RE: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

["Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>]

I agree with Toby Green.

Jan Szczepanski said, of carriage manufacturers and the oil lamp industry:

"Large or small didn't matter they all disappeared."

It's not all that clear cut.

Fisher Body was one of the largest carriage manufacturers. They made the
switch from making carriages to making auto bodies, first as a
free-standing company and then as a division of GM. Fisher Body merged
with some other GM divisions in 1984. While there technically isn't a
Fisher Body division in GM now, their work continues.

As far as oil lights go, Consolidated Edison started out as the New York
Gas Light Company. They haven't exactly disappeared. (OK, so they weren't
exactly an oil light business, but the point is the same...gas lighting
was largely replaced by electric lighting, but the businesses prevailed).

Bernie Sloan

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Toby.GREEN@oecd.org
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 6:27 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Who gets hurt by Open Access?

Not quite right. The industries remained (transport, lighting) and each is
now far larger than they once were. It's just that the technologies they
use changed. During the change many of the established companies failed to
adapt in time, so they died away, to be replaced by newcomers (and many of
the newcomers failed too because they didn't find a sustainable business
model).

In specialist publishing some of the established players are trying to
adapt (Springer, Blackwells, OUP each with author-paying programmes) as
well as newcomers having a go (BioMed Central, PLoS, arXiv et al). On top
of this universities seem on the brink of expanding their publishing
efforts via repositories. Each of these better-funded players can afford
to experiment and take risks with new business models (ie they can afford
to pay for some failures). So, I think Joe is right about the small
established players (Societies & others) because their much smaller
resources mean they can't afford to take risks that might fail - so in
making a jump-change they have perhaps only one chance to get it right,
and that's a risky call!

What is certain is that the publishing industry will remain - the
uncertainty is who the surviving players will be when the current period
of change completes its cycle.

Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing