Open Access and Research Articles
November 8, 2011
Free the information! “Academic Publishing Profits Enough to Fund Open Access To Every Research Article In Every Field,” asserts Techdirt. Writer Glyn Moody points to some blog articles which analyzed academic publishing profits and insists that the companies make more than enough from publication fees to afford making articles freely available. Publication fees are most often paid by an author’s funding institution. After quoting his sources, Moody summarizes:
But those are just details; what really matters is the fact that collectively the top two or maybe three publishers take out of the academic world enough profits to pay for every research article in every discipline to be made freely available online for everyone to access using [the Public Library of Science’s] publishing fee approach.
I agree that, from researchers to medical professionals to businesses, open access would be a boon to every segment of society. The question is, how do we get the publishers to give up a segment of their profits for the greater good?
Are academic publishers getting closer to a collapse? Budgets are tight. Those responsible for negotiating deals are hearing talk but getting modest concessions from publishers? Young researchers are Web savvy? Will the subscriptions just give way like a damp paper bag with one too many tomatoes dropped in by a teenager bagger. Search may just be good enough to find low cost or free information via the Web or an app for that.
Cynthia Murrell, November 8, 2011
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A MORE REALISTIC WAY TO DO THE ARITHMETIC…
Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L’Harmattan.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15753/
ABSTRACT: What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community’s access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.