Re: Q 1. on OA

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>]

Couldn't agree more.  Marketing is not selling - it's making your product or
service visible.  In the case of journals (or individual articles, come to
that) this means making sure that potential authors and readers know they
exist and can readily find them - much of this has to do with inclusion in
the relevant databases (which doesn't just happen by magic), linking to and
from databases and other articles, etc..  This costs money!

Sally


Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871 686
Fax:  +44 (0)1903 871 457
Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message -----
From: <Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 12:35 AM
Subject: RE: Q 1. on OA


> 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
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