From: <[log in to unmask]> Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 09:37:20 +0100 Much of what Grossman says I agree with, particularly his remarks about major publishers gobbling up nearly all the serials budgets, and that situation being "totally unacceptable in terms of providing researchers and their institutions with the freedom and flexibility to access the information they need for their work." Its partly in response to this situation that we have developed our Pay only for Usage model. Its what it says: all our content + backfile is put in a library, no subscription or other upfront charges, nor any ongoing commitment. When downloads are made, they are charged at $5 each. The maximum possible theoretical charge is capped for budgeting purposes. Administratively and technically simple, cheaper and quicker than ILL; the library is enriched; discovery is easier for researchers in that the content is already in the library; many of our customers for this find they are able to fund it from other 'pots' rather than the already stressed serials budget. To my mind, above all, this model addresses the question of equity. Why should you pay for content you have not used - under the subscription model that is, to some degree, inevitable. Here, the tables are turned, and you only pay for what you use. Where I disagree with Grossman is in his contention that it takes just one or a few key institutions to change the world. No it doesn't, it takes much more than that. While the rate of institutions signing up for this model is increasing - in the last two months, just in the USA, four major institutions have signed licences with us - what's needed is something more like 'a lot' or 'most' libraries to join with us. Its in demonstrating that this model has worked, and that it has the support of the library community, that its landscape changing potential will be realised, as other publishers come to see that this idea, or their own variants on it, could work for them too. You might say that nothing will change the practices of 'Big Publishing' so advantageous to them is the status quo. But look around. If 'market forces' can make them engage with OA (even if under flags of convenience at the moment) why could similar pressure not ultimately force them to engage with this concept? Librarians who want to change the world have to recognise that they too need to step out from behind their own barricades. Bill Hughes Director Multi-Science Publishing ----- Original Message ----- From: "LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2013 3:22 AM Subject: Alexander Grossmann on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done? From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 12:28:46 +0100 A new Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access has been published. This one is with Alexander Grossmann, who earlier this year took up a post as Professor of Publishing Management at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences. To do so Grossmann gave up a job as Vice President at the scholarly publisher De Gruyter, returning to research after ten years in the publishing industry. In that time he also served as Managing Director at Springer-Verlag GmbH in Vienna and as Director of physics publishing at Wiley. Grossmann has also recently co-founded an OA venture called ScienceOpen. *Some excerpts from the Q&A*: “I have the impression that there is no publishing house which is either able or willing to consider the rigorous change in their business models which would be required to actively pursue an open access publishing concept. However, the publishers are certainly aware of the PR value of Open Access and many are taking steps in this direction by founding new gold Open Access journals, offering hybrid models or acquiring OA companies. All attractive trimmings as long as the profit margins from subscription-based journals are not threatened. Active lobbying against OA takes place in parallel to these cosmetic offerings. “I have been involved in many internal meetings with publishers since the early 2000s in which copyright issues, embargo periods, or self-archiving were heavily discussed. The Science/ Technology/Medicine (STM) sector has always been particularly demanding, and even within a publishing house one always remains an advocate for one’s authors — physicists were early proponents of open access with the ArXiv preprint database for example. I always tried to sensitize my colleagues to these demands — only a fair and transparent handling of access issues would result in a positive and persistent settlement between authors and publishers. But at complete variance to my earlier expectations, publishers continue to tighten their rules, for instance for self-archiving and embargoing. The yearly drop in subscription numbers has everyone on edge and the occasional experiments in Open Access are not designed to save the bottom line.” — “The introduction of ‘Green OA’ should be considered simply as the first response of the publishing industry to the new legal requirements or regulations introduced by funding agencies such as the National Institutions of Health (NIH) in the US. When it was first introduced I expected Green OA to be an intermediate concept to be replaced by a new business and publishing concept in general. At variance to this expectation, the concept has become established as something which shall exist forever. Certainly Green OA cannot be considered as meeting researchers’ demand for an easy way to immediately make their research freely available to everybody who is interested in accessing the results.” — “[I]t is not sufficient to continue to launch single new OA journals in individual scientific disciplines. Rather, both the visibility and acceptance of OA concepts among the scholarly community worldwide needs to be increased. The development of a platform concept similar to ScienceOpen for many scholarly disciplines may be one approach, and that is one of the reasons why I launched the project.” — “The OA movement should uniformly focus on supporting libraries to develop strategies to modify their budget policies. This should result in having more money available to be spent on OA at their institutions. At least it should be possible to reallocate a part of the present budget which is spent on big deals for subscription journals towards OA in order to meet the costs of Gold OA publications. As long as libraries are caught in the big deals and traditional subscription models, we all have less chance to move forward with OA. Although this task sounds of a technical nature, it seems to me to be the prerequisite to providing the necessary budget for more OA publishing today and in the future.” — “The present business models of subscription based publishing forces librarians to spend most of their budget or all of their budget on package deals with the major publishers. Just to illustrate the situation: For some libraries, in particular smaller libraries which cannot afford all the journals they need, publishers offer to take their whole budget to get access to the complete list of that publisher. As a result, no money is left to buy the publications of other publishing houses, or other content resources. However, those libraries accept that situation as the lesser evil. “It is apparent that such a situation and such a business practice is totally unacceptable in terms of providing researchers and their institutions with the freedom and flexibility to access the information they need for their work, and to make the outcome of that research available for everybody worldwide working on the same problem. I am confident that it simply requires one or a few key scholarly institutions to make a significant change in how their libraries acquire and fund their research content.” The Q&A with Alexander Grossmann can be read here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/alexander-grossmann-on-state-of-open.html Richard Poynder