[GOAL] Re: Scope of the GOAL list and discussions on "open access"

[Arthur Sale]

Heather, my comments are interspersed on two paragraphs of your recent post.

Happy New Year.

Arthur Sale
University of Tasmania, Australia

...

[Heather]
Libraries. Currently, library subscriptions account for about 80-90% of the
financial support for the scholarly publishing system, with 68-73% coming
from academic libraries alone. (Ware and Mabe, 2009). I argue that
transitioning this economic support from subscriptions to open access is key
to a successful transition to open access. Library budgets need not be the
only source of support, however they should be one of the main sources of
support.  Librarians have a lot of experience negotiating terms including
pricing for subscriptions which can easily translate into open access
negotiations. [Disclosure: this is my day job].  The SCOAP3 project is doing
just this, transitioning one sub-discipline from subscriptions to open
access.
[Arthur]
I assume you mean the project SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access
in Particle Physics Publishing) discussed in
http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/223_elpub2008.content.pdf and
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers/scoap3_09april.shtml. There are
a lot of things with the SCOAP acronym. Unfortunately high energy physics
does not offer a transferable model for most disciplines, for several
reasons.

Do you have any experience in your day job of transitioning a discipline or
initiating the process? I ask because there is a quite solid move in my
university at transitioning from some subscriptions to on-demand acquisition
of toll-access articles. Especially in specialized journals. Adding OA
publishing fees to such a scheme might be feasible.

... 

[Heather]
One model that might be optimal for reasons of fiscal prudence, which  
is the approach of N.I.H. and the Canadian Institutes of Health  
Research, I understand, is to allow researchers to use grant funds or  
some portion thereof for dissemination purposes, without specifying  
that these be OA article processing fees or if so, how much. This  
gives the researcher an incentive to look for cost-effective  
alternatives, to use the remaining funds for other purposes, for  
example sending grad students to conferences to present on the  
research. [Disclosure: I'm a grad student, and have many friends who  
are grad students]. This approach also avoids the possibility of the  
research funder setting an overly generous trend.
[Arthur] 
Giving researchers one-line freedom over their grants is no solution,
because (a) there are very strong competitive needs for these funds, and (b)
researchers see journal publication as traditionally free to them. Only
people with an institutional perspective see the costs. Separate funding (eg
Library, Government, funder) seems to be necessary to persuade researchers
to see a level playing field between reader-side and author-side fees.