>sh> [A]lthough the Harvards are somewhat better off than the Have-Nots >sh> in their institutional access, *no* institution (or institutional >sh> consortium) has remotely enough money to afford toll access to all >sh> or even most of the planet's 24,000 serials: only to a small and >sh> shrinking minority of them. >sh> >sh> Nor is open access merely a matter of making tolls more affordable: >sh> Even if all 24,000 journals were sold at-cost (zero profit) it would >sh> still remain true of every article published that most of its would-be >sh> users could not access it, because most institutions worldwide still >sh> could not afford most journals, even at-cost...
Anonymous comment: > I expect that at least one library, namely Harvard's, could afford all these > journals, even with the publisher profits. But your statement would surely > be correct if you changed "no institution" to "almost no institution." I am happy to amend the statement to "almost no institution," But let me also add these data: According to the Ulrich/Bowkers Serials listing at http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/analysis/ "The 'Ulrich's Universe' consists of the approximately 175,000 active status titles that are included in the Ulrich's database. The Ulrich's Universe does not include ceased or suspended titles, or titles that are "forthcoming" titles (such as those announced for publication or announced but never published)." Of those 175,000 serials, Ulrichs says it has about 24,000 "refereed serials": "As used by Bowker in the Ulrich's database, the term refereed is applied to a journal that has been peer-reviewed. Refereed serials include articles that have been reviewed by experts and respected researchers in specific fields of study including the sciences, technology, the social sciences, arts and humanities." According to the excellent ARL statistics at http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupstats the *total* (refereed and unrefereed) serials holdings of the top and bottom 15 of their 115 US/Canada research universities are: Mean 31983.4652 Median 28454.50 Std Deviation 17103.5302 Std Error Mean 1594.91242 100% Max 106869.0 99% 90707.0 95% 69218.0 90% 53934.0 75% Q3 38121.0 50% Median 28454.5 Rank Institution Total Current Serials 1 HARVARD 106869.0000 2 ILLINOIS, URBANA 90707.0000 3 CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 83089.0000 4 CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 79552.0000 5 YALE 69664.0000 6 MICHIGAN 69218.0000 7 CORNELL 62077.0000 8 INDIANA 60019.0000 9 PENNSYLVANIA STATE 56270.0000 10 VIRGINIA 55843.0000 11 COLUMBIA 54958.0000 12 TORONTO 53934.0000 13 NORTH CAROLINA STATE 52769.0000 14 STANFORD 50056.0000 15 TEXAS 50014.0000 ... 100 CASE WESTERN RESERVE 17506.0000 101 SOUTHERN ILLINOIS 17467.0000 102 VIRGINIA TECH 16679.0000 103 GEORGE WASHINGTON 16638.0000 104 QUEEN'S 16109.0000 105 MISSOURI 16073.0000 106 LOUISVILLE 16028.0000 107 MASSACHUSETTS 15260.0000 108 WATERLOO 15251.0000 109 TULANE 14998.0000 110 KENT STATE 14605.0000 111 DELAWARE 13541.0000 112 HOWARD 13102.0000 113 GUELPH 12637.0000 114 SASKATCHEWAN 11261.0000 115 MANITOBA 9865.0000 So Harvard, which is one standard deviation above the next richest university (and over 4 standard deviations above the mean) still purchases only 60% of the Ulrich's total. Now this could have various explanations. (Maybe 40% are junk, with no academic interest.) And the 24,000 refereed journals are only 13% of the Ulrichs total and 23% of the Harvard total. And one has no idea what the priorities are. But the stats do suggest that even Harvard's budget is not omnipotent -- and that it is a statistical order of magnitude higher than the next richest (and 4 SDs above the mean). I often speak about the "Harvards" vs. the "Have-Nots" in discussing access and impact effects, pointing out that even if the Harvards are somewhat better off in terms of access to the research output of the Have-Nots, the impact of their own research output is still diminished by the fact that the Have-Nots (which are in the vast majority) cannot access it! http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#29.Sitting But I'm happy to add the qualifier "almost" if it is still warranted in the light of these stats. (The zero-profit conditional is, after all, counterfactual!) What is important, I think, is to dissociate the access/impact problem from the affordability problem, rather than to focus on how many universities might be able to afford how much. "The Affordable-Access (AA) Problem and The Open-Access (OA) Problem Are Not the Same" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3483.html Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum: To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: [email protected] Hypermail Archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
