This is a very interesting suggestion, and one that dovetails
with our thinking at BioOne. Our OA collection currently has 8
titles (with the addition in 2008 of 5 titles from Conservation
International), and we are exploring ways to grow it on a
sustainable basis. At present, we ask OA titles to either submit
their content in NLM XML or pay for their conversion and online
loading/QC expenses, which are not insignificant. Some OA titles
can cover that via author fees, but for most titles in
organismal, environmental, and integrative biology, author
charges are not an option--and this is a significant limiting
factor. And of course, the costs of building and maintaining a
sophisticated hosting platform extend well beyond conversion and
loading charges. So we do not yet have a sustainable model for
OA.
Recently we've been exploring the possibility of asking
libraries to contribute to the financial sustainability of our
OA collection, whether as a small percentage of their licensing
fee to the subscribed collection(s) (allowing libraries to
contribute on a proportional basis), or on a per-journal charge
of the sort you suggest. We have discussed an opt-in model,
whereby subscribing libraries could agree to be invoiced for the
additional amount by checking a box on the subscriber license.
The problem is, as ever, that of free ridership. Would the
benefit to library subscribers you identify--"more content
accessible through one familiar, well-developed tool with lots
of support..." be a sufficient incentive to escape the conundrum
of free ridership and establish a new economic settlement (as we
at BioOne think of it) for scholarly publishing?
We would genuinely appreciate feedback from the members of this
list.
Mark Kurtz | Director of Business Development | BioOne
21 Dupont Circle Suite 800 | Washington, DC 20036
Phone 202.296.2296 | Fax 202.872.0884 | Cell 617.669.4276
mkurtz@arl.org
www.BioOne.org
On Mar 19, 2008, at 9:05 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:
Vendors of aggregated databases and similar services to libraries
have potentially very important roles to play in the transition
to open access.
These roles range from increasing visibility of open access
journals through providing abstracting and indexing, to
supporting OA services such as the Directory of Open Access
Journals, to contributing to the economics of open access and
including the full text content of OA journals in the aggregated
> databases.
>
> This could be a win-win-win situation. OA journals benefit from
> enhanced impact and support; vendors can provide expanded
> services at little or no additional cost; and libraries can enjoy
more fulltext content in the well-developed searching services we
currently enjoy.
By my calculations, libraries could fund an immense amount of
open access journals, at costs of an average of $1 - $10 per
title.
For details, please see my blogpost, Open Access: Roles for the
Aggregators:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-access-roles-for-
aggregators.html
> Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone,
and does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic
Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.
Heather Morrison, MLIS