RE: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model

[William Park <wpark@deepdyve.com>]

Fair points and one that will be open for vigorous debate.  The 
other perspective is that this universal platform will in fact 
*level* the playing field, allowing smaller publishers to make up 
for their current scale and distribution disadvantages by being 
discoverable right alongside larger publishers and thereby 
competing solely on the merits of their content.  This could also 
be good for users with lower, more transparent pricing:  as has 
been demonstrated by Apple, when its app store first launched 
there was a wide variety of prices being charged but very quickly 
the prices settled into a narrow range of choices from Free to 
just a few dollars.

Why would large publishers give up their competitive advantage? 
For one, by attracting a much larger audience, and by having the 
most content, they will have an opportunity to expand the size of 
the pie, so even if their % of that pie diminishes they will 
still gain more.  The other reason could be to give those large 
publishers a non-controlling equity stake in this platform so 
they reap the upside for being the anchor tenants.  As you point 
out, the key is one of governance, specifically to ensure the 
primary goal is to maximize the value of the platform and not any 
one constituent.  While that may be messy, I think it will be 
worth the effort and will ultimately be addressed either by the 
industry or by Apple/Google/Amazon.




-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas Krichel
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 2:44 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: ArXiv Grows Up, Adopts Subscription-like Model

William Park writes

> -Would the end-user and the industry not be better off
> consolidating access and discovery onto a single, industry
> platform?

No, that would stifle competition (bad for users) and whoever
runs the platform has a terrific rent-seeking opportunity (bad
for the industry).

But it would be beneficial for the industry to give away metadata
about the contents so that a bunch of different platforms could
be built to advertize the contents.

Cheers,

Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1
                                               skype: thomaskrichel