Re: UC v. NPG

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Fascinating!  Maybe we are getting close to the "tipping point" 
that I projected would eventually come when I wrote "The 
Challenge of Open Access for University Presses" (Learned 
Publishing, July 2007): Here are some pertinent excerpts:

****

Commercial, and indeed society, publishers
might well decide against remaining in
the educational market with reduced profits
or surpluses - as envisioned by open access
advocates. In these circumstances, universities
without presses would have to decide
which of the journals abandoned by these
publishers they could afford to assume
responsibility for continuing and to subsidize
by creating a mechanism for publishing them
online and paying the staff to run it; universities
with presses would need to determine
how much they could increase the output of
their presses to accommodate additional
journals and monographs. These decisions
could involve very significant new capital
investments in their presses' infrastructure;
commercial and society publishers now publish
many thousands of scholarly journals
and books annually.

... Change in the marketplace may well not
come gradually, as many supporters of open
access believe, but suddenly, as a result of
the 'tipping point' (which the FRPAA could
be, particularly for society and commercial
STM journal publishers), leaving the system
of scholarly communication in at least a
temporary state of chaos.25 Universities
should prepare themselves as best they can
for this 'worst-case' scenario, and not simply
assume that change will be slow and steady.

*****

Joe Esposito has suggested that commercial publishers like 
Elsevier might mutate from content providers to service 
providers, which thisd equity analyst envisions as one 
possibility for Elsevier's staying in the business. but the 
question, as he notes, is whether Elsevier could manage to 
sustain the kind of profit margins as a service provider that its 
stockholders have come to expect from its role as a content 
provider.

Sandy Thatcher


>Apropos of this list members might be interested in an interview 
>with an equity analyst about Elsevier:
>
>http://poynder.blogspot.com/2010/06/reed-elsevier-need-for-progressive.html
>
>
>On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu> wrote:
>
>>  Is this the straw that will break the camel's back?
>>
>>>From today's Chronicle:
>>
>>http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/65823/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
>>
>>  The University of California system has said "enough" to the
>>  Nature Publishing Group, one of the leading commercial
>>  scientific publishers, over a big proposed jump in the cost of
>>  the group's journals.
>>
>>  On Tuesday, a letter went out to all of the university's
>>  faculty members from the California Digital Library, which
>>  negotiates the system's deals with publishers, and the
>>  University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication.
>>  The letter said that Nature proposed to raise the cost of
>>  California's license for its journals by 400 percent next year.
>>  If the publisher won't negotiate, the letter said, the system
>>  may have to take "more drastic actions" with the help of the
>>  faculty. Those actions could include suspending subscriptions
>>  to all of the Nature Group journals the California system buys
>>  access to-67 in all, including Nature....
> >
> > The story has an embedded link to the letter.
> >
> > Sandy Thatcher