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Re: Institutional Mandates and Institutional OA Repository Growth

On 25-Sep-07, at 9:50 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote:
it is not a matter of whether the STM business could be run profitably with NIH-type restrictions in place, but instead the expectations the companies most invested in this business have about profit margins and their willingness to continue in the business at a lower level of profit when their funds might be redirected to more profitable uses elsewhere. Money tends to go where the expectations for profits are greatest.
If some players (commercial or otherwise) eventually abandon the journal publishing game because of lowered prospects for profit, their titles and editorial boards will migrate, quite naturally, to other players (like PLoS or BMC or HIndawi) who are happy to stay in, or enter, the Gold OA arena (but we are again getting ahead of ourselves: it is Green OA, Green OA mandates and Institutional OA Repositories whose time is coming first, not Gold OA). Journal title migration itself is not hypothetical: it is happening all the time, irrespective of OA. (So is journal death, and birth.) A learned journal consists of its editorship, peer-reviewership, authorship, and reputation (including its impact metrics), not its publisher. We know (and value) journals by their individual titles and track- records, not their publishers.

One would hope, Stevan, that "logic" would apply, of all places, within academic institutions. But I have been writing now for two decades providing "evidence" of ways in which higher education does not act according to logic, or norms of rationality, that one would expect from it.
You are certainly right, Sandy, that universities sometimes (often?) act irrationally, sometimes even with respect to their own best interests: not only universities, but corporations, and even people, individual and multiple, betimes obtund. But reality eventually exerts a pressure (if the stakes and consequences are nontrivial) and adaptation occurs. Not necessarily for the best, in ethical and humanistic terms, but at least for the better in terms of "interests". And the competition of interests in the question of what universities will do with their hypothetical windfall journal- cancellation savings (if/when Green OA mandates ever generate the -- likewise hypothetical -- unsustainable subscription cancellations) is a competition between (1) the other things universities could do with those newfound windfall savings -- e.g., (1) buying more books for the library, or withdrawing them from the library budget altogether and spending them on something else -- versus (2) using them to pay for the university's newfound research publicaton costs (which, on the very same hypothesis, will emerge pari passu with the university's windfall cancellation savings).

It seems a safe bet that since the logical brainwork in question is just a one-step deduction (which I think university adminstrators, even with their atrophied neurons, should still be capable of making, if they are still capable of getting up in the morning at all), the dance-step will be mastered: Faced with the question "Do we use the newfound windfall cancellation savings from our former publication buy-in to pay for the newfound publication costs of our research publication output, or for something else, letting our research output fend for itself?" they will -- under the pressure of logic, necessity, practicality, self-interest, and a lot of emails and phone calls from their research-publishing faculty -- find their way to the dead-obvious solution...

Best wishes,

Stevan Harnad

On 25-Sep-07, at 9:50 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

The factual part is fact. If wise men have privileged access to the future, so be it. I have none. I have only the available evidence, and logic. (And logic tells me that where there's a will, there's a way, especially if/when the hypothetical cancellation windfall savings that no one has yet seen should ever materialize. Till then, I'll just go with the evidence-based four -- self-archiving, self-archiving mandates, OA, and their already demonstrated feasibility and benefits -- leaving the speculation to those who prefer that sort of thing.)
One would hope, Stevan, that "logic" would apply, of all places, within academic institutions. But I have been writing now for two decades providing "evidence" of ways in which higher education does not act according to logic, or norms of rationality, that one would expect from it. For a recent example, see my article in the April issue of Against the Grain about the illogic of the way revised dissertations, and the fates of junior faculty tied to them, are handled in the academy now. Another example is the promotion of aggressive application of "fair use" within academia, which has the by-product of undercutting the economic base of university press publishing. This kind of "evidence" of pervaise irrationality in the system of scholarly communication of which there is an abundance makes me skeptical of any "logic" that foresees a redirecting of savings from journal cancellations to funding of Gold OA journals.

If PRISM is making any new points -- empirical or logical -- I would be very grateful if you point out to me exactly what those new points are. For all I have seen has been a repetition of the very few and very familiar old points I and others have rebutted many, many times before.
I'm not saying the points or arguments per se are all that new (although a decade ago no one in publishing was talking about OA as any kind of threat, even they even knew what OA was), but that the rhetoric and the level of lobbying activity on this issue betoken a new level of concern among STM publishers, which leads me to speculate--yes, speculate--that we may be getting closer to a "tipping point" in the industry. As I have emphasized before, it is not a matter of whether the STM business could be run profitably with NIH-type restrictions in place, but instead the expectations the companies most invested in this business have about profit margins and their willingness to continue in the business at ba lower level of profit when their funds might be redirected to more profitable uses elsewhere. Money tends to go where the expectations for profits are greatest. It is perception, rather than any "reality," that is important here and that will ultimately determine whether a "tipping point" occurs--just as it was the perception of the consequences of black movement into urban areas that led to "white flight" that was the first application of the notion of the "tipping point." It wasn't any reality of the consequences, but the expectation among white owners that certain consequences would ensue from an increase in black population that led to the "tipping point" in this instance. Since the commercial companies do not have a "mission" to serve scholarship (unlike societies and university presses), they have no reason to stay in the business if it can't continue to meet their economic expectations.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press