RE: Q 1. on OA

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

Richard,

I drafted a response yesterday, but didn't send it because I 
couldn't quite get my thoughts into a concise message. Your new 
post helps, thank you. The point I was going to make was this: it 
takes more than an ideal publishing system and OA to maximise 
audience reach. It also requires old fashioned promotion and 
marketing - and this also costs money.

Why do I say this? Here's a couple of stories.

1. In the UK we license most of our statistical databases to a 
database aggregator called MIMAS. They've also got data from our 
peers - the World Bank, IMF, Eurostat, UN et al. MIMAS have the 
right to make all this data freely available to the all higher 
educational institutions in the UK. By some estimates, that's 
around 1.5 million students and faculty. So, we've got the 
ingredients you propose: OA and an ideal publishing platform - 
result? Well, for our data around 9,000 sessions a year. That's 
not a lot for an audience of this size and we think this is 'way 
below what the usage could be. In other markets we're learning 
that it's important to make presentations and promote our content 
to users, and when we do, usage goes up. Seems we've got a 
missing ingredient in the UK.

2. Would I be right in assuming that your ideal publishing system 
uses Google or the other search engines as a key discovery tool? 
If so, then read on. We're adding all our scholarly reports into 
Google Books (they're also in Google Scholar, but that's another 
story). Google Books is a bit like your ideal publishing system 
in that the full text is there and users can see the pages 
they've searched for freely (there's a limit on the total number 
of pages they can see in a session - so not perfect OA). Google 
have thoughtfully provided publishers with a tool so we can see 
the number of visitors to each of our reports (we've loaded 
around 1500). The surprise is this: our French language editions 
are getting visitor levels 500 - 1000 times MORE than our English 
language editions. Via any other channel (print, online, 
whatever) our French editions usually get about 7% of all 
traffic. So what's going on? Our conclusion is this: with French 
we've got first-mover advantage because so few French books are 
available in Google. While in English, we're competing with an 
ever-growing mountain of other stuff, so we're having to fight 
for market share. As we all know, searchers rarely look beyond 
the first ten or so results, so the game becomes one of finding 
ways to boost your rankings - a Red Queen game if there ever was 
one. Our conclusion is that those that have the ability and money 
to do search result boosting, promotion and marketing will 
probably get more of their stuff read than those who can't.

So the moral of my stories: the need for marketing and promotion 
won't go away even with a perfect platform and OA. This will 
require money too.

As to your theoretical question - I'm sure all publishers want 
maximum access to their content. However, to achieve this they 
need a stable and predicatable business model to make it work. 
Maybe an author-side payment system will prove to be sustainable 
and, if it is, it will surely displace the reader-side payment 
system over time. Why am I so confident? Because in spite of 
everything, I trust the market - it has an uncanny knack of 
producing the most efficient system in the end.

Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate
http://www.oecd.org/Bookshop
http://www.SourceOECD.org  - our award-winning e-library
http://www.oecd.org/OECDdirect  - our new title alerting service

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Richard Feinman
Sent: 20 June, 2006 1:38 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Q 1. on OA

Maybe the Q. wasn't phrased well.  I am trying to propose a 
thought experiment.  Suppose there were all the money needed to 
get what ever publishing model one wanted, that miraculously we 
could pay for whatever quality is needed.  Is there then any 
argument that OA is not an ideal. You can say the ideal is not 
practical or it will never happen, or whatever. I am only trying 
to settle the difference between a best case and the practical 
barriers to that goal.  Net income is financial benefit no matter 
how messianic the ultimate disposition of the money is.

So, rephrasing: if money were freely available from whatever 
sources, is there any argument against OA?  Not money is never 
freely available, but if it were freely available, Gedanken 
Experiment, if you like.  You, know, frictionless pulley, freely 
reversible chemical reaction, totally altruistic society, 
whatever.

Richard D. Feinman, Professor of Biochemistry

__________

"Lisa Dittrich" <lrdittrich@aamc.org>
06/18/06 08:47 AM

Yes--our journal "benefits" only in the sense that any income we
make somewhat offsets our associations significant investment in
the costs of running our journal (and we are now published--but
not owned--by a commercial publisher).  We provide excellent
services to our authors (who routinely praise us for the
substantive editing we do) and keep our subscription prices low.
We charge no authors fees, and few of our authors are subsidized
by grants from the government or anyone else. They therefore
would likely balk at being charged any kind of fee should we move
to all OA.  Should we move to OA, my guess is that our
association would (reasonably) decide that we should simply let
the publisher take over all copyediting (which they do a rather
poor job of) and that I let go of many of the high-quality
dedicated staff members who have contributed to making our
journal the high-quality journal it has become over the course of
the past 17 or so years (in the name of cost savings, since they
would completely subsidize the journal).  You might say this is
the cost of the "greater good."

I say if I want quality, I pay for quality.  If an artist writes
a novel or paints a painting using funding from a government arts
agency, I don't think I should get that work for free.  You might
argue that, well, the journal is "stealing" the researchers'
works.  Well, no--I and my staff are adding value that costs time
and money, too, for which we deserve compensation.

Why no one seems to get this is beyond me.  Let researchers post
their research to blogs if free and fast access is all that is
needed.  If what journals add is so worthless and if we are so
evil, then let us die off.

anyway, to return to your original question--we make no profit.
And I, as managing editor and speaking only for myself and not
for my association, am entirely opposed to OA.

Lisa