Susan Hezlet
London Mathematical Society 

The Open Archives Initiative and Payment Models -- A Learned Society
Publisher's Perspective

The OAI-PMH and the Budapest Open Access Initiative promote the idea
of freely accessible journals at the point of use. The open access
journals have moved away from the traditional subscription model,
where the library or reader pays for access, to a new payment model
where the authors or research funding bodies are prepared to cover the
costs. Some publishers are thinking of launching or moving existing
journals to adopt the Open Access Initiative. What would make them
move? They want to be sure that the model is sustainable in terms of
the financial return.

The intention of this talk is not to argue moral causes but to briefly
outline how the scholarly journals economy works - i.e. how the money
flows between governments, research funding bodies, mathematicians (as
authors and readers), commercial publishers and learned societies.
Then to see if there is a way that the flow of money can be diverted
in new directions without destroying the things we want from a
scholarly journal: peer review and dissemination of one's work.

(No attempt will be made to address technical computing aspects of the
problem.)