Apologies for picking this up so late
There are, in fact, tangible examples where publishers have
experienced serious consequences from offering too short an
embargo
British Medical Journal - when all content was free on BMJ
site,
print subs (and ads) fell dramatically. Now that only
research
articles are free, revenue has almost recovered
Molecular Biology of the Cell - in the 3 years following
introduction of free access after 2 month embargo, average
annual
subscription growth fell from (spectacular!) 84% to 8%
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science - free access
after 1 month embargo in 2000 led to 11% fall in
subscriptions in
2001; extending the embargo to 6 months reduced this to 9%
in
2002
Sally Morris
Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)
South House, The Street
Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Email: sally morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-llists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-llists.yale.edu] On Behalf
Of David Prosser
Sent: 20 March 2007 21:47
To: liblicense-llists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Summary paper from the Publishing Research
Consortium
The Beckett and Inger paper 'Self-Archiving and Journal
Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?' gives us a
hypothesis (p. 11 of the summary paper):
'In the extreme case of 100% availability of content on the
institutional archives and a 24-month embargo, still nearly
half
the market for subscription journals has disappeared.'
So, if 100% of the journal's content is freely available the
journal will, all other factors being equal, lose a massive
proportion of its subscription base. Decreasing the embargo
to
zero increases the predicted fall in the market from 50% to
approximately 70%.
Can we test this hypothesis? If we look at journals hosted
by
HighWire Press we can see that a large number make papers
freely
available after 6, 12, or 24 months (see
http:/
/highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl). For these
journals, the final versions of papers are made available to
all.
If the prediction made by Beckett and Inger was true then
these
journals should have started to haemorrhaging subscriptions
following the opening-up of the archives. Is there any
evidence
that they have?
Back in 2005, John Sack wrote, in a history of HighWire
Press
(http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content
/alpsp/lp/2005/00000018/00000002/art00
008)
After several years of content was online, Nick Cozzarelli
(PNAS), Bob Simoni (JBC) and Michael Held (Rockefeller
University
Press) presented a concept of 'free back issues' to their
colleague HighWire publishers. Their view was that
librarians and
researchers were subscribing because they needed access to
absolutely current issues, and that there was significant
educational benefit in issues that were months old. They
proposed
that back issues (6 or 12 months old) be made freely
available to
the public to support educational uses, and expected that
this
would have no significant effect on subscription count.
Gradually
more and more journals came to this same belief, and today
the
programme comprises the largest archive of free full-text
research articles that we know of: over 825,000 articles
from
about 220 journals.
There does not appear to be a mass retreat from the free
back
file programme - are publisher sanguine in the face of 50%
declines in their subscription base?
Of course, most of the HighWire hosted journals offering
free
backfiles are in the biological and medical fields, but as
the
summary does not break-down the response of librarians by
subject
area, it is difficult to tell what predictions are being
made in
these fields.
So, we have a hypothesis and we have some test-cases. If the
HighWire-hosted journals are managing to survive despite the
predicted massive falls in subscriptions they should have
experience, why should we take the Beckett and Inger study
as a
credible warning of what might happen as self-archiving
become
more widespread?
David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail: david.prosserbodley.ox.ac.uk
http://www.sparceurope.org
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