Primary Research Group is conducting a survey of "academic and research library purchasing practices for scholarly and professional journals." Some of the questions address journal prices and OA. (Thanks to medinfo.) For example:
Which phrase comes closest to describing your attitude towards the open access movement?
It’s a nice idea but I don’t think that it will affect journal prices much.
It has not had much of an impact yet but it should eventually slow the growth of price increases for journals or modestly improve contract conditions.
It has already slowed the growth of price increases for journals or modestly improved contract conditions and there may be additional gains but nothing too dramatic.
We have already made significant progress and if we continue to grow the base of open access articles open access will eventually lead to significantly lower journal costs for libraries.
How do you agree to this statement? : Journal publishers have been able to continuously increase prices because they control peer review and this control of peer review has not been challenged by an alternative system controlled by academics themselves. If libraries want to force down the price of journals, they must develop an alternative peer review process that breaks the monopoly that private publishers have on this process....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/27/2008 12:02:00 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.
