These statistics, if correct, provide one more argument for not continuing to fund the long tail of journals (and to pare down what's in the "core",appropriately defined), thereby putting long-term downward and  incremental pressures on  tenure and promotion expectations that incentivize so much stuff.

Now that would be a truly "transformative" move by large consortia, to say the least. I'd happily be corrected on this point, but I don't get sense that this is a major concern (or even something on the radar) of large consortia or networks of university libraries. The drivers in negotiations appear to be primarily if not solely working out APC arrangements with publishers. 

OA is ok, who is to dispute that? But hasn't this monolithic and mantric drive for OA obscured other parts of the picture that might even be much more important than OA?

E.g., are people at Princeton who work on fusion confinement reading the past literature? Could that slow down work on this as an alternative source of energy? A speculative question but one that can be repeated for thousands of other research agendas. Another physics example: the so-called "standard theory" in physics has been stagnant for what, 40 years or so? Might the huge glut of exotic mathematical speculations in theoretical physics distract  from rich earlier discussions in the literature? Read physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's neat work on this theme and her book, Lost in Math.

I talked to two scholars recently whose judgment about these matters I respect a lot. They echoed the concern about the glut of research. A while back I talked to another scholar who admitted to reading only a few trailing years of the literature. Not statistically representative, but no doubt a survey of a large number faculty would confirm this point.

To Danny Kingsley's point, what are the educational ramifications for students of so much stuff being published? Is it harming the ability of students to find high quality, educationally valuable articles? Especially ones that provide a nice overview of late-breaking developments? 

The problem as I see it, once again, is that there are two distinct needs in scientific communication (with apologies to non-scientific realms of journal publishing): time stamped announcement/claims of discoveries, and ex post highly critical evaluation (peer-reviewed) of research agendas disclosed in other journal articles, in preprints and in other formats. (This is distinct from one understanding of an "overlay" journal. . Elide the two emphases, and you get the explosion of publishing at the long tail that we see today.

A project for next year that I hope to work on is to create a library guide or something online that documents the various ways these two needs have been addressed since the 17th century. 

Brian Simboli
Science, Mathematics, and Psychology Librarian
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