Re: Fascinating quotation

[Mark Funk <mefunk@mail.med.cornell.edu>]

While Dr. Zerhouni's analogy to the Olympics is perhaps not the best,
Joe's criticism focuses on an imperfect analogy, not the publishers' bogus
arguments about lost business.

If I were a sports bookie, I not only would not be interested in six-month
old Olympic results, I wouldn't even be interested in NBC's nightly
delayed broadcast of the day's events. I would purchase a satellite dish
and a satellite subscription service so I could get the results live. As a
bookie, my career depends on having this information as quickly as
possible.

In the medical world, our researchers are similar to sports bookies.  
They need information today, not six months from today. They need it so
they can use it to apply for a grant with a deadline next week, use it in
their current research project, or even apply it in the clinic to a
desperately ill patient. For the most part, these researchers use a
library's subscription in order to get this information. Libraries are not
going to cancel a needed journal because some of its articles will appear
free in six months.  Librarians' heads would be appearing on stakes all
across the country if we tried that.

Librarians know that information is valuable. Timely information is even
more valuable, and people are willing to pay for that timeliness if it is
needed. Hundreds of web sites have free stock market quotations only
fifteen minutes old. Have these hurt Dow Jones' subscriptions? I don't
think so. The NIH proposal only makes the research that they fund more
widely available to people throughout the world, those without access to
well-financed medical libraries.

As overly-priced as many of them are, medical journals are a vital source
of timely information to our users. Librarians may cancel a journal for
being little used, out of scope, or of declining quality.  But if our
users need information from that journal, we aren't going to cancel it
because some of its articles might be free six months after publication.

You can bet on it.

Mark Funk
Head, Collection Development
Weill Cornell Medical Library
1300 York Avenue
New York, NY 10021
212-746-6073
mefunk@mail.med.cornell.edu

> The following appeared in yesterday's Wall St. Journal:
>
> "But Dr. Zerhouni has been skeptical of the publishers' arguments about
> lost business.. .In a recent interview, Dr. Zerhouni said it's rare for a
> journal to have more than 30% to 40% of its content generated by
> NIH-sponsored work, so that only a portion of the articles would be
> expected to be made public. "If you offered to show one-third of the
> Olympics, six months later on tape, would people not watch the Olympics?"
> he asks."
>
> The answer to this is obviously yes, as Dr. Zerhouni himself knows,
> assuming he, like most of the rest of us, sometimes declines to purchase
> the hardcover and waits for the paperback or forgoes a subscription to HBO
> and waits to see "The Sopranos" on DVD or believes that the pain of
> parking and the cost of the babysitter make it worthwhile to skip the
> feature release and see "A Beautiful Mind" as part of his Netflix
> subscription.  Comparing scientific literature to the Olympics, which is
> advertising-supported and ostensibly "free" to the viewer, is willfully
> misleading.
>
> Joe Esposito