Re: DeepDyve - 99 cent article rentals

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On 5-Nov-09, at 7:26 PM, Joseph Esposito wrote:

> I don't want to comment further on DeepDyve's program as I have 
> a relationship there, but I find Professor Harnad's perceived 
> irony to be misplaced.
>
> OF COURSE, people would find ways to monetize OA content. 
> What did you expect?  And if someone prefers to purchase 
> something through "monetized OA" instead of going directly to 
> the free OA source, why would anyone want to interfere with an 
> individual's preference?  I fail to see the virtue of the 
> top-down, mandated policies that Professor Harnad supports.

The answer is simple: At the moment, OA's target content -- all 
2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 25,000 -- 
is still 85% absent (i.e., not made OA by its authors). The 
mandates are in order to get it self-archived, and hence made OA. 
The current bids to "monetize" the existing OA content -- whether 
from OA journals or from OA repositories -- are likely to reduce 
the momentum (from both users and authors) to provide that 
missing OA content, as well as to reduce the institutional and 
funder momentum to mandate that they provide it.

That is a bad thing (for OA, and authors, and users, and their 
institutions and funders, and the general public that funds much 
of the research funding and for whose benefit that research is 
being done).

But once all OA's target content is OA, I couldn't care less if 
secondary vendors try to "monetize it" -- or users are foolish 
enough to pay for it (since it is all already OA).

As for what is said below about books: nolo contendere. Refereed 
journal articles (OA's primary target content) are all, without 
exception, author give-aways, written purely for user uptake, 
usage and impact, not for sales royalty income. Not so for books. 
So books are irrelevant to the irony of the premature floating, 
touting and uptake of $0.99 PPV at this time: jubilatio praecox.

Stevan Harnad

> I recently did a survey of a segment of scholarly book publishers
> and stumbled upon an interesting practice.  One publisher sells
> books directly from its Web site.  All the titles also appear on
> Amazon.  Amazon's prices are less expensive across the board.
> But the publisher continues to do good business from its own
> site.  Why?  Do we ban publishers from selling from their own
> sites and mandate that all sales go to Amazon?
>
> Joe Esposito
>
>
> On 11/4/09 3:39 PM, "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Ahmed is quite right. This sort of re-use comes with the
>> territory if one adopts a CC attrib license.
>>
>> It's still ironic that OA content can be used to promote PPV
>> which in turn slows the momentum for growth of OA...
>>
>> Stevan
>>
>> On 3-Nov-09, at 6:04 PM, Ahmed Hindawi wrote:
>>
>>> I am surprised that Steven (or anyone else for that matter) is
>>> surprised that PLoS content is available on the DeepDyve site.
>>> All PLoS articles are published under CC attribution license
>>> (which does not prevent commercial reuse), just like most of the
>>> major OA journals/publishers. DeepDyve does not even need to take
>>> PLoS permission to index, host, or even sell the material on
>>> their web site. I am glad DeepDyve is not charging for PLoS
>>> articles (or Hindawi articles), but if they did, they would be
>>> within their legal rights and would not need to get any
>>> permissions from the publisher or the authors (as the copyright
>>> holders) in order to do that.
>>>
>>> Ahmed Hindawi