From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2018 14:31:14 -0700

entia non multiplicanda sine necessitate -- that's the Latin for Occam's
razor:  Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.  Twice in the
last week, a particular multiplication of entities has brought that old
principle to mind.  Once in a posting from Europe and now today in a very
lucid posting on Scholarly Kitchen,
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/10/29/are-mirror-journals-a-better-path-to-the-open-access-flip/,
the possibly is being mooted of breaking apart existing journals cleanly,
so that there would be, I take it, Journal-of-Palaeobotany-Subscriber and
Journal-of-Palaeobotany-OA.

The piece on SK makes the argument that doing the bookkeeping on hybrid
journals is ineffective -- leading either to double-dipping or what is
almost as bad, strong suspicion of double-dipping -- and that the
European-advanced notion of 'flipping' journals by reworking the funding
flow so that current subscribers effectively pay about what they pay now in
order to provide OA to the rest of the world.

The hybrid and the two-journal models have in common that they expect the
main change to be a concentration of financial responsibility on fewer and
fewer players (research-producing institutions more than research-consuming
institutions), while expecting regions of the world with burgeoning
research productivity to step up immediately to the costs of publishing in
proportion to how much they publish.  Could this result in an incentive to
scientists to publish less?  Would that be a good outcome for us all?

Jim O'Donnell
ASU