Re: Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Thank you for the welcome, Stevan, and for your helpful and 
illuminating responses to various of my comments.

I think that, while our long-range goals are similar, our ideas 
about how to get there differ. In particular, we are operating 
with different models of change. Yours is a linear model, 
predicting gradual change to which the various players will be 
able to adjust over time, thus making the transition relatively 
smooth for everyone involved, with minimal harm (expect, perhaps, 
to a few major STM publishers) and many benefits accruing 
especially to researchers. I have a quite different model in 
mind, which is nonlinear and predicts a point at which major 
disruption to the system could occur, with at least very harmful 
short-term consequences.

You are no doubt familiar with the differences in biological 
theory between standard evolution and what has come to be known 
as "punctuated equilibrium." The first is linear, the second 
nonlinear. I'm predicting the latter type of change, whereas you 
are predicting the former.

But I really draw my model from what I referred to before as the 
"tipping phenomenon." Probably you know that this originated in 
economic and sociological theory as a way of understanding the 
mass exodus of white urban dwellers ("white flight") once an 
urban neighborhood had reached the "tipping point" in numbers of 
blacks entering that area (between 10 and 20%, the research 
showed). That is a nonlinear effect, which cannot readily be 
predicted by looking for "evidence" of the kind you are seeking 
regarding the cancellation of subscriptions as OA alternatives 
proliferate. And it is not necessarily based on any rational 
assessment of potential harm. Was the white urban dwellers' 
belief in the harm that would come from the encroaching black 
population really "rational," or in fact did this not turn out to 
be a self-fulfilling prophecy-the harm ultimately coming from the 
effects of "white flight" rather than from any direct impact of 
black behavior?

So we get back to the point that Joe Esposito raised about 
beliefs being what is really important here, not any "hard" 
evidence of actual cancellations. My suggestion is that a 
mandated 6-month embargo through FRPAA-type legislation might 
turn out to be a real "tipping point," which would lead some 
major publishers to abandon the field of STM journal publishing 
in the belief (however erroneous) that they could not sustain 
their expected profit margins under the new regime thus 
legislated. Yes, there might well remain some smaller publishers 
willing to step in and pick up the pieces, at least for a while, 
but what I'm suggesting is that, with the degree of 
conglomerization that now exists in this field (even more so in 
the wake of the Wiley takeover of Blackwell), it now would take 
the exit of only a few major players to bring about massive 
change in the marketplace. Smaller publishers, especially 
university presses, simply do not have the capital to launch the 
kinds of sophisticated systems that these major players can 
provide, so even if there was some uptake among other publishers, 
I can't imagine that 10,000+ journals would somehow be able to 
find satisfactory homes elsewhere anytime very quickly. So, in my 
nightmarish scenario, this "tipping" would occur within a 
relatively short space of time and leave a huge vacuum in the 
system, which no amount of self-archiving or IRs could begin to 
fill adequately in the short term.

So, who is to say whether your "evolutionary" model of gradual 
change or mine of "punctuated equilibrium" is the better theory 
to apply here? You adduce the lack of "evidence" of cancellations 
to support your theory; but that lack does not count against my 
theory. On my side, I can adduce plenty of evidence that 
businesses in general, and publishers in particular, have acted 
in just this way in the past, abandoning entire areas of their 
business in one fell swoop. It is not as though Elsevier and 
others wouldn't have plenty of other opportunities they could 
exploit, even within publishing; they could, for example, decide 
to put all their investment into professional publishing (law, 
business, etc.) where their main markets are other corporations, 
not universities) or into STM book publishing or into high-end 
newsletters. Unlike university presses, such publishers have no 
inherent reason to dedicate themselves to publishing for the 
world of higher education. The same, by the way, could happen in 
college textbook publishing: if you read "Books in the Digital 
Age" by the astute publisher (Polity Press) and Cambridge 
sociologist John Thompson, you'll see that that industry is ripe 
for some major shakeup, too.

As I said earlier, I have no major stake in the outcome here, 
whichever model happens to be true of this sector-except to the 
extent that, if my model turns out to be true, I'm sure I'll have 
plenty of professors, administrators, and librarians appealing to 
us to expand our journals program, which I will politely but 
firmly decline (at least without some guarantee of vastly 
expanded capital resources!). But I suggest that it is prudent 
for university administrators not to bet everything on the 
accuracy of your model as opposed to mine, and to take 
precautions just in case my model might be the one that fits the 
world of publishing better.

P.S. It is revealing, I think, that in the newly released study 
by the MLA of tenure and promotion practices in the field of 
modern languages, credit for editing journals is way, way down on 
the list of what academics can use to position themselves better 
for tenure and promotion in the humanities. This also casts doubt 
on any scenario that would see a major rise in support for 
journal publishing on campuses were the prediction I am making 
come true. Over the last decade, what we have witnessed is a real 
decline in administrative support for editorial offices on 
campus.

Sanford G. Thatcher, Director
Penn State University Press
University Park, PA 16802-1003
e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu
http://www.psupress.org

"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John Ruskin (1865)