Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

[Adam Hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

Joe

And in fact I agree with much of this. As the larger publisher 
aggregator publishers put more content in their 'big deal' 
bundles it is increasingly impractical for libraries to subscribe 
to content except through the big deal. This tendency merely to 
aggregate without offering effective disaggregation is not using 
the inherent flexibility of the 'subscribe to appropriate 
copyrights' mechanism.

But I am not sure that I see why an 'imaginative' publisher 
should expect to see a proportionate (not absolute) decline in 
library revenues year over year.

It surely depends on what has gone before and what kind of 
service the publisher is offering to libraries and other 
institutions. There are services which are only/primarily 
intended for libraries and library subscriptions.

Adam


On 24 Jun 2008, at 00:28, Joseph J. Esposito wrote:

> Adam,
>
> I reread Toby's posts and find nothing in them to suggest that a
> book  publisher should *only* market through aggregations to
> libraries.  Toby  can speak for himself, but it seems to me that
> libraries (purchasing  bundles, by whatever name) are but one of
> many  marketing channels.   Some channels have more potential
> than others, obviously, but a shrewd  publisher will be
> aggregating, disaggregating, repackaging, selling by  the piece,
> selling by the yard, cooperating with integrated products  (aka
> mash-ups in the consumer market), and generally finding as many
> ways as possible to marry investments in content to the needs of
> paying  customers.  Copyright is infinitely divisible, but many
> publishers have  little imagination for the means by which their
> material can be used.
>
> There is a subtext to this point.  Part of the "crisis" (terrible
> word  in this context) of scholarly communications is a result of
> limited  imaginations among publishers, who look to academic
> libraries for all or  close to all of their revenue.  This
> imposes an enormous burden on  libraries, which have to pay the
> freight for virtually all of the  publishing enterprise.  An
> imaginative publisher would be seeking
>
> Joe Esposito