Re: Future of the "subscription model?"

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I don't agree that open access is a train wreck waiting to 
happen. There are good and bad OA services.  Some will survive, 
some will not.  This is true of traditional publishing models as 
well.

I want to repeat a remark I made earlier on this thread. I am not 
defending the situation; I am trying to explain it.  Changing the 
"system" (how can anything so diverse, so disorganized, be called 
a "system"?) requires an understanding of the economics at work. 
Many of the tactics used to effect change are pointless, the 
expression of moral outrage among them.  OA, whatever its many 
virtues, does not support libraries, though it does open up a new 
revenue stream from authors, thereby expanding the market for 
scholarly materials and potentially increasing the profitability 
of the sector.  I would be surprised if that is the goal 
expressed by many OA advocates.

Joe Esposito

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 4:46 PM,  <bill@multi-science.co.uk> 
wrote:

> Fred is quite right that the bigger publishers so dominate the
> library market that smaller publishers are always being squeezed.
> I have lost count of the times librarians have said to me they
> would love to buy a journal of ours but because so much of their
> funds are going to a certain publisher, there simply isn't
> anything left over. Libraries need to grasp that the more Big
> Publishing dominates the market, the more demanding it will
> become, and for that reason it is in the interests of libraries
> to do what they can to support smaller publishers, to encourage
> diversity in the supplier base. Moreover, smaller publishers,
> having to be nimble to survive in lop-sided markets, are the
> people who are more likely to come up with innovative titles, to
> quickly latch on to developments in technology which merit the
> starting of a new journal: another good reason for libraries to
> give their support.
>
> I would wholly agree with Fred's remark that smaller subscription
> publishers offer titles of high academic value and are not
> getting their fair share of the cake, but I would disagree with
> his inclusion of OA publishers. My prediction is that OA is a
> train wreck waiting to happen, that the scholarly communications
> landscape in 25 years time will be littered with broken links,
> journals that lasted only a couple of years before the amateur
> publishers got fed up with an unrelenting and unrewarding
> exercise: unretrievable research. Will our successors thank us
> for that? Is that any answer to the problem Big Publishing has
> created for both libraries and small publishers?
>
> Bill Hughes
> Director
> Multi-Science Publishing
> www.multi-science.co.uk