Models for long term funding of OA

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

The general relevance of proposals such as this is as a warning 
to all parties:

If agreement cannot be reached on OA provided in a stable manner 
by one of the conventional variants, such as "Gold" OA Journals, 
with sufficient subsidies to accommodate authors without funds to 
pay for publication, or a system of "Green" Self-archiving with a 
guarantee of support for the essential functions of journal 
publication, there are two recourses available:

1/ publishing small journals, and dividing the publication 
activities of large journals if necessary to publish the material 
in sections that universities, university libraries, and 
university departments can manage

as well as the previously well understood

2/ Publication in the form of archives only, with possible 
peer-reviewing overlays for those disciplines that consider them 
essential.

The technical feasibility of both has been thoroughly 
demonstrated by arXiv, and by the thousands of small journals in 
DOAJ.  The organization necessary for the establishment of peer 
reviewed overlays for the entire body of literature, or for the 
coordination of multiple small journals, has not yet been 
developed. But both of them are much simpler than the existing 
system. If we have been able to keep a complicated and 'expensive 
system in operation in spite of all of its faults and inequities, 
we can certainly arrange a simpler and cheaper system, with all 
the benefits of ease of use by authors, easier operation for 
libraries, and open availability to users.

Who are the people I subsume as "we"?-- the librarians who 
understand how to manage complex systems tuned for reader 
benefit, the information scientists who develop systems relying 
less upon manual operations, the scientists who know the 
publication needs of their subjects, and those people in 
publishing prepared to work in a different manner--and those 
innovative publishing organizations able to operate in a system 
of which they will not be the center, and where their 
participation will be conditional upon the usefulness and 
affordability of their work, not on their previously-assummed 
necessity.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu