Big Deals Eat Our Seed Corn
We are finding it difficult to convince individual universities or funders to commit to supporting us even at the basic level of €1,000 per year, since their budget is eaten up by all the insistent (and well-calculated) invoicing from for-profit publishers.
Jean-Sébastien Caux, founder of SciPost and Free Journal Network Steering Committee member in Introducing the Free Journal Network – community-controlled open access publishing
I am convinced that the best publishing model, and the only model that is fully consistent with scholarly norms and values, is community-controlled and supported infrastructure that is free to the author and to the reader. But that infrastructure isn’t free of cost; that cost should be born by research institutions, and libraries are the natural place to look for the expertise and the funding for new models of scholarship. We have to plant the seeds that will grow into a better system. As long as “must-have” bundles gobble up more than half our budgets, and essentially all of our e-resource budgets, there’s no seed money for these important projects. As long as we are feeding our seed corn to international conglomerates, we will never develop the sustainable system that could replace them.