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The Beckett and Inger paper 'Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?' gives us a hypothesis (p. 11 of the summary paper): 'In the extreme case of 100% availability of content on the institutional archives and a 24-month embargo, still nearly half the market for subscription journals has disappeared.' So, if 100% of the journal's content is freely available the journal will, all other factors being equal, lose a massive proportion of its subscription base. Decreasing the embargo to zero increases the predicted fall in the market from 50% to approximately 70%. Can we test this hypothesis? If we look at journals hosted by HighWire Press we can see that a large number make papers freely available after 6, 12, or 24 months (see http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl). For these journals, the final versions of papers are made available to all. If the prediction made by Beckett and Inger was true then these journals should have started to haemorrhaging subscriptions following the opening-up of the archives. Is there any evidence that they have? Back in 2005, John Sack wrote, in a history of HighWire Press (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2005/00000018/00000002/art00 008): After several years of content was online, Nick Cozzarelli (PNAS), Bob Simoni (JBC) and Michael Held (Rockefeller University Press) presented a concept of 'free back issues' to their colleague HighWire publishers. Their view was that librarians and researchers were subscribing because they needed access to absolutely current issues, and that there was significant educational benefit in issues that were months old. They proposed that back issues (6 or 12 months old) be made freely available to the public to support educational uses, and expected that this would have no significant effect on subscription count. Gradually more and more journals came to this same belief, and today the programme comprises the largest archive of free full-text research articles that we know of: over 825,000 articles from about 220 journals. (Emphasis added). There does not appear to be a mass retreat from the free back file programme - are publisher sanguine in the face of 50% declines in their subscription base? Of course, most of the HighWire hosted journals offering free backfiles are in the biological and medical fields, but as the summary does not break-down the response of librarians by subject area, it is difficult to tell what predictions are being made in these fields. So, we have a hypothesis and we have some test-cases. If the HighWire-hosted journals are managing to survive despite the predicted massive falls in subscriptions they should have experience, why should we take the Beckett and Inger study as a credible warning of what might happen as self-archiving become more widespread? David David C Prosser PhD Director SPARC Europe E-mail: [log in to unmask] Tel: +44 (0) 1865 277 614 Mobile: +44 (0) 7974 673 888 http://www.sparceurope.org -----Original Message----- From: An informal open list set up by the UK Serials Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sally Morris Sent: 19 March 2007 12:43 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Summary paper from the Publishing Research Consortium To help the scholarly community better understand and evaluate how open archiving might impact journal subscriptions, the Publishing Research Consortium has released the summary paper 'Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?'. This paper is a condensed version of the earlier analysis released in November 2006. It looks at librarian purchasing preferences, and concludes that mandating self-archiving within six months or less of publication will undermine the subscription-based peer review journal. The summary paper, together with the original report, is freely available at http://www.publishingresearch.org.uk/. Sally Morris on behalf of the Publishing Research Consortium Email: [log in to unmask] Website: www.publishingresearch.org.uk