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Re: Publishers - your thoughts on jobs for your authors

Of course the "system" is showing signs of strain.  It was
showing signs of strain when I was first introduced to it (that
is, the serials crisis) by Ann Okerson in 1993.  It'a also the
case that some people think the Big Deal is in fact a good deal.

But I am really being misquoted if David or anyone else thinks I
am saying that everything is hunky-dory.  My observation is that
opinion on the Big Deal is divided, but I do not know if that
division is split evenly or unevenly.  It would be interesting to
resolve this, and one way of getting at this is to assess actions
people are actually taking rather than simply polling opinions.
Someone who says, "The Big Deal is a terrible program for
libraries" and then proceeds to renew the various Big Deals is
suggesting that, bad as they are are, they are still better than
the alternatives.

Joe Esposito


On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 7:44 PM, David Prosser
<david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk> wrote:

> I suspect that 'publishing consultant believes publishing
> revenues reasonable' would be no more a headline than 'library
> representative believes them excessive'. But it is interesting
> to compare and contrast what one is getting for the money.
>
> The average rejection rate over all the journals in a big deal
> package is not hugely different to the average PLoS One
> rejection rate (running at 30-50% compared to about 30%,
> respectively), so the question of whether or not a paper should
> be published isn't the key question. What the big deals do is
> sort the papers into journals. And they do that at the price of
> restricting who has access and what can be done with the papers
> by those who do have access, plus being 2.5 times as
> expensive. Doesn't sound like a great bargain.
>
> And Joe says they system works. Well, in another thread we are
> discussing how libraries are moving away from the big deals, so
> reducing the total amount of access. Perhaps the system is
> beginning to show signs of strain?
>
> David