Re: Brantley blog post

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Some clarifications in response to Adam Hodgkin:

1.  Brantley is no longer blogging for O'Reilly's Radar.  Much of 
his attention has shifted to the Publishing Frontier blog 
(http://pubfrontier.com).

2.  You would have to ask Brantley this directly, but from my 
extensive communications with him, I would say that his concerns 
for libraries and the Google project in particular go far beyond 
open access.

3.  My view--not Brantley's--is that the phrase "public interest 
in Open Access" is misleading.  The public is interested in the 
sense that open access has captured its imagination, but there is 
no "public interest" in the sense that there are any public 
benefits to open access.  I know I have become tiresome on this 
point, but I will assert it once more and move on: attention, not 
information, is the scarce commodity.  Open access adds to 
information and dilutes attention.  One might as well sell a 
space heater in the tropics.

4.  I am skeptical about the assertion that "publishers are 
showing a very proper concern with the benefits of an information 
commons."  This sounds like Woodstock.  Publishers are awakening 
to various ways open access can be used to market other products 
and services, including subscriptions.  This does not meant that 
OA is a publisher's preferred marketing venue, but it is the hand 
they have been dealt and they are learning to play it.  Over 
time, except for those publications (a small number) that are 
fully funded for open access by various groups (e.g., 
philanthropies or universities), open access will evolve into one 
facet of a broadly based marketing strategy.  A publisher's 
"proper concern" is perhaps better summarized by Don Barzini in 
his address to his fellow thugs in "The Godfather":  "After all, 
we are not communists."

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 6:27 PM
Subject: Re: Brantley blog post

> Peter Brantley's piece is indeed interesting, and I wonder why 
> it did not appear among his normal and distinguished postings 
> on O'Reilly Radar. Joe's phrase may be a misrepresentation of 
> Brantley's concern. Its not so much that a 
> Google/Publisher/Author settlement may amount to "Google will 
> sell out the libraries". The real issue here is the public 
> interest in Open Access for which libraries, librarians, are 
> generally, or often, but not always the most reliable advocate. 
> It is very noticeable that there is a growing concern in the 
> library community that some libraries may have missed their 
> calling by aligning too much of their efforts and their long 
> term mission with Google's digitisation projects.
>
> Its also important that some very serious publishers are 
> showing a very proper concern with the benefits of an 
> information commons, a larger and freer commons, with Open 
> Access, with reusable and repurposable content etc. In the end 
> authors and publishers, scholarship and creative literature 
> will be the losers if a Google Book Search settlement leads to 
> bureaucratic and overly institutional restrictions on the reuse 
> of digital text. I will be very surprised if the case is 
> settled by the parties agreeing to a new type of collective 
> licensing arrangement for orphan copyrights, a Google funded 
> collective payments system that monitors and obscures a lot of 
> literature in libraries (this is I suspect what worries 
> Brantley). But if that is the way things go, the libraries, 
> especially Google's partners, will surely join in the "sell 
> out".
>
> Adam
>
> On Jan 4, 2008 12:08 AM, Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Peter Brantley has a long post on his "Shimenawa" blog (he has
> > more than one).  It can be found here:
> >
> > http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/shimenawa.php/2008/01/02/trade_for_our_own_account
> >
> > The post is hard to summarize, as it ranges across a number of
> > challenging policy issues, but the gist of it is that the
> > current mass digitization projects in many libraries are not
> > moving forward in the libraries' own interests, but, rather, in
> > the interests of the parties (largely commercial and
> > principally Google) who step up to the initial costs.  There is
> > also speculation here about the much-whispered-about
> > possibility that "Google will sell out the libraries" (my
> > phrase, not Peter's) in cutting a deal with the publishers and
> > authors with whom they are now in litigation.
> >
> > Joe Esposito