journals, especially society journals, 
have a diversified base of revenue, from pharmaceutical 
advertising, reprint sales, individual subscriptions, membership 
dues, and other sources including government subsidized page 
charges.

I do not consider it "sensible" for a government that is 
hemorrhaging money, grossly underfunding medical research, and 
failing to ensure that health coverage is available to nearly 50 
million people, to assume all of the costs of publishing, simply 
so that it can claim exclusive control to an article (which is in 
many cases already freely available to the public.) Worse, open 
access has given senators and representatives a way to appear to 
support medical research while in fact doing absolutely nothing 
of substance (like increasing the NIH budget).

Peter Banks
Banks Publishing
Publications Consulting and Services
(703) 591-6544
FAX (703) 383-0765
pbanks@bankspub.com


On 6/6/06 6:41 PM, "Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com> wrote:

> Peter, How exactly would subscription-based scientific journals
> "serv[e] readers long term, absent the support of government or
> funding agencies"?
>
> Governments and funding agencies (not publishers) pay for the
> research to be done in the first place, without which there would
> be nothing for the journals to publish. And they also pay
> (invisibly) for the peer reviewers' time and often much of the
> editors' time, for pretty much all journals, not just open access
> journals.
>
> For publishers to be paid (by the government and funding agencies
> amongst others) to provide a publication service is logically
> consistent, and seems eminently more sensible than for publishers
> not to be paid, but instead to be granted exclusive control of
> the articles which form the fundamental, hard won record of
> scientific discovery.
>
> Matt
>
> ==
> Matt Cockerill
> Publisher
> BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com)
> London W1T 4LB
>
> Email: matt@biomedcentral.com