Economies of Scale

In "Scale and scalability," Jan Velterop writes:

"self-archiving is... not scalable. As long as... only a small number of authors... [self-archive] anarchically and unpredictably, it will work... [But] [t]ake the anarchy and unpredictability out of it... via self-archiving mandates – and... [n]o publisher... could afford to allow authors to self-archive... and ‘green’ would fade out of existence."

Individual journals making 100% of their own contents Open Access (OA) (gold), all at once, and all in one place, right now, is indeed likely to cause cancellations.

But individual authors making their own articles OA (green) by self-archiving them in their own Institutional Repositories, anarchically and distributedly, does not provide 100% of the contents of any individual journal, and its extent and growth rate is hard to ascertain. (In other words, individual mandates are just as anarchic as individual self-archiving with respect to the contents of any individual journal.)

Hence self-archiving is unlikely to cause journal cancellations until the self-archiving of all articles in all journals is reliably at or near 100%. If/when that happens, or is clearly approaching, journals can and will scale down to become peer-review service providers only, recovering their much reduced costs on the OA model that Jan favors. But journals are extremely unlikely to want to do that scaling down and conversion now, when there is no pressure to do it. And there is certainly no reason for researchers to sit waiting meanwhile, as they keep losing access, usage and impact. Mandates will pressure researchers to self-archive, and, eventually, 100% self-archiving might also pressure journals to scale down and convert to the model Jan advocates.

Right now, however, journals are all still making ends meet through subscriptions, whereas (non-self-archiving) researchers are all still losing about half their potential daily usage and impact, cumulatively. The immediate priority for research, researchers, their institutions and their funders is hence obvious, and it is certainly not to pay their journals' current asking-price for making each individual article OA, over and above paying for subscriptions: It is to make their own individual articles OA, right now, by self-archiving them, and to pay for peer review only if and when journals have minimized costs by scaling down to the essentials in the OA era if/when there is no longer any sustainable way of recovering those costs via subscriptions.

(By that time, of course, subscription cancellation savings will have become available to pay those reduced costs up-front. Today they are not; and double-paying up front would be pure folly.)

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum