Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

[Atanu Garai <atanugarai.lists@gmail.com>]

Phil Davis wrote:

> Price sensitivity is key to the solution, and I'm glad that 
> David brings this point up again.  It also allows us to debate 
> the rationality of different publisher models on economic 
> (rather than moral) grounds.  The Report of the Cornell 
> University Library Task Force on Open Access Publishing done in 
> 2004 contains a large section where we considered the 
> implications of various models of funding (see pages 7-11 of 
> http://hdl.handle.net/1813/193).  None of them, of course, is 
> without problems.
I looked into the paper 7-11 again and I know I have to work on 
this quite a bit before writing along these lines. One issue is 
that, which is not mentioned in your paper, I believe, within the 
economics of open access realm, flow of money remains, only its 
direction and quantity may change. It is a matter of 
investigation to understand 'who pays what' - which is, of 
course, very important. It is important because it determines the 
changing role of these institutions - libraries, research 
universities, publishers - in the open access supply chain.

I guess the amount of tax paid by the commercial publishers to 
the government would fall in the same brackets what universities 
receive as grants from the government (and other sources) for 
giving OA fees, including others. Then on the user side, the fees 
for accessing licensed content are not paid by the users 
themselves, they are paid by the libraries. In a way, the issue 
of charging authors or users is much more neutral than we can 
think.

Atanu Garai