I mentioned last week that I participated in the UConn Library's spring forum “Mandatory open access: friend or foe.” There will be videos of the whole two-hour event posted,1 and I'll provide a link here as soon as they're available.2 In the meantime, I've posted the PowerPoint slides I used with my presentation.
I had three main conclusions:
- Open access is an undeniable public good. (see Ingrid Robeyns on Crooked Timber for a discussion of how open access is particularly valuable to scholars in lesser developed countries and at smaller academic institutions everywhere)
- Publishing journals costs money, and only about 30% of the cost is accounted for by printing and distribution. Roughly 70% of the costs will remain, even with pure electronic distribution.3
- The challenge is to find an economic model that provides publishers with resources sufficient to keep publishing while providing the broadest possible access to published scholarly material.
Open access is a friend who deserves our help and support.
1I am not looking forward to seeing myself on video. I don't like the way I look in photoes, and I don't like the way I sound on tape. Put the two together, and I'm sure I'll be awful. But I'll provide the link anyway.
2I understand that we aren't able to stream videos yet. So what you'll find are several video files (I don't know what format) that you'll have to download first and watch after they've downloaded.
3It costs a surprisingly large amount of money to review papers, copy edit them, convert them to standard XML, and convert the XML to a human-readable form (HTML or PDF). It costs even more to provide sites with good indexing, cross references to other journals, DOIs, and the rest of the stuff we take for granted. The 70% is not going to high salaries for academic editors and reviewers.
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