From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:43:10 +0000

>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.

That's absolutely true, and if I had the option of buying every article
that might conceivably be useful in the future, then your argument would
powerfully support the journal subscription model. But that's not the
case: my library (like most) has limited resources, and therefore must
choose: if we subscribe to Biology Journal X, we can't subscribe to
Biology Journal Y. The problem is that both of those journals are likely
to contain articles that our biology students and researchers need. Under
a title-based subscription model, I'm forced to buy articles that they
don't need and forego purchase of articles they do need. This may prop up
Journal X, but it hurts Journal Y, and it doesn't support the students and
researchers very well. Nor, it seems to me, does it do the discipline
itself much good.

>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.

Well, this brings up a very uncomfortable but perhaps necessary question:
Should an author who produces an article that no one finds useful enough
to read feel like a failure? I guess it depends on how you define
scholarly success. Here's a more proximate question: If a library buys an
article that its patrons never use, does that mean it should have bought a
different article instead? (And if not, why not?)

>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?

Libraries have always limited the number of papers to which they provide
access, and they will always do so until the Great Day comes when
libraries have unlimited budgets. The question isn't whether patron access
will be limited; the question is how the limitation will be structured.
Traditionally, limitation has been at the level of the journal title: we
subscribe to this journal and not to that one. My contention is that this
structure is fundamentally irrational, and reflects the limitations of the
print environment.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
University of Utah
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