Re: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

["Peter Banks" <pbanks@diabetes.org>]

And since when have publishers received "private support" or "the shelter
of a special economic regime"? If I am receiving some sort of financial
free ride, it's certainly news to me. I thought I was competing the
marketplace. Please direct me to that "shelter," so I can escape the
broiling sun of the marketplace.

The only one I know receiving private support is PLoS, which is supported
by the Moore Foundation, and the only ones asking for a "special economic
regime" are certain OA publishers, who seek to sustain their money-losing
operations with government bail outs.

Peter Banks
Publisher
American Diabetes Association
1701 North Beauregard Street
Alexandria, VA 22311
703/299-2033
FAX 703/683-2890
Email: pbanks@diabetes.org

>>> espositoj@gmail.com 07/19/05 7:23 PM >>>

I was unaware that anyone was concerned about the prosperity of
traditional publishers, except the publishers themselves.  Speaking only
for myself, my concern is being presented with the absurdity of publishers
being asked to sentence themselves to death.

Joe Esposito

On 7/18/05, adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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