On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Graham Triggs <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
research does require scholarly communication, and to that extent research - and research funders - should be concerned that however it is (or should be) arranged, that there is a sustainable model for it. That includes ensuring continued, sustainable communication during any transition phase.
Even for the full set of services currently provided, there isn't justification that the subscription model must be sustained.
But I wouldn't be so quick to write-off "no longer necessary" activities by publishers. As it currently stands, the publisher's copy is a verifiable record of peer-review taking place. It's also the version assigned pagination information which is still used by convention for citations (even in the presence of persistent identifiers). It's also the means by which the publication is tracked in PubMed, WoS, Scopus, etc.
This is not double payment. It's just payment. If the Gold OA publishers did not exist, then there would be more closed access / subscription journals than there are now, and you would be paying more / higher subscription fees.
You can't assess the potential for double-dipping based on the amount of Gold OA articles that are published. In fact, it's probably not helpful to even think consider double-dipping at all.
For a hybrid journal, there is a simpler point of comparison - APC vs average subscription revenue for closed access articles. Regardless of where the journal is positioned in the market, you would expect these should be roughly equivalent, or slightly favouring the APC.
If, with 100% Gold OA, there was a viable opportunity to downsize publishing services, then somebody would surely do it - just as Gold OA publishers exist today because there was a viable opportunity to establish a new business model. Green OA is not the only route to that outcome.
100% immediate, post peer-review Green OA might make the revenue and therefore costs of publishers unsustainable. But if that happens, will they still have an incentive to incur the costs of downsizing? Or could they just shutter all of their (scholarly communication) activities?
Or we could find out that despite all expectations, nothing much happens to nothing much happens to subscription costs (because primary links are still to the publisher's site, etc.) - in which case, nothing much changes.
Whilst some outcomes may appear to be more likely than others, nothing is actually certain.