Re: How much advertising is there?

["adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

I remember once trying to read the article in which Godel proved 
his incompleteness theorem. I perservered but my understanding 
did not carry me through....If you look at scholarly publishing 
in the manner of an estate agent it does not appear to be very 
promising terrain. The really good stuff may be almost 
incomprehensible. Not enough eyeballs and some of them are on 
very thin stipends with low disposable income.

But this really isnt the point. The value of scholarly 
publications is clearly not to be measured in the terms of the 
Google ads the page might transact, nor indeed in terms of the 
subscription income through which it may be currently supported. 
What matters is its accessiblity and its citeability, and its in 
those areas that the Open Access argument wins the day.

To put it rather crudely: the value of the Godel-watching 
eyeballs is not to be measured in terms of the ads which might 
appear on the Godel-content pages. The value for Google is in the 
overall intentional record and reading/seeking pattern of the web 
user. From that standpoint the value of the shape and patterns of 
research and scholalry activity may be really very high and they 
may be realised in ways which we find it hard to conceive. Google 
surely knows this and that is one reason why it has made its big 
commitment to Google Book Search.

There may be more value in openness than in the transaction where 
the page which meets the eyeball.

Adam

On 9/27/07, Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu> wrote:
> But no one has yet answered my question: how much, and what kind
> of, advertising could one expect to get for, say, our Journal of
> Speculative Philosophy, or the Shaw Annual, or the Chaucer
> Review? These are typical of specialized scholarly journals in
> the humanities, and I see no salvation for them going OA through
> advertising revenue.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press
>
>>I think Mr Hodgkin is right. Just look at what Ryanair has
>>achieved. The goal is not just cheap flights, but free flights.
>>lot of commercial TV-channels are for free. The OA model is on
>>the forefront of intelligent development if OA could be less
>>hostile to the advertising business.
>>
>>Jan Szczepanski
>>Goteborgs universitetsbibliotek
>>E-mail: Jan.Szczepanski@ub.gu.se