Re: New media example

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Joe,    As you are someone with a strong understanding of the 
business of information, especially for academic information, I 
am surprised your comments below targetting - let's put a name to 
it - open access, don't appear to take account of the following 
factors:

1 Price variability in which a valid new price is zero, 
non-exclusivity, choice, and value-adding.

2 Setting aside open access publishing, open access repositories 
are providing a service that is supplementary (i.e. additional) 
to journal publishers, not replacing it (see 1 above).

3 Open access is not about prices, it's about improving access 
and research productivity. So beyond the very basic provision 
that you refer to below, which has the aim of reducing cost to 
the extent consistent with zero price, any value-adding and 
non-zero pricing to reflect that is valid as well.

I'm pretty sure your approach does not deny any of these 
possibilities. Nobody is expecting an Mtrip-like featured service 
to be open access. If providers wish to offer paid-for and viable 
services with this or any other features, then that is welcome. 
But researchers are expecting the choice of open access to 
versions of papers where the only value added is by the authors. 
There is nothing 'hair shirt' or incongruous about authors, 
repositories and institutions providing that choice.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK