Re: Publsihers' view/reply to David Prosser

["Fytton Rowland" <J.F.Rowland@lboro.ac.uk>]

Prosser:
>>We have not (as far as I am aware) seen any publishers give us
>>their vision of the future based on subscription access - is it really
>>business as usual?

Esposito:  
>>I consult to publishers and would say that (among publishers) 
>>though there are areas of consensus, the future is generally pretty 
>>muddy.  The consenus areas concern the naivete about the costs of 
>>publication on the part of many Open Access advocates.  (snip)

Is it really naivete on the part of OA advocates, or an inability to
"think out of the box" on the part of publishers?  There has been much
debate over recent years, on this list among others, about just what is
essential expenditure ("The Cost of the Essentials"). Many of the "bells
and whistles" that publishers think are needed in scholarly publishing are
not necessarily wanted by academics.  Those debating are not all naive;
many of us are academics ourselves and have a reasonable sense of what
academics want. Those who have established new OA titles in recent years
and are *not* traditional publishers work on "zero-based budgeting", while
established scholarly publishers find it difficult to think in ways other
than "What changes from the old system?"  The former come out with lower
costs that the latter.

Esposito: 
>>And the notion that research publications don't have to have a 
>>market made for them goes into the naive category. (snip)

It is well established that schoalrly publications are not a "market" in
the normal sense, since each article is (or should be) a monopoly product
- you can only get that article from that one journal.  It is also well
established that the market that matters to scholarly publishers is the
*author* market, not the reader market.  It is a very imperfect market
because he who pays the piper (libraries mostly) does not call the tune.
So far as market *making* is concerned, the very experienced marketing
manager of the scientific publisher for whom I used to work was of the
view that mounting promotional campaigns for established schoalrly
journals was pointless.  Every institution who might have a use for them
already knew about them, and whether they bought them or not depended on
the budget they had available and how far up the pecking order our
journals were.  No-one needed telling about them.  He concentrated his
efforts on the marketing of books and bibliographic databases.

Esposito: 
>>But the Internet changes everything.

There we can agree!  But in particular, it changes students' behaviour -
and will as time goes on change the behaviour of older people too - in the
direction of using Internet search engines to look for all their
information.  So if my papers are availableon the Internet, free of
charge, suitably indexed with metadata, they will be found.  No need for
marketing departments at scholarly publishers......  This example
illustates both my previous points quite nicely.

Fytton Rowland,
Loughborough University, UK.