I fully agree,

There would be no great harm done in the longer perspective if some of 
the current major publishers dissapeared from the market, as long as the 
access to older article in their electronic holdings are secured. They 
would just be replaced by other. Academics need good journals for many 
reasons, partly because of recognition and evaluation reasons. Good and 
top journals have usually not been created through design but through a 
Darwinian selection process where authors, reviewers and academic 
editors flock to journals which become the leading ones in their fields, 
and these journals in many fields are not always more expensive to 
operate, since the major cost difference to lower prestige journals is 
in the amount of unpaid voluntary work going into the peer review part. 
And this is large managed by academic editors as well.  I see no danger 
to the quality of scientific article publishing. People are still able 
to fly around the world even if many major airlines who haven't been 
able to adapt to changing market  conditions have gone bankrupt.

Best regards
Bo-Christer


  9/16/13 12:42 AM, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
> Journal cancellation rates are currently almost impossible to judge, at least
> for the big publishers because of the "big deals". The big deal subscriptions
> mean that many libraries are subscribing either to whole publisher
> archives/fleets or at least to whole subjects. In those circumstances
> institutions cannot unsubscribe from individual journals until and unless
> sufficient journals could be included to drop the price of the remaining
> necessary journal subscriptions to below the big deal cost.
>
> All the cancellation (because of Green OA) talk is entirely speculative and
> pretty much impossible to model (because so many other things are also
> changing at the same time) that we must focus on cutting through the Gordian
> knot of "transitions to sustainable publishing" by mandating Green OA
> (Immediate Deposit/Optional Access where necessary) and let the disruptions
> to publishing take its course as it may.
>
> Some argue that publishing and journals are so important to academia that we
> must be careful not to undermine them. I make the opposite evaluation:
> journals and peer review are so important to academia that if Green OA (so
> far as we can tell from some pretty decent evidence quickly achievable by
> Mandates [and only by mandates]) causes significant disruption to journal
> publishing viability, that the relevant communities would quickly find a way
> to ensure the survival of the important avenues of communications by means
> other than the current subscription model.
>
>    

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