Re: University of Maryland's Open Access Deliberations

[Jean-Claude Guedon <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

Could you send some statistics about this? This would be most 
interesting.

Jean-Claude Guedon

Le mardi 05 mai 2009 a 13:09 -0400, Toby.GREEN@oecd.org a ecrit:

> I can endorse Sandy's experience. It's been the same for us.
> Making books OA, in our experience, does not increase sales.
>
> Toby Green
> OECD Publishing
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu <owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Tue May 05 04:14:09 2009
> Subject: Re: University of Maryland's Open Access Deliberations
>
> I'm not sure what "evidence" we are supposed to see at this site,
> which lists several links, most in German. The post by R.J.
> Keller titled "Why Free Pays" shows at most that OA is a good
> marketing tool for an unknown author (just as free posting of
> songs is good advertising for new bands). Please note that Keller
> admits that most of the over 2,000 e-book downloads of his novel
> brought him no revenue at all, and that his plan for his next
> novel is only to post some of the chapters free as a lure to get
> people to purchase the book. I see no proof in this example,
> anyway, that "OA increases sales."
>
> Most of the stories we've heard making this claim concern one-off
> publications of books by very well-known authors like Larry
> Lessig, but how one "proves" from such isolated experiments that
> OA "increases" sales baffles me. How would one know what these
> books would have sold if published just in print but with a
> sample chapter or two posted online, say, as a teaser in the way
> that Amazon.com uses "Search Inside the Book."
>
> Our own experiment in publishing monographs in Romance Studies
> (http://www.romancestudies.psu.edu), where they are available to
> read online in their entirety but can only be printed out in
> part, is more of a true test because we have over ten years of
> experience with books in this series offered for sale in print
> only with which to compare sales of the POD versions, and so far
> at least there is no evidence at all that "OA increases sales,"
> though I am happy to say that sales have not declined much
> either.  This is about as close to a "controlled experiment" as
> one is likely to be able to undertake since the books are all
> monographs on specialized topics in the same general field by
> authors not known outside academe and their subjects are quite
> comparable to the subjects of the books published in the series
> earlier when the books were available only in print form.
>
> The benefit of OA here is not to "increase sales," but simply to
> make these monographs much more widely accessible than they ever
> were in print form alone. That seems to me a sufficiently
> important benefit to make the experiment well worthwhile
> undertaking, and we hope we can eventually extend it to other
> fields, too.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press
>