Take that for a yes.

[Richard Feinman <RFeinman@downstate.edu>]

I said I would give you all the money you need.  Now money is taken care
of.  Is OA a good idea?  I will take your  answer as a yes.

Richard D. Feinman, Professor of Biochemistry

_______________

<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org> wrote:

Richard,

I drafted a response yesterday, but didn't send it because I 
couldn't quite get my thoughts into a concise message. Your new 
post helps, thank you. The point I was going to make was this: it 
takes more than an ideal publishing system and OA to maximise 
audience reach. It also requires old fashioned promotion and 
marketing - and this also costs money.

Why do I say this? Here's a couple of stories.

1. In the UK we license most of our statistical databases to a 
database aggregator called MIMAS. They've also got data from our 
peers - the World Bank, IMF, Eurostat, UN et al. MIMAS have the 
right to make all this data freely available to the all higher 
educational institutions in the UK. By some estimates, that's 
around 1.5 million students and faculty. So, we've got the 
ingredients you propose: OA and an ideal publishing platform - 
result? Well, for our data around 9,000 sessions a year. That's 
not a lot for an audience of this size and we think this is 'way 
below what the usage could be. In other markets we're learning 
that it's important to make presentations and promote our content 
to users, and when we do, usage goes up. Seems we've got a 
missing ingredient in the UK.

2. Would I be right in assuming that your ideal publishing system 
uses Google or the other search engines as a key discovery tool? 
If so, then read on. We're adding all our scholarly reports into 
Google Books (they're also in Google Scholar, but that's another 
story). Google Books is a bit like your ideal publishing system 
in that the full text is there and users can see the pages 
they've searched for freely (there's a limit on the total number 
of pages they can see in a session - so not perfect OA). Google 
have thoughtfully provided publishers with a tool so we can see 
the number of visitors to each of our reports (we've loaded 
around 1500). The surprise is this: our French language editions 
are getting visitor levels 500 - 1000 times MORE than our English 
language editions. Via any other channel (print, online, 
whatever) our French editions usually get about 7% of all 
traffic. So what's going on? Our conclusion is this: with French 
we've got first-mover advantage because so few French books are 
available in Google. While in English, we're competing with an 
ever-growing mountain of other stuff, so we're having to fight 
for market share. As we all know, searchers rarely look beyond 
the first ten or so results, so the game becomes one of finding 
ways to boost your rankings - a Red Queen game if there ever was 
one. Our conclusion is that those that have the ability and money 
to do search result boosting, promotion and marketing will 
probably get more of their stuff read than those who can't.

So the moral of my stories: the need for marketing and promotion 
won't go away even with a perfect platform and OA. This will 
require money too.

As to your theoretical question - I'm sure all publishers want 
maximum access to their content. However, to achieve this they 
need a stable and predicatable business model to make it work. 
Maybe an author-side payment system will prove to be sustainable 
and, if it is, it will surely displace the reader-side payment 
system over time. Why am I so confident? Because in spite of 
everything, I trust the market - it has an uncanny knack of 
producing the most efficient system in the end.

Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate
http://www.oecd.org/Bookshop
http://www.SourceOECD.org  - our award-winning e-library
http://www.oecd.org/OECDdirect  - our new title alerting service