Journal of Electronic Publishing

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

There is a new issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing 
(Michigan) available at http://journalofelectronicpublishing.org. 
A number of articles that are likely to be of interest to members 
of this list.  In particular see Donald Waters, "Open Access 
Publishing and the Emerging Infrastructure for 21st-Century 
Scholarship."  An excerpt:

"It is all too easy to focus on the trendy, glitzy, 
heart-pounding rhetoric about the initial step of making 
materials freely available, especially those materials that "your 
tax dollars helped make possible," and to trust that only good 
consequences will follow downstream. It is much harder to focus 
strategically on the full life cycle of scholarly communications 
and ask hard questions such as: open access for what and for whom 
and how can we ensure that there is sufficient capital for 
continued innovation in scholarly publishing? One worry about 
mandates for open access publishing is that they will deprive 
smaller publishers of much needed subscription income, pushing 
them into further decline, and making it difficult for them to 
invest in ways to help scholars select, edit, market, evaluate, 
and sustain the new products of scholarship represented in 
digital resources and databases. The bigger worry, which is 
hardly recognized and much less discussed in open access circles, 
is that sophisticated publishers are increasingly seeing that the 
availability of material in open access form gives them important 
new business opportunities that may ultimately provide a 
competitive advantage by which they can restrict access, limit 
competition, and raise prices."

Joe Esposito