Re: Publishers' view/reply to David Prosser

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

This is perhaps a matter of definition, but I would say that the author
demand for (at least some kinds of) open access is enormous and is indeed
arguably the fastest-growing aspect of current Internet usage, with the
possible exception of the new generation of social software (Friendster,
LinkedIn, and the like), outstripping even voice-over-Internet Protocol.  
The Weblog is a form--currently the PRIMARY form--of open-access
publishing.  Many people think that for OA to "really" be OA, it has to
look like traditional (read:  proprietary) publishing.  Thus we have a
crop of OA practitioners that are going to great lengths to develop
parallel peer review systems, citations systems, and the like.  To my mind
this is like the early days of personal computing, when the Apple II was
criticized for not being more like a mainframe.

Open Access is happening; it is just not happening in the way its most
respectable advocates imagine or hope for.  There is something in the
emergent OA universe (with blogs as version 1.0) for everyone--or nothing
for anyone, depending on how twisted one's perspective happens to me.

"Unwashed" OA (as distinct from such carefully articulated and respectable
ventures as the Public Library of Science) is indeed available to anyone
without restriction--and thus antipathetic to the interests of publishers;
it is free--and thus antipathetic to the interests of librarians, who
serve as gatekeepers with a checkbook to the world of proprietary
publishing; and it is developed in a dialogue with a community--making it
antipathetic to the interests of authors, who seek personal attribution
for economic, psychological, and professional reasons (mostly
psychological).

Whoever thought when Steve Wozniak stuck the first disk drive into the
Apple computer that we would someday be communicating on a vast, global
network of machines, each of us pecking away at our personal "client"?

>From the pigpen,

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sally Morris (ALPSP)" <chief-exec@alpsp.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 5:01 AM
Subject: Re: Publishers' view/reply to David Prosser

> Curiously, there seems to be remarkably little evidence of author demand
> for Open Access publication according to all the studies I have seen.
> There's a straw poll running on the ALPSP discussion list at the moment,
> and so far no society publisher has reported demand from a single society
> member.
>
> In the end, it is author behaviour which will drive change
>
> Sally Morris, Chief Executive
> Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
> E-mail:  chief-exec@alpsp.org