Update: I emailed Alex Tabarrok to get his thoughts on this. He originally proposed using dominant assurance contracts to solve public good problems, and he has experience testing it empirically.
He makes the following points about my suggestion:
The first step is the most important. Without clarity of what the public good will be and who is expected to pay for it, the DAC won’t work
You should probably focus on libraries as the potential source of funding. They are the ones who pay subscription fees, they are the ones who would benefit from this
DACs are a novel forum of social technology. It might be best to try to deliver smaller public goods first, allowing people to get more familiar, before trying to buy a journal
He also suggested other ways to solve the same problem:
Have you considered starting a new journal? This should be cheaper. There would also be a coordination questions to solve to make it prestigious, but this one might be easier
Have you considered ‘flipping’ a journal? Could you take the editors, reviewers and community that supports an existing journal, and persuade them to start a similar but open access journal? (The Fair Open Access Alliance seem to have had success facilitating this. Perhaps we should support them?)
My current (and weakly held) position is that flipping editorial boards to create new open access journals is the best way to improve publishing standards. Small steps towards a much better world. Would it be possible to for the Future Fund to entice 80% of the big journals to do this? The top journal in every field? Maybe.
Update: I emailed Alex Tabarrok to get his thoughts on this. He originally proposed using dominant assurance contracts to solve public good problems, and he has experience testing it empirically.
He makes the following points about my suggestion:
The first step is the most important. Without clarity of what the public good will be and who is expected to pay for it, the DAC won’t work
You should probably focus on libraries as the potential source of funding. They are the ones who pay subscription fees, they are the ones who would benefit from this
DACs are a novel forum of social technology. It might be best to try to deliver smaller public goods first, allowing people to get more familiar, before trying to buy a journal
He also suggested other ways to solve the same problem:
Have you considered starting a new journal? This should be cheaper. There would also be a coordination questions to solve to make it prestigious, but this one might be easier
Have you considered ‘flipping’ a journal? Could you take the editors, reviewers and community that supports an existing journal, and persuade them to start a similar but open access journal? (The Fair Open Access Alliance seem to have had success facilitating this. Perhaps we should support them?)
My current (and weakly held) position is that flipping editorial boards to create new open access journals is the best way to improve publishing standards. Small steps towards a much better world. Would it be possible to for the Future Fund to entice 80% of the big journals to do this? The top journal in every field? Maybe.