[GOAL] Re: Planning for the Open Access Era

[CHARLES OPPENHEIM]

Peter is correct that there is a fourth way to achieve OA, and Sally is right that each of them has costs, though in Peter's volunteer effort scenario, the costs are largely hidden.
Can I go back to my snooze now please?
Charles

Professor Charles Oppenheim

--- On Tue, 7/8/12, Sally Morris <sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:

From: Sally Morris <sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Planning for the Open Access Era
To: "'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)'" <goal at eprints.org>
Date: Tuesday, 7 August, 2012, 16:00



 
 

Do you think that doesn't entail cost?
 
The people who are doing this work 'free' (and the computer 
services provided 'free', etc) are all in reality being paid by someone to do 
their 'real' jobs.  And, presumably, the amount of time devoted to those 
'real' jobs is accordingly reduced.
 
Sally
 
 
Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, 
Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Tel:  +44 (0)1903 
871286
Email:  
sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
 



From: goal-bounces at eprints.org 
[mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Peter 
Murray-Rust
Sent: 07 August 2012 15:12
To: Global Open 
Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Planning for the 
Open Access Era





On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Sally Morris <sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:

We should not delude ourselves; journals can only be 'free' 
  if someone pays
the costs.

All the work involved in creating and 
  running a journal has to be paid for
somehow - they don't magically go away 
  if a journal is e-only (in fact,
there are some new costs, even though some 
  of the old ones disappear).

I can only see three options for who pays: 
   reader-side (e.g. the library);
author-side (e.g. publication fees); 
   or 'fairy godmother' (e.g. sponsor).


There is a fourth option, which works: the scholarly community manage 
publication through contributed labour and resources and the net amount of cash 
is near-zero. This is described in http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ 
where the J. Machine Learning Research is among the highest regarded journals in 
the area (top 7%) and free-to-authors and free-to-readers. There is an 
enlightening debate (on this URL) between those who run the journal and Kent 
Anderson of the Scholarly Kitchen who cannot believe that people will run and 
work for journals for the good of the community.

There is no law of 
physics that says this doesn't scale. It is simply that most scholars would 
rather the taxpayer and students paid for the administration publishing (either 
as author-side or reader-side) so the scholars don't have to do the work. And 
they've managed ot get 10 B USD per year. If scholars regarded publishing as 
part of their role, of if they were prepared to involved the wider community (as 
Wikipedia has done) we could have a much more C21 type of activity - innovative 
and valuable to the whole world rather than just academia. It would cost zero, 
but it would be much cheaper than any current model.

And of course we now 
have a complete free map of the whole world (openstreetmap.org) which is so much better 
than other alternatives that many people and organizations are switching to it. 
And, for many years, it didn't have a bank account and existed on "marginal 
resources" from UCL (and probably still does).

But most people will 
regard this as another fairy tale.



-- 
Peter 
Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of 
Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, 
UK
+44-1223-763069


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