Re: Exchange in the Financial Times

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Steve, OA is hugely important in today's discourse about the future of
scholarly communications, publishing, and all that sails therein.  But,
just to offer some perspective:  OA is front and center in STM
journal-related discussions.  Our library may be unusual in this, but we
estimate well under 1/4 of our budget is spent on STM journals, with the
rest on various databases, books, area studies materials, newspapers,
images, media, and much more -- way over half of our acquistions are from
outside N. American publishers, and a large proportion are from
"non-western" publishers.

The dominance of OA or not, is likely to depend on the mix of fields of
study and supporting materials at a given university.

Also, there are other areas of scholarly communications that command our
attention (and innovative skills).  The foremost among them, to my mind,
is long-term digital archiving, preservation, access.  Through activities
such as LOCKSS, the NDIIPP funding led by Library of Congress, and various
publisher and vendor activities, the digitital preservation topic
underpins many library discussions and activities (without solving
long-term digital preservation we will not succeed in electronic scholarly
communications).  There are other significant areas of activity, such as
scaled-up digitization possibilities, both from the for-profit and not-for
profit sectors that command a great deal of attention by numerous
libraries, especially the larger ones.  There's a whole set of activity
(growing) that can't begin to be captured in the traditional scholarly
article.  I can think of several more, but let me stop for now...  Best,
Ann Okerson/Yale Library

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Steve Hitchcock wrote:

> At 18:57 26/11/04 -0500, you wrote:
> >Many readers of this list will already have seen this exchange on Open
> >Access in the Financial Times:
> >
> >http://news.ft.com/cms/s/1ea23b3e-3f15-11d9-8e70-00000e2511c8.html
> >
> >It is Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, and the winner is dum-dee-dum!
> >
> >Note the implication in the headline of the article and the texts of the
> >pieces that the ONLY form of innovation in electronic publishing concerns
> >Open Access.  OA is a very small part of what is going on in electronic
> >publishing today and is largely irrelevant to the investments currently
> >being made that will define the future shape of scholarly communications.
> 
> Joe, You might want to elaborate on this point, because I'm looking at it
> from an academic's perspective, as one who follows developments in
> electronic publishing, and Open Access is THE biggest factor currently. It
> has a profound effect on everything. As I see it, anyone who is making
> business decisions in this area and isn't taking OA into account, or is
> minimising the effect of OA, is making the wrong decisions. Here I'm
> including everyone in the academic publishing chain, from authors on.
> 
> Steve Hitchcock
> IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
> University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
> Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256     Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865