RE: Non sequitur (Reply to David Goodman)

["T Scott Plutchak" <tscott@uab.edu>]

While many librarians jumped on the OA bandwagon initially thinking that
it would "solve" the cost problem, I don't think that is the case any
longer.  I don't have systematic data, but in my conversations with
librarians, they tend to have a more nuanced view.

http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=147
62457

T. Scott Plutchak
Editor, Journal of the Medical Library Association
Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
tscott@uab.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph J.
Esposito
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 6:04 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Non sequitur (Reply to David Goodman)

Why should we assume that the existing institutional arrangements are
the highest attainable peak of perfection, either technical or economic?

JE:  I was unaware that anyone believed that the existing arrangements
are the peak of perfection.  The point is that Open Access is a step
backward, not forward.

I believe the vast majority of OA advocates support OA because they see it
is an appropriate response to what they view as price-gouging on the part
of many journals publishers.  This is not the perspective of Steven Harnad
and his followers, but it certainly is the point of view or hope of many
librarians.  But there are many other responses to high prices; the
question is what is the most effective response.

Challenging high prices is the right and often the obligation of any
purchaser.  This is true whether prices are rising at a rate greater than
CPI (bad metric, in my view) or GDP (better); or even if prices are
holding steady.  In fact, even if prices are dropping at the rate of
Moore's Law, surely a purchaser should be thinking about all expenses all
the time.  On their side, publishers do this, whether they are shopping
for paper or bandwidth or office space.  When is the last time anyone went
to buy something without asking, How much?

Among the responses to prices are such things as developing tools for
non-for-profit publishers (Highwire, for example), starting competing
journals, and simply cancelling selected publications.  The idea that one
hears all the time that customers are helpless in the face of gigantic
publishing conglomerates is simple nonesense.  Does anyone remember that
it was only a few years ago that people predicted that Microsoft was going
to control the entire planet?  Now Microsoft is graying at the temples,
Google is on a roll, the iPod and smart phones are transforming the
computing environment, and technologies such as Ajax are threatening to
turn the Internet itself into a software platform.  A slingshot was a
shrewd innovation that took down Goliath.

The great untapped resource in scholarly communications today are the
100-plus university presses that, with the exception of perhaps 5 or 6,
are being systematically ignored by their parent institutions. Actually,
being ignored would be an improvement; most of the presses are being bled
white by universities who see fit to put their money elsewhere--including
into money-losing OA ventures that typically reside within libraries.  In
my experience the university presses are filled with people with a passion
for scholarship, people who work hard to strike a balance between the
economic requirements (usually to run at breakeven) of their own
organizations and the goals of the academic community, which they are a
part of and serve.  A concerted effort to alter the economics of scholarly
communications should begin with these presses, whose role within the
university should grow expressly to counter the overweening ambitions of
the commercial sector.

Joe Esposito