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

["Sally Morris \(Morris Associates\)" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

April may be interested in Don King's literature review article 
at http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/174148507X183551, which distils both 
the existing literature and the logical analysis of costs in his 
usual masterly way

Sally Morris
Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)
Email:  sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of April Younglove
Sent: 24 May 2007 01:34
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Critique of PRC Study

Dear Rick Anderson,

Thank you for your thoughtful answer to my question: "Why would 
the author have to fund OA publishing?"  I agree that the 
question of who should pay is a difficult one.  However, I am 
interested in learning more about the different proposed answers 
and their rationale.  Perhaps an author-pays model is the only 
one that works with OA and peer reviewing, but it seems to me 
that a much more creative solutions to this problem might exist.

Another question, and this can be for everyone and not just Rick 
Anderson, if anyone feels inclined to discuss it, is, why is it 
so expensive to publish research?  Is most of the money being 
spent on promotion of the journal title?  Administrating those 
who peer review articles (it is my understanding that peer 
reviewers themselves often do so for free)?  The cost of printing 
the articles on paper?  The cost of keeping the article in a main 
FTP server?  None of these things (in my mind) quite add up to 
the amounts that I have seen quoted ($1,500-2,000 or more per 
article).

Thanks to everyone on the list for helping to educate me about 
this topic. I really enjoy all the different points that people 
bring up here.

April Younglove
Technical Services Specialist
Linfield College Library, Portland Campus
ayoungl@linfield.edu

--On Sunday, May 20, 2007 7:36 PM -0400 Rick Anderson <rickand@unr.edu>
wrote:

>> 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