Re: PLOS article metrics

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Heather, Quite the opposite. The consequence of open access is: 
free the data, build the services. This is the mantra of 
everything digital. It isn't about running down investment in 
publishing services, but about enabling opportunities to provide 
value in new forms. Search-based enterprise has been pretty 
successful elsewhere.

Investment decisions are for others. Freeing the content is the 
concern of the academy. If we mix up the two, imposing dismal 
economics and minimal prospects of returns, we won't get the 
services that open access inherently ought to motivate. In that 
situation it would not be surprising if potential supporters of 
open access saw better alternatives.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk


On 23 Sep 2009, at 22:33, Heather Morrison wrote:

> On 22-Sep-09, at 7:39 PM, Joseph Esposito wrote:
>
> As authors and publishers become more aware of the value in
> driving up usage statistics, they will engage in more and more
> SEM and often SEO.  Thus the competition for the 'best' article
> becomes entangled with the efforts of aggressive marketing.
> Authors and publishers who are less skilled at this will be left
> behind; the more skillful will invest greater and greater
> resources in SEM, driving up costs.
>
> HM - Two comments:
>
> 1.  This is an excellent argument for eliminating the for-profit
>    sector from scholarly publishing.  As things stand, some of
>    the mega- publishers are already taking in profit margins of
>    30% or higher; once you add in taxes, that's at least 50% of
>    revenue spent without a dime going to anything having to do
>    with scholarship.  That's not even taking into account sales,
>    lobbying, etc.!  Add to this even more money going to
>    aggressive marketing, and the percentage of the academic
>    library budget that actually goes to scholarly aims will be
>    very small indeed.
>
> 2.  If some publishers take this approach and it drives up costs,
>    they won't stand a chance of competing on a per-article basis
>    with more efficient publishers, like PLoS - or almost any
>    society not-for-profit.
>
> Heather Morrison, MLIS
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com