From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 26 May 2015 10:33:51 +0100

Dear Rick

I agree that there is very little evidence. I use "very little" rather
than "no" evidence because people tell me that there is evidence in
certain disciplines but I have not seen it. There is modelling which
is a different matter. Libraries are not going to cancel if it is
difficult or impossible to get together the contents of a particular
issue - we all know that. They may not even cancel then but perhaps
there will be less pressure from patrons to keep the journal.
Cancellation decisions are made with different criteria in mind - at
the moment.

It seems to me that it is all a matter of harvesting and metadata. If
OAI-PMH or something a little less complicated is revived or becomes
front line and if repositories actually manage to attach proper
metadata to what they ingest, the situation will change. How quickly
might that happen? It is like those regular questions at conferences
where a panel are asked how soon gold Open Access will become the
default journals model or whatever "tipping point" is used.

Over the decades I have noticed that the projections have tended to recede.

I suppose the question for publishers is whether they should believe
the projections of fanatical green activists (not Professor Harnad)
and act accordingly or whether they should believe the concept of
librarians being unable to organise themselves to make repositories a
threat which is put forward by the CEO of one very large company (not
Elsevier).

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 02:33:26 +0000


>I think the important point here, aside from the double-talk Dr. Wise
>continues to employ even after Steven points out the inconsistency, is
>that there is no evidence at all that libraries have or will cancel
>journal subscriptions because of author self-archiving in institutional
>repositories.

Of course, gathering real-world data from imaginary scenarios is
notoriously tough.

So here¹s my question (and this will be awkwardly phrased, sorry): is
anyone aware of a subscription journal for which most or all of the
content is consistently self-archived in repositories? If there are
ten or twenty such journals out there, it would be very interesting to
see whether and to what degree subscriptions have been affected since
the self-archiving started ‹ and to monitor that trend over time.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections Marriott Library,
University of Utah [log in to unmask]