[GOAL] Re: submission fee

[Andrew A. Adams]

Kimberly Douglas of Caltech Library wrote:
> I'm with Jan on the rationality of achieving OA through submission
> fees.    It does make economic and market-based sense.  After all,
> scholarly publishing is a 2-sided market and for OA to really come
> about the manuscript submission side needs to carry its weight instead
> of being subsidized by the readership.   A publisher could implement a
> required submission fee in exchange for OA for everything.  They have
> their numbers and know exactly what the submission fee would need to
> be.  What's holding them up?  Such a change would be a welcome
> positive and market-healthy action on the part of the PSP.

> Jan does a nice job of outlining the constructive outcomes of such a
> requirement on his blog.    It'd be interesting to get some read on
> range of potential submission fee rates.

Discussions of the long term sustainability of the management and review of 
the scholarly literature are all very well and good. THey've been going on 
for over two decades since the "serials crisis" began being discussed. In the 
meantime we lose access which could be easily provided by the supp at lementary 
provision of Green OA. Mandate Green OA now and then spend time on the 
loinger term goal of discussing how to ensure economic sustainability. There 
are many models and
author submission fees are only one of them (scholarly societies, once the 
primary "publishers" of the peer reviewed corpus might return to that role 
but subsidising the management costs from their other income rather than 
taking a profit from publishing; universities might find the reputational 
benefits of managing a journal worth the costs involved; etc.).

Caltech does not yet have a mandate for anything other than PhD theses 
according to Roarmap. What the Caltech library should first do is lobby 
within Caltech for the adoption of a deposit mandate. Once Caltech is like 
Caesar's wife in providing access to its own output, then its staff 
(academics and library) can engage in the long term sustainability debate, 
knowing that they ahve already solved the immediate access problem to their 
own output.

Ensuring immediate access to their own output s directly within the grasp of 
Caltech. Reforming the funding model of the whole of scholarly communications 
is something they can only do slowly and in consultation with another 10,000+ 
institutions around the world.

Do what is within your immediate grasp to solve the access problem, first. 
Ten worry about the long term.

-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
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/