Re: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

["Richard Gottlieb" <rhg@greyhouse.com>]

Joe's e-mail below is exactly on the money. The purported expansion of
access to research via OA is either a fantasy or an attempt to obfuscate
the real issue, which is to reduce journal expenditures to free up moneys
for other library priorities.

There isn't a serious researcher in almost any field to be considered,
especially in the sciences, who is constrained or limited by an inability
to access print. Either through their own library's subscriptions,
association membership, institutional availability to aggregator's data
bases, or inter-institutional loan.

The damage to small and association publishers is being brushed off as
being part of some appropriate Darwinian process. Are Journal closings
and/or sale to the Elseviers and Kluwers a positive outcome? And barely
touched on in these discussions are the damaging effects to scholarship,of
the termination of the article selection and peer review process that
takes place currently.

It's all about money folks.

Richard Gottlieb

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

> No, not at all.  My advice to small publishers is (a) seek consolidation,
> whether by selling out to a larger company or by developing publishing
> consortia (b) be very careful about working with aggregators, whose
> success often undermines subscriptions (c) steer clear of Open Access,
> including declining to publish authors who self-archive (d) if the journal
> is owned by a professional society, regularly inform the membership how
> much higher their dues will be if publishing revenues drop (e) petition
> elected representatives to get the NIH and other governmental bodies to
> get out of publishing (f)  seek new revenue streams by repackaging
> material (new sales channels, licensed archives, etc.) (g) most
> importantly, make every effort to publish the finest work in the
> field--there is no substitute for editorial excellence (h) begin to
> experiment with INEXPENSIVE author-pays hosting schemes, something between
> arXiv and BMC, which strip away most of the costs associated with
> editorial review (e.g., prepublication peer review) (i) aggressively
> pursue search-engine marketing, bypassing library portals (j) actively
> market the journal's role in certification to its readership (k) be wary
> of marketing plans whose success is largely built upon price increases.
> This list can go on and on.
>
> There is a great deal that a publisher, big or small, could do.  What they
> should NOT do is put valuable time into OA.  Publishers should defend
> THEIR interests, just as librarians and authors do theirs, as one would
> expect.
>
> Joe Esposito