An odd thought about market failure
As often as not, when a faculty member encounters open access journals, the conclusion is immediately drawn that author-pays is the only, or most prominent, or most common business model. Faculty members then flee in dismay. Doesn’t matter the discipline, doesn’t matter how much grant money the individual is swimming in, it’s always “Author pays! Flee, you fools!”
Well, that connected up in my head with the notion that an individual faculty member is reading less and less of the scholarly literature, percentage-wise. I once heard Allen Renear put it this way: “When a researcher picks up an article, he’s looking for an excuse not to read it.”
And it made me think that maybe author-pays is the economically-efficient funding model. Why should libraries be paying for stuff that nobody wants to read? The real benefit is to the author’s career, isn’t it? So why shouldn’t the author pay?
I know, I know. But things connect up oddly in my head sometimes.