Journal Title Migration and University Resource Reallocation

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SUMMARY: (1) If some publishers (commercial or otherwise) should ever decide to abandon journal publishing because of lowered profit prospects, their titles and editorial boards will migrate, quite naturally, to Gold OA publishers. (2) If ever faced with the (currently hypothetical) question "Do we use our newfound windfall cancellation savings from our former publication buy-in to pay (2a) for our newfound publication costs for our research publication output, or (2b) for something else, letting our research output fend for itself?" universities will find their way, quite naturally, to the obvious solution.

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Sandy Thatcher, President, Association of American University Presses (AAUP) wrote:

ST: "[I]t is not a matter of whether the STM business could be run profitably with NIH-type restrictions in place, but instead the expectations the companies most invested in this business have about profit margins and their willingness to continue in the business at a lower level of profit when their funds might be redirected to more profitable uses elsewhere. Money tends to go where the expectations for profits are greatest."

If some players (commercial or otherwise) eventually abandon the journal publishing game because of lowered prospects for profit, their titles and editorial boards will migrate, quite naturally, to other players (like PLoS or BMC or Hindawi) who are quite happy to stay in, or enter, the Gold OA arena (but we are again getting ahead of ourselves: it is Green OA, Green OA mandates and Institutional OA Repositories whose time is coming first, not Gold OA). Journal title migration itself is not hypothetical: it is happening all the time, irrespective of OA. (So is journal death, and birth.) A learned journal consists of its editorship, peer-reviewership, authorship, and reputation (including its impact metrics), not its publisher. We know (and value) journals by their individual titles and track-records, not their publishers.

ST: "One would hope... that "logic" would apply, of all places, within academic institutions. But I have been writing now for two decades providing "evidence" of ways in which higher education does not act according to logic, or norms of rationality, that one would expect from it."

It is certainly true that universities sometimes (often?) act irrationally, sometimes even with respect to their own best interests: not only universities, but corporations (and even people, individual and plural) betimes obtund. But reality eventually exerts a pressure (if the stakes and consequences are nontrivial) and adaptation occurs -- not necessarily for the best, in ethical and humanistic terms, but at least for the better in terms of "interests".

And the competition of interests in the question of what universities will do with their hypothetical windfall journal-cancellation savings (if/when Green OA mandates ever generate the -- likewise hypothetical -- unsustainable subscription cancellations) is a competition between the other things universities could do with those newfound windfall savings -- e.g., (1) buying more books for the university library, or withdrawing them from the university library budget altogether and spending them on something else -- versus (2) using those savings to pay for the university's newfound research publicaton costs (which, on the very same hypothesis, will emerge pari passu with the university's windfall cancellation savings).

It seems a safe bet that since the logical brainwork in question is just a one-step deduction (which I think university adminstrators, even with their atrophied neurons, should still be capable of making, if they are still capable of getting up in the morning at all), the new dance-step will be mastered: Faced with the question "Do we use our newfound windfall cancellation savings from our former publication buy-in to pay for our newfound publication costs of our research publication output, or for something else, letting our research output fend for itself?" they will -- under the pressure of logic, necessity, practicality, self-interest, and a lot of emails and phone-calls from their research-publishing faculty -- find their way to the dead-obvious (dare I say "optimal and inevitable"? solution...

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum