Learned Societies, Open Access and Budgetary Cross-Subsidy | Martin Paul Eve | Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-09-17

Summary:

"There’s an article out in The Times Higher Education Science Magazine (edit 11:38am) about Learned Societies and open access. As usual, it points out the thorny problem that Learned Societies derive revenue from subscriptions that they fear will be lost under an OA model. A few points spring to mind on this. 1. There is no guarantee that moving to an OA model will cause a loss of revenue; 2. zero-embargo green OA would be compliant with Plan S and does not seem to lead to loss of revenue; 3. I have written previously on how Learned Societies could manage this transition.

What I really wanted to write on here, though, briefly, was how this is really a problem of value, transparency, and distributed financing of disciplinary activities. When people say ‘Learned Societies fund their activities through subscription revenues’ what I hear is ‘academic library budgets are used to fund disciplinary activities’ (yes, I know that there are private subscriptions, membership fees, and other revenue streams etc., but the majority of the money is, nonetheless, coming from library budgets). These are also the budgets that have lagged by several hundred percent behind the total cost of ownership of all subscription journals worldwide. The subscription model does, at least, distribute this cost among many libraries (as opposed to APC-based models, which concentrate the costs at fewer points). But the truth of the matter is that Learned Societies are funded by academic library budgets. If they rely on a subscription model, they are also reliant on excluding people who cannot pay, for the claimed good of the Society.

I happen to think that a mission of a Learned Society should include getting its research as far under the nose of any interested constituent as possible, regardless of whether that person can pay. At the end of the day, what’s the point of funding a Ph.D. studentship if, when that student graduates and likely does not get an academic job, she/he/they is/are unable to continue to read research in the field? Regardless of this, though, I think that what sits at the heart of this dilemma for Learned Societies is a crisis and anxiety of value...."

Link:

https://eve.gd/2019/09/17/learned-societies-open-access-and-budgetary-cross-subsidy/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.societies oa.economics_of

Date tagged:

09/17/2019, 09:48

Date published:

09/17/2019, 05:48