Recently this list has taken on an air of ideological purity; this is
unfortunate. There is not (as yet) only one true religion.
Initiatives such as by HHMI, CERN, and Wellcome should be greeted, not
scorned. Let 1000 flowers bloom!
Below, in an attempt to decrease the heat, and increase the light, I
list six statements, which I claim are true, and which obviously bear
on the questions this list discusses.
(A) THE CURRENT SITUATION. The quantity of scientific research has been
increasing exponentially for several generations. This increase,
roughly an order of magnitude during my lifetime (~4% per year,
essentially the same as the growth in the global economy), has
been mediated and enabled by the existing system for scientific
communication, namely toll access journals and libraries.
(B) THE CURRENT COSTS. Direct costs for journals are remarkably
small, about 1% of the total research and development budget (1).
This compares with other costs involved such as (2) unpaid
refereeing and editing 1% and the non-acquisition costs of a
library, 2%. Possible changes to the direct cost of journals, up
or down, are likely to be smaller than the error in estimating
the yearly inflation adjustments.
(C) THE POSSIBLE BENEFIT OF OPEN ACCESS. The purpose of OA is to
increase the amount and quality of research. The growth rate of
research is currently ~4%; if OA is a massive success, it could
perhaps increase this growth rate by 10%, which would be a yearly
increment of 0.4% of total research. It may be expected that the
greatest effect of OA would be in cross-disciplinary research,
such as Nanotechnology.
(D) THE RISK OF OPEN ACCESS. By substantially changing the economics
of journal publishing OA risks the catastrophic financial
collapse of some publishers. This is especially true for the
mandated 100% green OA path.
(E) CURRENT GREEN MODELS. There are basically two types of Green
repository: centralized, such as arXiv, and distributed, as the
institutional repositories. Only arXiv has much of a track
record. After more than 15 years arXiv only has more than half
the refereed articles in the two subfields of High Energy Physics
and Astrophysics; only HEP has more than 90%. It does not appear
that there is any subfield of science where the existing
institutional repositories contain more than half of the refereed
literature.
(F) CURRENT GOLD MODELS. Page charges have existed for decades as a
method of financing journals; while their use has been in decline
for some time several venerable titles use them, in whole or in
part, and there are several new, page charge funded, OA
journals. Direct subsidies, by scholarly organizations and
funding agencies, have long been used to support scientific
publishing. Nearly all technical reports series are funded in
this manner.
(1) Odlyzko (2006)
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/OpenAccess_book-odlyzko-chapter.pdf
(2) Odlyzko (1997)
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_8/odlyzko/
--
Dr. Michael J. Kurtz
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
60 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
VOICE: +1-617-495-7434
FAX: +1-617-495-7467
E-MAIL: kurtz_at_cfa.harvard.edu
WWW: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kurtz
Received on Thu Mar 15 2007 - 00:23:34 GMT