Re: Bad Times are Good Times for Open Access?

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

It appears that the link in the post below is broken.  I have 
written FirstMonday to get this fixed, but in the meantime, I 
have found a copy of the article here:

http://outreach.lib.uic.edu/www/issues/issue9_8/esposito/index.html

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 4:30 PM
Subject: Bad Times are Good Times for Open Access?

> In a long and polemical post, Leslie Chan stated that "OA is 
> the only sustainable way to build local research capacity in 
> the long term."  I don't wish to argue the broad open access 
> issue yet again, but I would like to know in what sense OA is 
> more sustainable than toll-access publications, assuming OA is 
> sustainable at all.
>
> The fact is that neither OA nor toll-access publishing is 
> "sustainable." How could they be?  They are both subject to the 
> same vagaries of the marketplace, the economy, and the changing 
> interests of funding agencies and the research community, not 
> to mention the technological transformation known as "Cloud 
> computing," which, through streaming, will pretty much put an 
> end to unauthorized copying.
>
> One would have thought that the recent meltdown on Wall Street 
> would have rid us of the term "sustainable" once and for all. 
> A toll-access publiction is not "sustainable" if customers 
> cannot pay their bills.  An OA service (of whatever kind) that 
> is supported by an institutional sponsor or philanthropy may 
> find funding cut back when the size of an endowment plummets. 
> Surely many members of this list are facing such cutbacks now. 
> An author-pays service (e.g., PLOS or BMC) may be challenged 
> when authors have difficulty coming up with the cash. In a 
> connected world, when Wall St. loses, libraries starve.
>
> The sustainability idea is the Miss Havisham of scholarly 
> communications. We all want to stop the world at a particular 
> momentous time.  Sooner or later, however, someone pulls down 
> the drapes and we see Havisham's wedding banquet and the 
> sustainable models of publishing for the nostalgic illusions 
> that they are.
>
> Better, I think, to imagine what is likely to survive the bad 
> times we are now living through.  Provided one is not too 
> particular about all the trappings of legacy publishing, I 
> believe bad times will be good times for OA for the simple 
> reason that one form of OA--the simple posting of content on 
> the Internet without benefit of any editorial review--is very 
> inexpensive and potentially almost entirely automated.  This is 
> not "greeen" OA or "gold" OA but "unwashed" OA.  In good times 
> DSpace is simply an annoyance to an Elsevier or a Wiley; in bad 
> times DSpace may become the preferred, indeed the only, venue 
> for some researchers and some disciplines.  This assumes that 
> DSpace and other OA vehicles are run in a bare-bones way, with 
> little overhead.  Perhaps that is yet another fantasy.
>
> So, looking out beyond the economic crisis, assuming anyone can 
> see that far, we are likely to encounter a great amount of 
> unmediated OA material on the Internet, indexed by Google, free 
> for anyone to review.  It is likely that commentary will be 
> built up around at least some of that material, a form of 
> post-publication peer review.  Over time this could lead to a 
> new publishing paradigm:  low-cost Internet posting of 
> materials directly by authors, with increasingly elaborate 
> community-based commentary surrounding it.  We already see this 
> kind of thing in the consumer Internet.
>
> I described this scenario in an essay several years ago:  "The 
> Devil You Don't Know:  The Unexpected Future of Open Access 
> Publishing." It can be found at http://firstmonday.org.  If you 
> take the trouble to read this, be sure to also read Stevan 
> Harnad's nuclear critique of it, affixed to the target article. 
> It is one of his best, and it inadvertently proves my thesis.
>
> Joe Esposito