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
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