RE: FTE-based pricing and usage-based pricing

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

Joe

It is always fun to see what new evils open access will be 
responsible for - today it is the possible bankrupting of the US. 
I'm sure famine and pestilence will not be far behind.

But does your argument work?  You claim that open access will 
remove the suppression of production that operates under the 
current system.  However, the belief that there are piles of 
unpublished manuscripts waiting to be unleashed on the world is 
surely a fallacy.  The 90-odd percent of papers rejected by 
Nature and Science do not languish in the authors' bottom draws - 
they are submitted to the next journals down the hierarchy.  And 
if they are not published there then they are submitted to the 
next rank until they find their level.  Sally Morris has report 
research on this list that shows that just about everything is 
published somewhere.

The limit on the number of papers published is not Nature's 
rejection rate, but the limit on the number of papers submitted 
(which is a function of number of researchers).  Why will this 
change as we move to open access? Very few funders use the number 
of papers published as a means to evaluate papers.  So, the 
'publish or perish' pressures will not increase - what's the 
mechanism by which busy researchers are suddenly going to start 
churning out hugely increased numbers of papers?

Of course, everybody agrees that readers will always need better 
filers for selection.  I hope that we can also agree that one of 
the current filters - what the host institution can afford to 
access - is amongst the worst.

Best wishes
David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph J. Esposito
Sent: 23 October 2006 23:31
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: FTE-based pricing and usage-based pricing

Sally has her examples wrong, but her conclusions are correct. 
David has his examples right, but his conclusions are incorrect. 
What is being overlooked is that the value-added function of 
publishing is to SUPPRESS production through selectivity, not to 
encourage it.  Google "david goodman" (464,000 pages returned) 
and ask what happens when the editorial function has an economic 
incentive to approve more materials, not fewer.  ("joe esposito" 
returns fewer pages:  More Gold, Less Dross!)  The Web is not an 
encyclopedia or a substitute for a publishing enterprise; it is a 
pile of manure, through which one searches, holding one's nose, 
to find the pony. That is why Google is worth so much, because it 
looks for the pony and the Web stinks.

Open Access will significantly increase the cost of scholarly 
communications by creating incentives for production, when what 
is needed are filters for selection.  You can't change one cog in 
the machine without having the machine go off in an unintended 
direction.  Think of the savings and loan scandal of a few years 
ago, the most apposite precedent for OA publishing that there is: 
one change in a vast body of linked laws and it almost bankrupted 
the nation.

Joe Esposito