RE: Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Critique of PRC Study

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> As a result, no one can make a general, sweepingg, statement 
> that gold OA would remove money from research. It all depends 
> on how the money is parcelled out.

Gold OA will remove money from research to the exact degree that 
it causes funding to be redirected from the support of research 
to the support of publication and distribution.  A dollar can 
either support a dollar's worth of the former or a dollar's worth 
of the latter -- no matter how you parcel it out, it's still only 
a dollar.

And:

> Why would the author have to fund OA publishing?  Why wouldn't 
> the library or the University fund the publishing?

An "author-funded" model doesn't actually assume that, in most 
cases, the author will pay out of her own pocket.  The assumption 
is that the author will usually get the money from someplace 
else, either from a granting agency or from her institution. 
The question -- and it's a difficult one -- is whether such an 
arrangement would result in a net gain or a net loss in benefit 
to the scholarly community and the world at large.

---
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
Univ. of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu