Re: the Yale argument on open-choice

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Why do you just assume that all non-profit publishers "will 
charge as much as they can in order to maximize their revenues"? 
I can't speak for society publishers, but this is clearly not 
true for university presses. If it were, the prices of our 
journals and books would have risen much faster over the last 
forty years than they have, I assure you. As parts of 
universities, presses are driven by other imperatives than pure 
revenue-maximization.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press

> Is it not clear, though, hat price inflation is an 
> expectedconsequence of the subscription model?
>
> If the research community hands over ownership/exclusive 
> rightsto publishers, it is economically predictable that 
> publishers(whether commercial or not-for-profit) will charge as 
> much asthey can in order to maximize their revenues. Given that 
> theacademic community *really* needs access to that research, 
> thereis virtually no upper bound on what publishers with enough 
> marketpower can get away with charging for subscriptions . The 
> naturalsolution to this is surely for the research community 
> *not* togive away the ownership/exclusive rights to the 
> research.
>
> Under an open access publishing model, you immediately have 
> amuch more effective market. The customer (the research 
> community)can choose the publication service that offers the 
> best value,ensuring that prices are kept down. This kind 
> of'substitutability' generally doesn't exist with the 
> subscriptionmodel - hence the problem of journal inflation.
>
> Matt Cockerill
> BioMed Central
>
>
> On 20 Mar 2007, at 22:34, Rick Anderson wrote:
>
> > > For all the many problems of the traditional model ofuser-pays 
> > > publishing, it does one thing very well:  it marriesthe 
> > > production of information to the ability to consume it.In 
> > > plain English, this is called living within a budget.
> > I'm not even convinced that there are many problems with 
> > thetraditional model of user-pays publishing.  The model 
> > itselfworks great, as Joe points out.  The problem is with 
> > priceinflation.  If all journal subscriptions cost $5 per year, 
> > noone would be complaining about the subscription model.
> >
> > Rick Anderson Dir. of Resource Acquisition University of 
> > Nevada, Reno Libraries rickand@unr.edu