From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:21:48 +0000

Chris,

You are right. The players don't necessarily act on behalf of
the system. A kind of instance of the tragedy of the commons.

It may be worth recounting that among the reasons we (my
colleagues and I at Academic press, in 1995) devised the first
'BigDeal' was exactly the idea that if scientific information were
seen as an 'infrastructural provision' on a national scale, there
would be optimal access within the academic environment,
with re-use built in. The first BigDeal was therefore a national
deal (in the UK, with HEFCE, covering *all* institutes of higher
education in the UK, without exception). We had high hopes of
exporting these BigDeals to other countries as well.

A national BigDeal involved, necessarily, some 'top-slicing' of
funds. Unfortunately, individual institutions and librarians didn't
like that. Loss of choice was often quoted: better to pay more
for less with choice, than pay less for more without choice – the
choice in effect being the choice to deny access to certain
material.  So after a few years the UK BigDeal fell apart into some
'biggish deals' and even more 'smallish deals', delivering much
less benefit and 'degenerating' the idea into 'bundled subscriptions'
rather than the truly national big deal with wide-ranging possibilities
to help making research communication more efficient and effective.
Elsewhere the idea of national BigDeals never took off seriously in
the first place (with the exception of a few State-wide deals in the
US). The original thinking behind the BigDeal led me in any case
to the concept of open access, with the potential of putting control
into the hands of authors and their funders, when the BigDeal as
conceived 'degenerated' in a way.

Good luck with national deals. Though sensible, my experience in
that regard isn't great, albeit that circumstances have changed
now. I'm much more optimistic about open access.

Best,

Jan
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On 28 Nov 2011, at 22:21, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: "Armbruster, Chris" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2011 00:18:50 -0800

Jan,

we agree that research information overwhelm is what the
system needs to deal with most importantly. Also, OAP with
re-use rights is a fully complementary solution.

Yet, the players in the system do not necessarily act on behalf of
 the system, and interestingly this does include many libraries
and their institutions (who may be cutting funds for SB, and
these cuts are predictable for the SB players - but have no plan
for growing funded OAP in a predictable and/or steady manner).

In these circumstances, it is worth thinking about negotiating
national SB deals that include re-use rights. To my mind, a national
SB deal that include re-use rights may be more interesting than
any piecemeal Green OA approach, because it delivers re-use
rights for the version of record and does so comprehensively for
the whole content (potentially, from many or all publishers). Of
course, buying re-use rights will cost extra, but, on the whole,
this may not be more expensive than maintaining thousands
of institutional repositories - and the value of re-use rights for
SB content is definitely higher than for any Green OA material.

Also, the coordination and transaction costs for achieving national
SB deals that include re-use rights may be (much) lower than the
for protracted efforts at implementing OA policy and OAP funding,
just think of what the signatories to the Berlin Declaration or the
EUROHORCS members have achieved or not.

Best,
Chris

________________________________________

From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of LIBLICENSE [[log in to unmask]
Sent: 25 November 2011 01:33
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Future of the Subscription Model

From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:07:15 +0000

Surely, it's not "optimizing the synergy" of OA and SB publishing, but
"optimising the efficacy of research communication" that it's all
about?

From that point of view, SB is decidedly sub-optimal, in contrast t,
OA, particularly 'true' OA, machine-readable, with no impediments to
re-use, so that computer-assisted large-scale analysis is possible.

Computer-assisted large scale analysis (in addition to actual reading
of selected articles) is fast becoming essential, due to the research
information 'overwhelm' that the relentless increase in published
research brings about. And not only in the form of research articles,
but increasingly accompanied by (large) datasets as well.

For that is the real problem: research information 'overwhelm'. The
problems of how to finance libraries and publishing follow from that.

As a result of this 'overwhelm', I see the entire edifice of research
publishing changing. Subscriptions, peer-review, the very format of
articles, funding, (traditional) libraries, (traditional) publishers,
impact factors; not far before time is up for all of those.

New concepts are emerging, integrating narrative and data, human- and
machine-readability, pattern-analysis of large amounts of information
and occasional linear reading, semantic navigation of knowledge, etc.
The time that information is taken in by the drink, like water, is
making place for a time in which information is being utilised as a
carrier (like oceans) to navigate between knowledge 'destinations' and
explore unknown shores.

Jan Velterop