A journal publishing 234 articles per year charging $30,860 for a subscription SHOULD be disrupted, on the basis of price. At this rate it would cost 7 times more to provide access to only the medical schools in North America than to provide open access to everyone, everywhere with an internet connection, even at the rates of a for-profit professional commercial publisher's very high impact journal. At the rates of The Journal of Machine Learning, aptly described by Shieber as an efficient journal, all of the articles published in this journal could be made open access for a total cost that is less than 10% of a single subscription.
Details: The Association of American Medical Colleges accredits 141 medical schools in the U.S. and Canada alone. If each one of these schools purchased a subscription at $30,860, that would add up to revenue of $4.3 million per year. $4.3 million would be sufficient to pay open access article processing fees for 1,657 articles at the rates of the professional for-profit BioMedCentral's very-high-impact journal Genome Biology (U.S. $2,265). Shieber describes the approach and costs (average $10 per article) of the Journal of Machine Learning on his blog The Occasional Pamphlet: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ The question should be how we can protect and sustain high-quality scholarly publishing in an open access environment - not how to protect such mind-boggling inefficiency as journals that charge over $30,000 for a subscription! Those who think that it is important to sustain scholarly journals so that a surplus can assist with things like education might want to consider whether medical schools should immediately cancel this journal and offer a medical student a $30,000 scholarship instead. best, -- Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> ALA Accreditation site visit scheduled for 30 Sept-1 Oct 2013 / Visite du comité externe pour l'accréditation par l'ALA est prévu le 30 sept-1 oct 2013 http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/accreditation.html http://www.esi.uottawa.ca/accreditation.html On 2013-09-13, at 4:53 PM, Dana Roth <dzr...@library.caltech.edu<mailto:dzr...@library.caltech.edu>> wrote: Isn’t the fact that “The BIS report finds no evidence to support this distinction,” due to the fact that there isn’t sufficient data? I sense that we are going to have to live with (Green) OA and subscription journals for some time … and that it is the subscription model for commercially published journals will be increasingly unsustainable in the short term. An example of what could soon be unsustainable, is the commercially published ‘Journal of Comparative Neurology’ … that for 2012 cost its subscribers $30,860 and published only 234 articles. Dana L. Roth Caltech Library 1-32 1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125 626-395-6423 fax 626-792-7540 dzr...@library.caltech.edu<mailto:dzr...@library.caltech.edu> http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:boun...@eprints.org>] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 8:39 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Disruption vs. Protection End of the gold rush? (Yvonne Morris, cilip)<http://www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/news/end-gold-rush>: "In the interest of making research outputs publicly available; shorter and consistent or no embargo periods are the desired outcome. However, publishers… have argued that short embargo periods make librarians cancel subscriptions to their journals… The BIS report finds no evidence to support this distinction." ________________________________ I have long meant to comment on a frequent contradiction that keeps being voiced by OA advocates and opponents alike: I. Call for Disruption: Serial publications are overpriced and unaffordable; publisher profits are excessive; the subscription (license) model is unsustainable: the subscription model needs to be disrupted in order to force it to evolve toward Gold OA. II. Call for Protection: Serials publications are threatened by (Green) OA, which risks making the subscription model unsustainable: the subscription model needs to be protected in order to allow it to evolve toward Gold OA. Green OA mandates do two things: (a) They provide immediate OA for all who cannot afford subscription access, and (b) they disrupt the subscription model. Green OA embargoes do two things: (c) They withhold OA from all who cannot afford subscription access, and (d) they protect the subscription model from disruption. Why do those OA advocates who are working for (a) (i.e., to provide immediate OA for all who cannot afford subscription access) also feel beholden to promise (d) (i.e. to protect the subscription model from disruption)? University of Liège<http://roarmap.eprints.org/56/> and FRSN Belgium<http://roarmap.eprints.org/850/> have adopted -- and HEFCE<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/987-The-UKs-New-HEFCEREF-OA-Mandate-Proposal.html> and BIS<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1040-UK-BIS-Committee-2013-Report-on-Open-Access.html> have both proposed adopting -- the compromise resolution to this contradiction: Mandate the immediate repository deposit of the final refereed draft of all articles immediately upon acceptance for publication, but if the author wishes to comply with a publisher embargo on Green OA, do not require access to the deposit to be made OA immediately: Let the deposit be made Closed Access during the allowable embargo period and let the repository's automated eprint-request Button tide over the needs of research and researchers by making it easy for users to request and authors to provide a copy for research purposes with one click each. This tides over research needs during the embargo. If it still disrupts serials publication and makes subscriptions unsustainable, chances are that it's time for publishers to phase out the products and services for which there is no longer a market in the online era and evolve instead toward something more in line with the real needs of the PostGutenberg research community. Evolution and adaptation never occur except under the (disruptive) pressure of necessity. Is there any reason to protect the journal publishing industry from evolutionary pressure, at the expense of research progress? Stevan Harnad _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org<mailto:GOAL@eprints.org> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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