Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
period, however valuable they may be in fact, are generally supplied by
people who need to write them rather than demanded by customers
anxious to read them), and it is generally anyone's guess whether the
document in question will offer lasting good to the scholarly
community beyond a basic salutary impact on the author's CV and
career. If the most obvious benefit of publication is to the author, why
should the author not foot the bill?
One obvious response is that the author will not, in the vast majority
of cases, actually foot that bill. The money will come from his home
institution or will be written into his grant proposal. One could argue
that this simply shifts the costs around in a fundamentally irrational
way, ensuring that scholarship that is destined to have little or no
impact on the world will be supported as if it were important. On the
other hand, the traditional subscription model has had exactly the same
effect, requiring customers to buy many articles that they do not want
in order to get access to the ones they do.
Taxation
The word 'taxation' is here used to describe any system that uses public
money (whether in the form of actual taxes or of public granting-
agency funds) to underwrite the free public distribution of research
articles and similar documents that would otherwise be available only
to subscribers. In practice, many 'author-pay' programmes are actually
taxation programmes, since the money ultimately comes from public
coffers.
The taxation model has a fundamental problem: it charges many,
many people for access to the documents in question, regardless of how
many of those people actually want or care about getting access. On the
other hand, it spreads the cost very thinly, which means that the actual
impact on any individual will be minimal. It can also be argued that
while the average person may have little or no use for a paper on
forensic histology, everyone in the world benefits when access to such
papers is broadly available to those who do have a use for them.
Which of these three models should be implemented, and which of
them is the fairest? Any question that begins with 'should' and includes
the word 'fair' is going to be impossible to settle by quantitative or
empirical argument. Publishers would generally like to price their titles
