[GOAL] Re: "Yawanna know wush wrong with this damn planet...?."

[Christian Gutknecht]

Well, I think Thomas is right. As long libraries do not shift money from the subscription side to the Gold OA side, the transformation will be very very slow.

Take the University of Zurich for example. I’ve just disclosed for the first time ever what they are paying for Elsevier, Springer and Wiley and put that in relation with the institutional publication behavior in this blog post: http://wisspub.net/2016/01/03/zahlungen-der-universitaet-zuerich/

The University of Zurich has a strong mandate since 2008 with probably one of the best staffed OA team (7 persons) in Europe. But regarding publications from 2014, only 23% (242 out of 1062) from all articles published articles within journals from Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Journals are freely accessible via the IR. In 2014 too, the University of Zurich paid 3.4 Mio CHF/USD to Elsevier, Springer and Wiley only for Journal subscriptions. 

The situation becomes even more absurd, when you learn that in 2014 there were 176 publications authored by the University of Zurich that were published by PLOS (which by the way already is the half of what the University of Zurich publishes with Wiley!). But there is only little institutional funding for APCs explicitly limited to humanities. So all authors who wish publish with PLOS have to throw in additional money by their own research budget, because the library claims to have no additional money for large scale Gold OA funding. Fortunately for the sake of OA, Swiss authors are willing to pay with the own budget that because the financial situation isn’t that bad. But think about the chance and the boost for OA, if the University of Zurich would shift all or at least a part of the money from the journal subscriptions and create a publisher neutral Open Access funds.

So I think we can and should promote more Green OA and care about a better compliance. But if we really want to speed up the transition to Gold OA we really should consider to give the subscription money a new purpose and use it in a coordinated way to force the publishers to change their business model. And as I heard this was Berlin 12 about.

Best regards

Christian Gutknecht





> Am 31.12.2015 um 19:15 schrieb Stevan Harnad <harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk>:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 31, 2015, at 10:59 AM, Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org <mailto:krichel at openlib.org>> wrote:
>> 
>>  Stevan Harnad writes
>> 
>>> 1. Actually, no one really knows why it is taking so long to reach the
>>> optimal and inevitable outcome -- universal OA --
>> 
>>  oh I know. It's because libraries are spending money on subscriptions.
>>  And as long as they do, OA remains evitable.
> 
> That’s about as useful as saying that "I know why there is poverty:
> because the rich are rich and the poor are poor."
> 
> Not only is it not possible to treat “libraries” as if they were a monolith
> any more than it is possible to treat “authors” as a monolith, 
> but it is completely out of the question for a university library
> to cancel subscriptions while its users have no other means to
> access that content. 
> 
> (Please don’t reply that they do cancel what they cannot afford: that is 
> not relevant. Libraries subscribe to as much content that their users need 
> as they can afford to subscribe to.)
> 
> The only way to make subscriptions cancellable is to first mandate 
> and provide (universal — not just local) Green OA <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>.
> 
> SH
> 
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