Summary: One can calculate the price a subscribing institution pays per article, journal by journal and field by field. The number of institutional subscribers per journal may be listed or estimated, but that's still all revenues rather than costs. If all text-generation, access-provision and archiving are offloaded onto the distributed network of institutional repositories, the only service left for a journal publisher to provide is peer review. The only two factors modulating that cost would be the journal's submission and rejection rates (since the referees are unpaid). That gives a more realistic idea of what Gold OA will cost per article once we have 100% OA (rather than the arbitrary asking-prices we have from today's Gold OA and hybrid Gold "open choice" journals). Green OA self-archiving mandates might have the eventual side-effect of inducing this transition to Gold, but the real objective of OA is not to save money on subscriptions: It is to put an end to needless loss of research usage and impact.This can be achieved by Green OA self-archiving mandates, whether or not they lead to an eventual transition to Gold OA....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/05/2007 12:32:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
