RE: Homer Simpson at the NIH

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

> Maybe, but don't the overall costs of scholarly communication 
> rise anyway each year - that's certainly the feeling most 
> librarians have!

I'm not sure that any thoughtful librarians feel that way at all. 
The cost of buying access to a particular scholarly journal 
certainly increases every year (as does the cost of buying almost 
anything).  But if you think in terms of scholarly communication 
generally, I think most of us would acknowledge that costs have 
fallen dramatically over the past ten years or so.  The advent of 
the Web has made it possible for us to provide far more content 
at a far lower per-article cost than was ever true before.  We 
communicate much more with each other and with publishers, and do 
so much more easily and cheaply than we ever did before.  Access 
itself is distributed far more efficiently and cheaply than we 
could have predicted in the 1980s.

> Alternatively, and less flippantly, it's entirely possible that 
> if we can create a new, functioning market then at least we may 
> get better value for money.

Sure.  But it's also possible that what we'll end up creating is 
a new, dysfunctional market in which we get less value for money. 
That's not to say that we shouldn't try -- only that we should be 
careful not to confuse fond hopes (or best intentions) with 
certain outcomes.

What concerns me more than the possibility of trading an 
imperfect market for a worse one is the possibility of creating a 
situation in which everyone in the world (including millions of 
people who don't want it) is given access to scientific content 
for free, but pays for it in loss of research.  This will be the 
inevitable result of granting agencies redirecting funds from 
research support to publication support. In that case, the 
scholarly-information market itself may be perfectly functional, 
and its functionality may even be enhanced -- but the world may 
be a much worse place.

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