Re: Summary paper from the Publishing Research Consortium

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

David,

The answer to your question is, Because this ("We would cancel") 
is what librarians say when asked the following question:  If all 
the articles in final form from a subscription-based journal were 
available for free, would you continue to subscribe to the 
journal?

There are important words in that question:  "all" and "final 
form."

I really cannot understand how you can persist in insisting that 
people will pay for what they can get for free.

Businesspeople talk to their customers.

Joe Esposito

On 3/20/07, David Prosser <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> The Beckett and Inger paper 'Self-Archiving and Journal 
> Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?' gives us a 
> hypothesis (p. 11 of the summary paper):
>
> 'In the extreme case of 100% availability of content on the 
> institutional archives and a 24-month embargo, still nearly 
> half the market for subscription journals has disappeared.'
>
> So, if 100% of the journal's content is freely available the 
> journal will, all other factors being equal, lose a massive 
> proportion of its subscription base.  Decreasing the embargo to 
> zero increases the predicted fall in the market from 50% to 
> approximately 70%.
>
> Can we test this hypothesis?  If we look at journals hosted by 
> HighWire Press we can see that a large number make papers 
> freely available after 6, 12, or 24 months (see 
> http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl). For these 
> journals, the final versions of papers are made available to 
> all. If the prediction made by Beckett and Inger was true then 
> these journals should have started to haemorrhaging 
> subscriptions following the opening-up of the archives.  Is 
> there any evidence that they have?
>
> Back in 2005, John Sack wrote, in a history of HighWire Press
> (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2005/00000018/00000002/art00008)
>
> After several years of content was online, Nick Cozzarelli 
> (PNAS), Bob Simoni (JBC) and Michael Held (Rockefeller 
> University Press) presented a concept of 'free back issues' to 
> their colleague HighWire publishers. Their view was that 
> librarians and researchers were subscribing because they needed 
> access to absolutely current issues, and that there was 
> significant educational benefit in issues that were months old. 
> They proposed that back issues (6 or 12 months old) be made 
> freely available to the public to support educational uses, and 
> expected that this would have no significant effect on 
> subscription count. Gradually more and more journals came to 
> this same belief, and today the programme comprises the largest 
> archive of free full-text research articles that we know of: 
> over 825,000 articles from about 220 journals.
>
> There does not appear to be a mass retreat from the free back 
> file programme - are publisher sanguine in the face of 50% 
> declines in their subscription base?
>
> Of course, most of the HighWire hosted journals offering free 
> backfiles are in the biological and medical fields, but as the 
> summary does not break-down the response of librarians by 
> subject area, it is difficult to tell what predictions are 
> being made in these fields.
>
> So, we have a hypothesis and we have some test-cases. If the 
> HighWire-hosted journals are managing to survive despite the 
> predicted massive falls in subscriptions they should have 
> experience, why should we take the Beckett and Inger study as a 
> credible warning of what might happen as self-archiving become 
> more widespread?
>
> David C Prosser PhD
> Director
> SPARC Europe
> E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk
> http://www.sparceurope.org