BOIA – response from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)

BOIA – response from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)

BOIA – response from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)

Keywords: Archives, Journal publishing, Sustainable development

ALPSP represents some 200 members from numerous countries; the substantial majority of these are not-for-profit publishers of scholarly and professional information (societies, university presses and others). As not-for-profit publishers, our members share a commitment to the widest possible dissemination of information for the good of scholarship; making money from the process is secondary, and where publishing surpluses are made, these are used to support the mission of the parent organisation.

We know, from our own research (What Authors Want: The ALPSP Research Study on the Motivations and Concerns of Contributors to Learned Journals), that formal publication continues to have great value to scholars, and that peer review is only one part of what they value. However, the processes of formal publication cost money. The advent of electronic publication has reduced these costs much less than hoped; indeed it has added new ones, such as database creation and maintenance, provision of the searchability and usability which users want, and permanent archiving and preservation. In order for the core functions of formal publication to continue, they must be paid for at some point in the communication chain.

ALPSP recognises that there is a growing problem, driven by the continuing growth in the volume of research literature, and the much lower growth, if any, in the library budgets available to buy it. Many of our members already make archival content freely available, and we do not restrict authors from posting and re-using their own articles: we encourage publishers to adopt the most scholarship-friendly policies that they can afford. In addition, a number of our members are actively engaged in developing and testing alternative funding models which might be more sustainable than the present library subscription/licence model. However, we are convinced that all of our scholarly communities will be ill-served by an initiative which promotes systematic institutional archiving of journal content without having in place a viable alternative academic model to fund the publication of that content. This can only serve to undermine the formal publishing process which these communities value, and we find it alarming that a responsible organisation proposes to subsidise such an initiative.

A second study, Authors and Electronic Publishing, was published in March 2002.

Source: ALPSP