RE: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I believe it is generally considered that a single small or medium sized
online journal, which publishes original work and not expensive
commissioned features, can be published at almost no direct cost, by using
the volunteer labor of members of the society or department.  There are
many examples, most available without charge, and some both free and of
the very highest quality, such as Annals of Mathematics,
<http://www.math.princeton.edu/~annals/> (no.3 in JCR impact factor in
mathematics--if impact factors are relevant in this subject.)

There's obviously a size where this becomes impossible. To overcome this,
perhaps we should only publish in this manner, either by individuals or
academic departments, and not involve larger enterprises of any sort for
primary publication.

It will be necessary to coordinate and find the material, but this problem
is no worse than at present, since what users really want is the articles,
not the journals as such, and there would be the same number of articles.

This still requires secondary services. Probably they can be much less
expensive than the present, if they follow the arXiv model, or the PMC
model. (I am here not specifying where the publications reside, and not
considering the OA aspects of these facilities, but considering only the
indexing and access functions they provide.) There are other
possibilities, such as Google, or preferably a truly reliable and
consistent metadata harvester.

I have previously thought that as costs rose, the need for buying the
primary journals would probably require cancellation of the secondary
services , and their disappearance. However, what I've said above leads to
the opposite conclusion.  If primary publication can be done in small
groups at trivial cost, it will be the secondary services which will have
the critical role, and the best of them will survive and prosper.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Joseph Esposito
Sent: Sun 7/17/2005 6:32 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Who gets hurt by Open Access?
 
>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