Re: the Yale argument on open-choice

["Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com>]

Is it not clear, though, hat price inflation is an expected 
consequence of the subscription model?

If the research community hands over ownership/exclusive rights 
to publishers, it is economically predictable that publishers 
(whether commercial or not-for-profit) will charge as much as 
they can in order to maximize their revenues. Given that the 
academic community *really* needs access to that research, there 
is virtually no upper bound on what publishers with enough market 
power can get away with charging for subscriptions . The natural 
solution to this is surely for the research community *not* to 
give away the ownership/exclusive rights to the research.

Under an open access publishing model, you immediately have a 
much more effective market. The customer (the research community) 
can choose the publication service that offers the best value, 
ensuring that prices are kept down. This kind of 
'substitutability' generally doesn't exist with the subscription 
model - hence the problem of journal inflation.

Matt Cockerill
BioMed Central


On 20 Mar 2007, at 22:34, Rick Anderson wrote:

> > For all the many problems of the traditional model of 
> > user-pays publishing, it does one thing very well:  it marries 
> > the production of information to the ability to consume it. 
> > In plain English, this is called living within a budget.
> I'm not even convinced that there are many problems with the 
> traditional model of user-pays publishing.  The model itself 
> works great, as Joe points out.  The problem is with price 
> inflation.  If all journal subscriptions cost $5 per year, no 
> one would be complaining about the subscription model.
>
> Rick Anderson
> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
> rickand@unr.edu