[GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?

[Heather Morrison]

One thing I like about this kind of approach is it seems so well suited to education about OA archives. If researchers would prefer not to wait they could try checking the author's IR - seems like a line to this effect would not be hard to add to a "request in progress" message - just my two bits off the top of my head...

Heather

On Jan 4, 2016, at 5:40 PM, "Arthur Sale" <ahjs at ozemail.com.au<mailto:ahjs at ozemail.com.au>> wrote:

I don’t have access to the raw data now apart from knowing that we fulfill 13,000+ requests a year, but the University of Tasmania has operated a free unlimited-quantity service for 15 years, funded pay-per-view centrally (ie in replacement for subscriptions). It is very much used, and regarded as a keystone of library research support. It simply is not true that academics are devoted to instant access, and they are prepared to wait a day or two to read the papers they think are relevant. Of course they use alert services, metadata, etc in making the judgment, but if they think a paper is worth reading in full (it may not be after they have read it but nobody cares) they have no hesitation in using the university’s service. The economics do stack up, and I am proud to have introduced it in about 1998.
See http://www.utas.edu.au/library/research/document-delivery and http://www.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/65611/Document-Delivery-Service-online-guide-v10.7.12.pdf.
For context, the University is in the top ten Australian universities for research, and in student size modest (27,000 students, 18% of whom are from outside Australia).
If someone wants to mine the data, contact the University Librarian.

Arthur Sale
University of Tasmania, Australia

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org<mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org> [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Tuesday, 5 January 2016 02:24 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Quo vadere?

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Christian Gutknecht <christian.gutknecht at bluewin.ch<mailto:christian.gutknecht at bluewin.ch>> wrote:
Stevan,

[ahjs] …

But I really like the idea to let researchers feel that subscription is an outdated model. And an easy way to do that without upsetting them too much, is to cancel subscriptions and get rid of the Big Deals. With the free money the library then can create two kind of funds: One is the Gold OA fund (incl. hybrid options but with a cap) and one is the fund for costs resulting getting access to documents that are not longer available via subscription (like costs for pay-per-view, document delivery, individual subscription of a really important journal).. Because librarians constantly overestimate the importance of their subscriptions and especially the Big Deals where they buy/rent a lot of stuff that is never used by their community. I think most libraries would find out that researchers would get along quite well with this option

Christian, I strongly suggest that you look into the actual costs of such a proposal (replacing subscriptions by pay-to-view costs, per paper).

We are in the online era, when scholars are accustomed to reaching content immediately with one click, and browsing it to see whether it's even worth reading. A scholar may look at dozens of papers a day this way. That's what they do with their institutional licensed content. You are imagining (without any data at all) that the cost of doing this via pay-per-view, at the usual $30 or so per paper, would amount to less cost for an institution than its current licensing costs.

Please repeat this proposal once you have done the arithmetic and have the evidence. (It won't be enough to find out the license costs and the pay-per-view costs. You will also have to monitor the daily usage, per discipline, of a sufficient representative sample of researchers.
Until then, subscription cancellation is not an option for institutions today. (But with universal immediate-deposit<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/> it will be.)

As Thomas mentioned it’s really easy these days to get to the papers by simply asking the author. Also Researchgate and academia.edu<http://academia.edu> close the gap where IRs fail to provide access.

The ease and immediacy of online access to which institutional authors are now accustomed is for licensed (+ OA) content. Find the actual  user data for unlicensed, non-OA content. And prepare to discover that copy-requests -- for which you have expressed pessimism when they are Button-based -- may turn out to be much less immediate or reliable if they must be mediated by email address search and waiting to see whether the author responds then when they are requested. With immediate deposit and the Button, the request is just one click for the user and one for the author...

[ahjs] …
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