I'm much in favour of repositories, but I don't think they are the ideal solution because they require too much of a culture change for academic authors. Researchers are accustomed to submitting to journals and they treat repositories simply as archives, to which they may or may not submit their papers - depending mainly on how seriously the institution requires submission, and it seems that, at least in the UK, they are not taken very seriously by academics. It is some years since I looked at the situation but, then, the dominant contributor to repositories was the University of Southampton, unsurprisingly :-) The University of Oxford had something in the order of 18,000 items in its repository of which, if my memory serves me, only six were actual journal papers, the rest were original scientific data and source materials. The situation may have changed since then, but there is obviously a lot of variation from institution to institution.<div>
<br></div><div>An alternative way to use the money would be to support the development of free, subsidised open publishing - not simply open access. I think the focus on access is one of the reasons that reports like that from the Finch Working Party get things so wrong. "Open publishing" means no author charges and no subscription costs - costs are met through subsidies from collaborating institutions and/or voluntary work. This possibility also suffers from problems, of course: no radical solution is going to be problem free and the strength of the publishing lobby along with (in the UK) the increasingly common practice of universities demanding that researchers publish only in selected, so-called 'high-quality' journals, means that considerable business and cultural forces are set up against this solution. However, as publisher of Information Research (<a href="http://informationr.net/ir/">http://informationr.net/ir/</a>) I know that it can be done and if, for example, those thousands of mathematicians who have revolted against the high subscription costs of Elsevier were to collaborate in the publication of a new mathematics journal, I suspect that it would rapidly achieve 'high quality' status. I do not imagine that this solution could replace journals with very large numbers of submitted papers, but new journals rarely have high submission rates, nor do they have high numbers of subscribers - why any new journal needs to be published by a commercial publisher is a mystery. They are usually launched at the instigation of an academic, or group of academics, and this points to another problem - the conservative character of the academic community.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Ultimately, the fact that the technology now makes the role of the publisher redundant is going to be recognized and open publishing will prevail - perhaps not in what is left of my lifetime but probably within the next 30 to 50 years - a long time to wait, perhaps, but we should reflect upon the timescale over which the printed book developed after Gutenberg's invention - it took about 70 years before output in the UK reached 10 titles per million population :-) <br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On 19 July 2012 15:39, Thomas Krichel <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:krichel@openlib.org" target="_blank">krichel@openlib.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Prof. T.D. Wilson writes<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> So - definitely cheaper, but not cost free.<br>
<br>
</div> That's why universities should cancel journal subscriptions to fund<br>
green open access.<br>
<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
<br>
Thomas Krichel <a href="http://openlib.org/home/krichel" target="_blank">http://openlib.org/home/krichel</a><br>
<a href="http://authorprofile.org/pkr1" target="_blank">http://authorprofile.org/pkr1</a><br>
skype: thomaskrichel<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
--<br>
To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:<br>
<a href="http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f" target="_blank">http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div>----------------------------------------------------------------------------</div>Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD, PhD (h.c.)<div>Publisher and Editor in Chief: Information Research</div>
<div><a href="http://informationr.net/ir/" target="_blank">http://informationr.net/ir/</a></div><div>E-mail: <a href="mailto:wilsontd@gmail.com" target="_blank">wilsontd@gmail.com</a></div><div>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------</div>
<div><br></div><br>
</div>