Cost of Open Access

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@worldnet.att.net>]

Heather Morrison worte:

>Another area where cost savings can confidently be expected with open
>access, particularly for publishers, is authentication.

The single largest cost in the publication of traditional (or proprietary
or copyrighted) works is the creation of a market for a product. Every
single penny expended by a publisher directly or indirectly goes toward
this single task. Not only will open access, for all its considerable
merits, not reduce this cost, but OA will indeed significantly, even
overwhelmingly increase the amount of money that will go into pairing
authors with readers. For those who think of marketing with a lowercase
"m" as simply an appeal to base instincts in the service of a product
(e.g., half-naked women used to sell automobiles), it may be beside the
point that capital "M" Marketing is a difficult and daring activity that
involves the identification of needs, the sourcing of materials, the
definition of a product, and the creation of demand. It is such a
demanding activity that its practitioners attend elite research
institutions to be trained to do it. The journals industry as we know it
today did not spring full-blown from the mind of Zeus.

OA will increase these costs because the suppression of production (what
publishers do: they SUPPRESS production by serving as filters) will cease.
Output will soar; finding the needle in a haystack will come to seem like
an easy task.  All the algorithms of Google will not put Humpty Dumpty
together again.

Joseph J. Esposito