From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:45:11 -0800
Bill,
Isn't the area you are describing--the new, specialized area of
research--precisely where the author-pays model is most potent? As
you say, a library may not want to purchase a journal for a single
member of the faculty, but the author of an article may be willing and
able to pay for the publication of his or her work in an OA form.
This does not solve some important problems (discovery,
certification), but it does address the bedrock issue of
communication.
Joe Esposito
On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 7:02 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:32:08 +0000
>
> Tiny fields present publishers with problems. Small publishers are
> necessarily expert in this area. First, 'tiny field' can be
> re-interpreted as 'tiny market', no-one out there much to buy the
> content whether its in journal or per-article form. Existing tiny
> markets may not be so problematical, the 'problem' having resolved
> itself: perhaps in the publisher acknowledging that publishing a
> particular title redounds to his credit, offsetting the annual
> financial loss, perhaps in sufficient libraries recognising it as
> content they 'ought' to have in their libraries regardless of the fact
> its barely used. The challenge becomes greater when dealing with
> emerging topics which may become mainstream over (a long) time, the
> kind of areas we tend to publish in. For example we started a journal
> on hypersonics a couple of years ago. It may emerge as a well
> resourced area of research but at present, in a few institutions
> around the world, deep in the aerospace department is an occasional
> individual enthused by this topic. Is the library going to buy the
> journal just for him? I assure you, very few have. Might his needs be
> better served by a low-cost PPV arrangement? Possibly. And, as you
> imply, the risk-averseness of most academic publishers is such that,
> if the proposal is, "lets start this new journal for a new field,
> which will certainly lose money for its first few years, and anyway
> the field itself might founder in a few years" then the answer is
> 'no'. Which is a sensible answer, but doesn't recognise the
> possibility of the field thriving.
>
> So, I am not suggesting my PPV proposal is any kind of comprehensive
> answer but there are spaces where it would, it seems to me, be a
> useful option, for researchers, librarians and publishers. It does
> help open up publishing possibilities, making it possible to publish
> as a journal (even if the content is also sold on a PPV basis)
> without, from the publisher perspective, the requirement that to be
> viable, it must turn over $xxxxxx; or, from the library side, that it
> must have a certain usage level in terms of xxx downloads to justify
> being subscribed to. The fact that only a handful of people around the
> world are studying some particular thing strikes me as wonderful, and
> my job is to facilitate what they're doing however I can, not as a
> reason to dismiss them/their work as unimportant. What I'm thinking
> about here, among other things, is finding ways for libraries to play
> their part within the financial constraints they have..
>
> Bill Hughes
> Multi-Science Publishing
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2012 4:03 AM
> Subject: Re: Moving towards paying only for usage?
> From: Lloyd Davidson <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Applying a pay-per-use system to highly specialized fields, e.g.
> taxonomy, where only very small numbers of people might be interested
> in an article on a particular species, and where such articles would
> predictably have very few readers, and fewer yet willing to pay for
> access to them, would result in a system where publishers would no
> longer have any incentive to publish such specialized papers at all.
> Consequently, small fields of study would likely cease to exist, to
> the great detriment of science as a whole. Such fields are already in
> jeopardy and who can honestly know what article will be important now
> or in the future? If I happen to be one of the two or three
> researchers in the world working on that particular species or genus,
> that taxonomic paper could well be vitally important to me but I
> might not need it for 100 years after it was published.
>
> In the humanities, where citations are less used than in the sciences,
> this system would be particularly devastating, to say nothing of how
> authors would feel when the inevitable annual reports to authors were
> issued by the publishers that showed that nobody was willing to pay
> for (i.e. read) your last publication, or, for that matter, perhaps
> any other of your publications. Such a system would make many authors
> feel like failures and would provide wonderfully specific hard data
> for denying tenure and promotion, as well as to politicians looking to
> cut funding for education.
>
> Who would be willing to pay to read an article that was found
> serendipitously, perhaps by browsing, and looked somewhat interesting
> but was peripheral to your interests of the moment? If libraries paid
> for such pay-per-use access, would they have to limit the number of
> papers that each user might be allowed to read? If individuals
> without grants, e.g. students, had to pay, where would the money come
> from?
>
> It's hard to see how a pay-per-use system could operate equally well
> for authors, readers (especially casual ones) and publishers.
>
> Lloyd
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