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