Re: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I was unaware that anyone was concerned about the prosperity of
traditional publishers, except the publishers themselves.  Speaking only
for myself, my concern is being presented with the absurdity of publishers
being asked to sentence themselves to death.

Joe Esposito

On 7/18/05, adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com> wrote:
> I find this concern for the prosperity of 'traditional publishers' rather
> comic. Are we being asked to believe that 'traditional publishing' is a
> vocation like 'artisanale cheese-making' or 'hand-thrown pottery' that
> deserves our private support and the shelter of a special economic regime?
> 
> Publishing, like librarianship, is a function which needs to reinvent
> itself in the technology and economic circumstances of the period in which
> the function is performed. Librarians and publishers are adjusting their
> practice to a delivery platform in which there is negligible marginal cost
> to searching masses of material (the more the merrier) and NO marginal
> cost to providing universal access to that material. This was not of
> course true with the relatively inefficient library-publishing technology
> platform of the 20th Century (call it 'traditional' if you insist; but
> lets recall that Excerpta Medica was the latest 'new new' thing in 1960).
> 
> Adam