RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

As a small university press that has just lost one of its 
journals to a large university press, Cambridge, I do not feel 
much sympathy at the moment for David's paean to the virtues of 
smallness. One factor in the editor's decision to take this 
journal away from us is that CUP can publish a lot more books in 
the field in which this journal exists. So, David, how does one 
compete with that advantage larger publishers have?

Yes, Highwire was innovative, but so were universities in 
creating their own e-mail systems to begin with. Guess what? Many 
universities are now turning over this business to Google and 
Microsoft because they have been able to invest and create 
systems far better than the universities' home-grown versions.

And what about other innovations, like open-source DSpace, DPubS, 
etc.? As I look around, I see commercial platforms like Aries 
that are far more advanced and sophisticated than anything 
self-grown in universities.

And who came up with Cross-Ref, DOIs, etc.? The commercial 
sector, not universities or societies.

I grant David that universities can be the initial seedbed for a 
lot of innovation. But it doesn't take long for the private 
sector to pick up on these innovations and, with their immense 
capital resources, develop them into far more sophisticated 
systems. Cottage industries will never be able to hold their own 
against the Wal-Marts of the world, I'm afraid. The independent 
bookstore sector is testimony to that. Just ask my two employees 
who used to be managers of local bookstores in State College. The 
only general bookstores that now exist are Barnes & Noble and the 
Penn State Bookstore (operated by B&N), plus one small store that 
doubles as a coffeehouse and mainly sells used, not new, books.

Imaginative thinking has allowed independents to keep a toehold 
in this business, but the best they can do is hang on. They'll 
never again dominant the sector the way they once did, just as 
you'll never see the general store regain the place now held by 
the Wal-Marts of the world. The last local general store in State 
College, Hout's, closed last year. Meanwhile, more big chain 
stores are sprouting up all the time.

David, look around you in Princeton: the same thing happened 
there. What remains of the old Balt, the Annex, etc., among 
locally owned restaurants, or the Micawber bookstore? All gone. 
Now it is just Starbuck's, MacDonald's, etc., and Barnes & Noble. 
Not much truly "local" small business left, is there?


>I know that I'm not going to convince Sandy and Jim, but I think
>they over-estimate the Wal-Marts and underestimate the smaller
>publishers.
>
>But just think about the business model that the CEO of a large
>publisher is going to have to propose to create the market that
>Sandy and Jim imagine. They are going to have to go to their
>shareholders or owners and say 'To drive out small publishers we
>are going to have to starve them of authors over the next five
>years.  To do that, we need to vastly improve the services we
>offer while massively cutting our revenue.  In physics, for
>example, we will need to reduce income per paper from $5000 or
>above to less than $2000 so as to put the APS out of business.
>The sector of our business that has been cash- and profit-rich
>over the past 20-40 years will, for the foreseeable future, have
>to run at a loss.' I imagine that a few CEOs will be going
>without their bonuses!  The point being that to make this change
>the large publishers not only have to compete against the smaller
>publishers, they have to compete against their internal
>expectations of what returns this market brings - and I suspect
>that is going to be the hardest thing for them to do.
>
>And while they do that, look at where most of the innovations in
>service and dissemination have come from over the past ten years
>- I would argue it's been from the small and society publishers,
>not the large commercials.  It is the commercials who play
>catch-up.  (In the field of online journals, for example, the
>large commercial publishers took quite a few years to come
>anywhere near what was being offered by HighWire).  Obviously,
>'innovations' in sales, where library budgets are tied into a
>small group of large publisher in multi-years deals, have come
>from the commercial publishers. But in terms of services?  I
>would say less so.
>
>So, I think that with a bit of imaginative thinking, focussing on
>what they do best, and greater collaboration on infrastructure
>issues small and society publishers are uniquely placed to take
>advantage of the changing environment and reassert themselves.
>(Which is much better, of course, than the main alternative on
>offer - their slow starvation of subscription revenues.)
>
>David Prosser
>SPARC Europe
>
>