[GOAL] Re: The direction of travel for open access in the UK

[Andrew A. Adams]

Much of the problem with OA policy from outside academia is, I think, due to 
two main interconnected factors (though there are also other things at play). 
The first is a classic Broken Window Fallacy (Bastiat: what is seen and what 
is not seen). The profits and activities of publishers are very visible, 
particularly in those countries in which the publishers are based (though I'd 
be very interested to see if the major publishers were actually paying 
significant taxes in, e.g. the UK or whether they followed Facebook, 
Starbucks and Amazon in using double-Dutch Irish approaches to avoid tax. 
This is also tied together with the surpluses from the publishing parts of 
the scholarly societies (which are non-profit so they aren't "profit" but 
surplus which then gets put into other areas of the organisation). The second 
connected element is of course the self-serving lobbying of this industry to 
government which, because of their current large profit margins they're able 
to do with high levels of both volume and lobbying expertise.

Of course if academic would get its act together and do what is within its 
power directly (create IRs, mandate local deposit on the immediate 
deposit/optional access model and using the fact that >60% of journals allow 
immediate access, none of which requires any external permission or 
significant funding) and we'd be at 100% OA. THe ability of my fellow 
academics to be unable to see the big picture that this is in the academic 
interest and that it's the way to promote an evolution instead of a collapse 
in the scholarly communication arena, continues to astound me.


-- 
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/