Re: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

[adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

I find this concern for the prosperity of 'traditional publishers' rather
comic. Are we being asked to believe that 'traditional publishing' is a
vocation like 'artisanale cheese-making' or 'hand-thrown pottery' that
deserves our private support and the shelter of a special economic regime?

Publishing, like librarianship, is a function which needs to reinvent
itself in the technology and economic circumstances of the period in which
the function is performed. Librarians and publishers are adjusting their
practice to a delivery platform in which there is negligible marginal cost
to searching masses of material (the more the merrier) and NO marginal
cost to providing universal access to that material. This was not of
course true with the relatively inefficient library-publishing technology
platform of the 20th Century (call it 'traditional' if you insist; but
lets recall that Excerpta Medica was the latest 'new new' thing in 1960).

Adam

On 7/17/05, Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
> >From David Prosser's post:
> 
> >"It is in no traditional publisher's interest for OA to move forward."
> 
> DP:  Now, of course, this may or may not be true for the large publishers
> who are nursing large profit margins, but let's remember that probably
> half of all journals are published by small (often society) publishers who
> only publish one or two title each.
> 
> JE:  It is precisely the smaller publishers who have the most to lose with
> OA.  Elsevier and Wiley have the resources to work with this, but pity the
> poor publisher who listens to SPARC on this matter.
> 
> Joe Esposito