Dear Anand and friends of the LIS Community. This is an interesting on-going development across several global Ivy League universities. The positive side of the developments in MIT's negotiation is that it has refused to relinquish its authors' copyright on papers they publish. This will be the beginning of the end of authors surrendering their exclusive copyright to journal publishers. It will also be a game-changer in the scholarly journal publishing economics of the past on which the journal publishing evolved during the last century. .
From a neutral view, these developments have not yet opened up definitive directions for a sustainable development of alternative journal publishing model as yet. Authors or their institutes will have to shell out US$ 2,000-3,500 to publish in a well cited journal. Even after close to two decades of OA movement which has taken deeper roots, there is no viable business model in the sight. With emotions at over-play in the scholarly community about OA on which authors are not exactly wholly united, is the situation turning out to be an "I win you loose game" from either side? It is time OA enthusiasts and advocates seriously start working on a viable business model for OA as a definitive option, be it Plan S or an unknown Play Y. Any business model will require partnership with commercial agencies to manage the model for successful evolution. As we realise today in the midst of Covid crisis, besides health, economics is at the centre of everything we want and we do.
Currently, according to Heather Piwowar, the co-founder of UnpayWall, 31% of all journal articles are estimated to be OA with the rest behind paywalls. Green OA constitutes 4%, which is the contribution of all the 4,000+ IRs in the world. Gold, Hybrid and embargoed OA contribute 27%, a good part of which is managed by commercial publishing. (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/795310v1.full.pdf)
A disruptive model that has the potential to succeed can perhaps emerge by breaking the idea of journal into to something else through an innovative process. What can Libraries do in concrete terms in this direction?
N. V. Sathyanarayana
Informatics India Ltd., Bangalore.
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From: LIS-Forum