Re: A Prophylactic Against the Edentation of the RCUK Policy Proposal

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Google is not a publisher.  It is a great company, but not a publisher.  
Reed Elsevier, John Wiley, McGraw Hill:  these are publishers in any
commonly accepted sense of the term.  If you invest in these companies,
it's not because you advocate Open Access.  I am not suggesting that
anyone should invest in them (I certainly haven't), but if you do invest
in them AND you advocate Open Access, you are betting against yourself.  
So let's cut the nonsense about OA being good for traditional publishers.

Joe Esposito

On 7/10/05, adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/8/05, Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
> > My challenge to Mark Funk is unchanged:  if self-archiving or any other
> > form of Open Access is not going to undermine the economic value of
> > proprietary journals, invest your life-savings in publishers who
> > authorize OA vehicles in parallel to proprietary versions.
> >
> > Joe Esposito
> 
> I am tempted to accept this challenge and invest my life savings in such a
> publisher. Looking around it would appear to me that the publisher who
> most clearly and fully meets this criterion is Google.
> 
> But there is a problem. Google looks like an Open Access publisher
> (republisher?) since they distribute their content/service without charge
> (at least so far), and they encourage everyone to use their service and
> the company also meets Stevan Harnad's criterion of giving full weight to
> impact factors (Google's technology is entirely built on measuring impact
> factors) but there is also at the present a small problem with the share
> price. It looks as though my/Joe's timing is wrong and it may have gone
> too high (oh yes I dearly wish I had put my life savings in a year ago).
> 
> But then again reading the contract that Google drew up with the
> University of Michigan I wonder if there may be a conscience issue for me
> in the fine print of that agreement. I am not sure whether or not Google
> is an open access (re)publisher, since from the U of M agreement it
> appears to be claiming rather strong and restrictive rights in the copies
> that it will have made of works that may be in (or even not yet in) the
> public domain. Perhaps they plan to become a new kind of Toll Access
> publisher -- in which case Joe's challenge still stands.
> 
> 
> adam