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RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees



The big publishers have far more capital to invest in providing sophisticated, cutting-edge "services"--and don't forget that they can afford to pay good stipends to academics to edit their journals, too. The consortial solution you suggest, David, is the best way for the smaller publishers to compete. But even a large consortium like Project Muse has nowhere near the investment capital that the biggest STM publishers do, so it will always be a game of catch-up.

Appeals to scholars to support non-profit alternatives have had very limited success so far: witness the migration of AnthroSource to Wiley. We'll see how successful initiatives like Harvard's opt-out mandate is. In view of the UC report on faculty attitudes, which showed most scholars (especially in the sciences) satisfied with their current publishing arrangements and feeling that it is other people who have problems, not themselves, I say "good luck." Faculty attitudes and habits die hard.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


Jim:  Your WalMart comparison is interesting, but I draw a
different conclusion from it than you do.

The first thing to note is that for the publishing process the
most important input is the intellectual.  Editors and reviewers
have no greater incentive to work with a big publisher than they
do with a small society publisher.  The ability to extract
intellectual effort from the community is not one that the big
publishers through their market position can leverage.

Where they can dominate is in sales and marketing.  Big
publishers can go to individual libraries and consortia and offer
large bundles, in multi-year packages that tie-in large
percentages of the libraries' budgets.  They can employ large
sales-forces to ensure that their products continue to be
purchased by the consortia.  Small publishers find it harder to
compete as they do not have the sales-forces and they do not have
the bundles.  So, it is the current big-deal subscription model
that encourages WalMart-type behaviour and is leading to the
consolidation of the market.  We can see this in the trend for
small and society publishers to move away from independence - a
move that has nothing to do with open access.

Open access with input fees allows publishers to compete on the
level of author services - something that small and society
publisher have traditionally been very good at.  Rather than
being the death-knell for society publishers it could be their
best chance of survival - especially compared to the current
big-deal environment.

Now if we just replace the current model where users (authors and
readers) are insulated from the subscription costs of journals to
a new model where users are insulated from publication charges
then the possibilities of generating a functional market will be
diminished and small publishers will be disadvantaged as they
will find it harder to compete against big publisher publication
charge big-deals (of the 'For a yearly payment of x hundred
thousand dollars the fees for publishing in any of publisher y's
1000 journals are covered for all researchers at institution z'
type).  That is why it is important that the prices become
transparent to the users and they become more closely integrated
with the decision making.

(I should add as an aside that I do think there are places where
small and society publishers could usefully come together more in
cooperatives to share development of submission systems,
publishing platforms and such like. That would provide them with
some economies of scale while allowing them to concentrate on
what they are best at - selection and certification.  There have
been some efforts in this direction - e.g. BioOne - but I would
like to see more.)

David Prosser
SPARC Europe