Much of the problem with OA policy from outside academia is, I think, due to two main interconnected factors (though there are also other things at play). The first is a classic Broken Window Fallacy (Bastiat: what is seen and what is not seen). The profits and activities of publishers are very visible, particularly in those countries in which the publishers are based (though I'd be very interested to see if the major publishers were actually paying significant taxes in, e.g. the UK or whether they followed Facebook, Starbucks and Amazon in using double-Dutch Irish approaches to avoid tax. This is also tied together with the surpluses from the publishing parts of the scholarly societies (which are non-profit so they aren't "profit" but surplus which then gets put into other areas of the organisation). The second connected element is of course the self-serving lobbying of this industry to government which, because of their current large profit margins they're able to do with high levels of both volume and lobbying expertise.
Of course if academic would get its act together and do what is within its power directly (create IRs, mandate local deposit on the immediate deposit/optional access model and using the fact that >60% of journals allow immediate access, none of which requires any external permission or significant funding) and we'd be at 100% OA. THe ability of my fellow academics to be unable to see the big picture that this is in the academic interest and that it's the way to promote an evolution instead of a collapse in the scholarly communication arena, continues to astound me. -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
