Small publishers and OA (RE: Homer Simpson at the NIH)

["Rick Anderson" <rick.anderson@utah.edu>]

> Now let's reintroduce the idea of open access.  Unfortunately, 
> through what we might call a prism of misunderstanding, open 
> access has been seen as a great threat to the smaller 
> publishers. My suggestion is that handled well it could 
> actually provide a survival mechanism for them.  Society 
> publishers and university presses have a number of great 
> advantages that could help them thrive in a publication-charge 
> open access journal environment - they often have high-quality 
> journals with excellent author services and they have close 
> connections with their communities (a bonus when searching for 
> referees).

This might be true if those small publishers were operating in a 
100% OA environment, and if the bigger publishers in that 
environment have no ability (or incentive) to set their author 
charges at competitive rates. But if the environment is something 
less than 100% OA (and therefore includes subscription-subsidized 
journals) or if the environment includes publishers that can 
afford to set their author charges competitively (and can thereby 
lure authors away from smaller publishers), it's hard to see how 
small publishers are going to benefit. The bottom line is that 
when you make it harder for small publishers to sell their 
services, you make it harder for small publishers to stay in 
business.

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Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
University of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu