Peter Murray-Rust writes > The situation with all commercial publishers (including many scholarly > societies) is now unacceptable.
It seems perfectly acceptable to libraries who continue to pay vast amounts for subscription journals with most of the contents receiving very little use. The average academic reads one hour a week. Now you take all the academic in the institution, you count 56 weeks a year and divide your annual subscription cost by that number ... it turns out to be a very very expensive hour I am sure. > Yes. I am now appalled at the scale of OA APC charges. I have outlined > these in > > https://www.slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/scientific-search-for-everyone > slides 3-11 > > where I contend that probably >1000 USD of an APCs goes to shareholder > profits and corporate branding and gross inefficiency. It is easy to be outraged at the riches of others, but clearly some people think it worth to pay that sort of amount. As long as they do, publishers can charge it. We should not be angry at those who charge but those who let them get away with it. > The effect of APCs on the Global South is appalling People can still publish. If the research is good, it will eventually make it to become known. Stevan writes > The only thing that is and has been sustaining the paywalls on research > has been publishers' lobbying of governments on funder OA policy and their > manipulation of institutional OA policy with "Big Deals" on extortionate > library licensing fees to ensure that OA policies always include Option B. If I recall correctly, "paywalls" usually, in this group's discussion, refers to limit access papers to those who pay for it. It is library subscriptions that keep paywalls running. I said this years ago. Stevan kept on dismissing my call to cancel subscription saying we need to wait until full green OA is achieved to start cancelling subscriptions. I agree fully that APCs as charged by commercial publishers are too high. But you can't blame publishers for wanting to charge them. You have to address the willingness to pay them. If institutions were to pay them fully, a race to spend more on APCs to demonstrate research quality will raise the cost of scholarly communication intemediation, potentially making OA more expensive than subscriptions. But I am not worried yet, because Plan S would only cover funded research, and it calls for a cap. -- Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
