Transparence de bibliothèque

Congratulations Christian and of course good luck with the appeal!

Fortunately Mr. Gorin has changed his mind and eventually allowed me to send an email to Swiss-Lib about this crowdfunding project. Thanks!

@Sylvie
Thanks for your contribution.

Of course we must pay attention that after the transition to (gold) OA we won't end up in the same situation as before, where publishers can demand fantasy prices not related to any real costs.

A great part of this topic has been addressed in the report: «Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges» (Björk and Solomon, 2014, http://goo.gl/mPZ1ei). Having read that and have talked to Björk in person, I'm quite optimistic that any Gold OA market will be better than the current subscription system. Transparency will be improved in a Gold OA world.

Actually it already has crossed my mind to request information about how much Swiss Universities spend for APCs. It would be great to put these small numbers next to the huge subscription fees.
It probably might be not so easy for the academic library to collect these numbers due to a missing monitoring/accounting system. However since Open Access publishers don't request any nondisclosure agreements, there should be no legal issues.

In Germany a few universities already have published their APC costs (broken down to the publisher and even article level): https://github.com/njahn82/unibiAPC

I funded your project about Transparence de Bibliothèque.

I really want to explain exactly what I founded: I founded Transparence de Bibliothèque, because I think that Swiss taxpayers should now how much money is spent for scientific journals publishing research already payed by the Swiss citizen. But it is not a position for Gold Open Access.

Indeed, I believe that Gold OA will be even more expensive in the future compared to subscription journals, because:
- many Swiss (and international) universities let the researchers pay directly the publisher. There is no centralized reporting of Gold OA in many Swiss (and international) Universities. I believe that spreading is even a commercial trick used by publishers to increase their incomes. In French, we say: «Diviser pour mieux régner». Very few universites will be able to publish how much money was spent for OA Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier articles
- predatory journals are flowering, and no answer is explored to solve this problem.
- price per OA article is just indecent. The higher reputation is, the highest prices are, exactly a for the subscription journal business model. So high that even stoke holder no longer consider OA as a threat to publisher business: read Reed Elsevier: Good Bye to Berlin - The Fading Threat of Open Access, Upgrade to market perform (2014, Berstein Research, Alesi and Luong).

Gold OA is a nice idea, but in reality, it is not comparable to CC, Open Source, or OER movements, which are independant of financial interests. Gold OA is still and will be in the hand of giant publishers, included in the market asking for a constant growth of benefits.

Therefore, can you also ask Swiss Universities to publish how much money was spent for Elsevier, Springer and Wiley publications in 2012, 2013, 2014 for Gold OA articles, and Hybrid articles? What is the average payed for one article?

In one sentence: institutional scientific information costs should be transparent for citizen and should be practiced independently from the business model!

Sylvie Vullioud

My email to inform the Swiss library community via Swiss-Lib about this
project was retained by the list moderator with rather strange arguments:

Von : michel.gorin@hesge.ch
Datum : 20/01/2015 - 08:27 (CET)
An : christian.gutknecht@bluewin.ch
Cc : alexandre.racine@hesge.ch
Betreff : Votre message an attente de validation sur swiss-lib

Monsieur,
Votre message adressé à swiss-lib, dans le but d’être diffusé par l’intermédiaire de notre liste, a retenu la meilleure attention des modérateurs soussignés, comme c'est le cas des nombreuses contributions que nous recevons quotidiennement.
Nous sommes au regret de vous informer du fait que nous ne pouvons accepter de diffuser votre message en l’état. En effet, notre liste de discussion est non seulement réglementée par sa charte d’utilisation, mais elle repose également sur le respect de ce que nous nommerons des principes éthiques généraux. Or, si rien, dans notre charte, ne s’oppose formellement à la diffusion en l’état de votre contribution, un aspect de cette dernière se heurte au principe de neutralité que swiss-lib se doit de respecter, afin de mériter la confiance de nos milieux professionnels. Nous faisons référence ici à votre appel à des dons, pour vous aider à couvrir vos frais liés au dépôt d’un recours contre l’Université de Genève. En publiant un tel appel, swiss-lib contribuerait à encourager ses membres à financer un recours contre une institution documentaire de notre pays (puisque l’affaire concernée est en lien direct avec la Bibliothèque de l’Université de Genève), ce qui est inacceptable. Un outil au service de notre monde professionnel, qui plus est placé sous la responsabilité du Département Information documentaire de la HEG de Genève, ne peut servir à cela !
Nous précisons qu’il s’agit là d’une décision de principe, prise indépendamment de la problématique que vous avez déjà eu l’occasion de soulever à quelques reprises par l’intermédiaire de swiss-lib, au sujet de laquelle il ne nous appartient pas de prendre position. Nous restons tout à fait disposés à diffuser vos messages relatifs à ce dossier, pour autant qu’ils contribuent à informer nos abonnés sur une question d’actualité et ses développements, sans faire de swiss-lib la «complice» d’une «attaque» contre une institution documentaire, quelle que soit sa taille et la «faute» commise.
Nous vous prions de recevoir, Monsieur, nos salutations les meilleures

Michel GORIN et Alexandre RACINE
Modération SWISS-LIB