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Re: Homer Simpson at the NIH (renaissance?)

Adam,

I reply in good faith and with no sleight of hand. I am not aware of any "retreat" from my earlier views, which I summarized a few years ago in "The Devil You Don't Know" (http://firstmonday.org).

By the "system" I mean the sum of the materials budgets at academic libraries, which, barring war or a total collapse of the international credit markets, are likely to be modestly larger in absolute, nominal dollars in 5 years than they are today. All of the growth, and probably some of the base as well, is likely to be garnered by the largest publishers.

I agree that the needs of science are not fully served by the current forms of scholarly communications. I also believe that most (NOT all) open access schemes are a step backward. I continue to hope that BioMedCentral, among other services, proves to be a huge success, as it is entirely non-parasitic.

As for the analogy to the music market, I don't know why you would want to present that. The music industry was assaulted with massive violations of copyright. Copyright violations of scholarly material are negligible in comparison.

For the record (sigh for the inadvertent pun): both the music and the publishing industries would be facing far better prospects if they had long had a program, represented by significant R&D budgets, to experiment with new media forms. Astonishing that Napster should have been created by a kid and not Warner Music or that Paul Ginsparg should have developed what the large journals publishers should have developed a decade earlier.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2007 6:57 PM
Subject: Re: Homer Simpson at the NIH (renaissance?)

Joe,

I interpret this as a retreat from your original claim that the big publishers are better placed to survive whether there is more money in the system or less. And I suspect that there is a definitional sleight of hand here. Do you mean by 'the system' in which the money circulates, the existing "mostly closed access journal publishing/library subscribing system"? If that is what you mean, I would agree that the market is highly mature, there will surely be more consolidation and the market so interpreted will not grow much and may well shrink.

But the key point is that these are no longer closed systems or market reservoirs in which cash slops from one pool to another in a broadly conservative annual cycle. The needs of science, technology and scholarship are growing at a prodigious rate -- internationally and within the internal dynamic of each discipline. For these reasons a step change in the productivity of publishing is to be expected and is almost inevitable since the web makes this possible. Part of that step change will be an increasing move to more open access, though I wouldnt be surprised if it does NOT follow the Green or the Gold paths that some proponents of Open Access reckon to be the inevitable way forward.

Perhaps you agree that it was quite likely that the rather big shifts in the information economy which are already happening will have a significant impact on the still relatively self-contained world of peer-reviewed journals within the five yours that you mentioned.

I think the big publishers will face some big challenges in this changing environment. The music majors (4 of them) have not been so clever at shifting their business model to meet the same sort of challenge....

Adam


On 8/24/07, Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:

I am keenly interested in Chris Armbruster's work, much of which I agree with, but I wish to point out that in no way are his comments apposite mine. And that's fine, but let's not assume there is a debate going on when we are in fact talking about two entirely different things. In terms of market maturity, I would suggest this mind experiment: imagine the journals world five years from now. Is the market share of the 5 largest players, as measured in dollars, larger or smaller than it is today? (And, yes, we can allow for the current 5 to have become 2 or 3.) Furthermore, the absolute growth of the 5, putting acquisitions to the side, will be in the single digits. That's maturity.

There may of course be new markets emerging, such as a market for a new kind of certification service. But those revenues will be on top of what the 5 largest publishers earn. You would have to look beyond a 5-year horizon to see the 5 diminish in scope and influence.

Armbruster is addressing a big idea: the restructuring of the information economy. I am addressing a small one: how the current economy for research publishing works. Let's hear it for the big ideas, but even the small ones cry out from time to time.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Armbruster, Chris" <Chris.Armbruster@EUI.eu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2007 11:23 AM
Subject: RE: Homer Simpson at the NIH (renaissance?)

The idea that the publishing is a no-growth market is based on
the now faulty perception that the Oldenbourg model of
conjoining peer review with dissemination in a final archival
publication may be transposed to the internet era. True
enough, this kind of publishing is a no-growth market. I would
go even further and say that in the medium term it has no
future at all. My argument would be that digital technology
and economics strongly favour the severance of certification
from dissemination. In that scenario, the functions of
registration, dissemination and archiving will lie with
(digital) libraries-cum-repositories, wheras certification and
new kinds of value-adding navigation services will be a growth
market.

I therefore suggest that we will witness the renaissance of
society publishers and the return of the library for
scientific and scholarly publishing. In this segment I would
be more afraid for the big commercial publishers that, because
of their size and inflexibility, might find themselves in a
big squeeze quite soon.

For more details on this argument, please consult
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=997819

Armbruster, Chris, "Society Publishing, the Internet and Open
Access: Shifting Mission-Orientation from Content Holding to
Certification and Navigation Services?" (July 2007). Available
at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=997819

or, for an overview, go to
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=434782

Joe Esposito wrote:

If there is less money in the system, the bigger players are
better positioned to survive; if there is more money in the
system, the bigger players are better positioned to survive.
The issue is not the size of the market; it is the maturity of
the market.  Publishing is close to a no-growth business.  In
no-growth markets, consolidation is a likely, if not
inevitable, strategy.

The only reason that academic journals are published by such a
huge number of publishers--unlike, say, college texts (6
players in the U.S. have 85% of the market)--is that the
not-for-profit status of many of the players makes them
resistant to some aspects of the marketplace.  That is neither
good nor bad; it is what it is.  If all journals publishers
were publicly traded and thus subject to Wall Street's stern
review, consolidation would come quickly; we would be down to
three publishers in 5 years.