[Open-access] Global - national scientific information budget

Tue Mar 12 16:38:30 UTC 2013

I like the idea of an anonymous survey for getting the data on costs of
bundled subscriptions.
Would SPARC be able to start this?
These figures would be very useful when calculating economic benefits of
open access

TOM

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Douglas Carnall
<dougie.carnall at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 11 March 2013 10:38, Laurent Romary <laurent.romary at inria.fr> wrote:
>
> > Is there a reference document which describes and breaks down (e.g.
> >subscriptions) the scientific information budgets worldwide and country
> per >country?
>
> As an academic librarian Heather Morrison has done a fair number of
> big picture calculations over the years:
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/economics
>
> The most widely cited economic studies are by Houghton, gathered here:
>
> http://www.cfses.com/projects/Easi-OA.htm
>
> and Alma Swan repeated Houghton’s methods in the UK in Feb 2010:
>
>
> http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2010/howtoopenaccess.aspx
>
> Mike Taylor wrote various articles about this time last year which
> also tried to address the big financial picture, among them:
>
>
> http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/31858/title/Opinion--Academic-Publishing-Is-Broken-/
>
> Less big picture, but equally indicative of just where the money goes
> in paywall publishing was Richard Smith's blog post, in which he
> remarked that the "editors were being taken for suckers and exploited
> more cruelly than the people working in fast food joints":
>
>
> http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2012/07/03/richard-smith-medical-journals-a-gaggle-of-golden-geese/
>
> an article that certainly reminded me that the heart of that fat crook
> Robert Maxwell's business empire was the academic publisher Pergamon
> Press.
>
> So why is the information you seek hard to come by?
>
> At the heart of modern business are two dark secrets, both guarded
> intensely close to players' chests: what the customer is willing to
> pay, and the various components that compose a price. That is why
> publishers oblige libraries to keep their journal bundle prices
> confidential, and that is why such pricing information can be hard to
> come by as we try to estimate how much it would take to make the
> world's scientific literature freely available so that all may benefit
> from it.
>
> I'm sure everyone would be interested to read the results from an
> anonymous survey that enabled librarians to unburden themselves of the
> secret knowledge in these commercial confidentiality agreements...
>
> Maybe this would be something the OKFN could take on? Or indeed INRIA?
>
> Je vous souhaite une très bonne continuation,
>
> D.
> --
> Douglas Carnall
> dougie.carnall at gmail.com
>
> http://cabinetbeezer.info
>
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