RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

Sandy

I did say that I wasn't going to convince you!  OK, so what's the 
answer? The current subscription-based models won't work 
long-term for small and society publishers as all the comments 
you make about consolidation and the power of the large players 
definitely apply here (they can tie-in budgets in big, multi-year 
deals and they have massive sales forces).  So, if OA does not 
offer a survival strategy, then what?  Too often in the debate we 
here about why OA won't work, but little about what the 
alternative is.  Let's have the model that will allow small and 
society publisher to thrive in the world market.

I'm not suggesting that the OA route is going to be easy for 
small and society publishers, but I still argue that for some it 
will be the best strategy for long-term survival.  It allows them 
to compete on what they do best, it scales with increases in 
research funding, and it doesn't require large-scale sales 
infrastructures.  Transition will be difficult, but nothing 
compared to the difficulties of not transitioning!  Subscription 
budgets are not going to suddenly increase and I don't think that 
we can expect a world-wide ban on commercial journal publishers. 
More of the same means a slow (if they're lucky!) squeezing-out 
of the smaller publishers.

(A quick word on comparisons to brick-and-mortar businesses - the 
barriers to entry in the scholarly communications market have 
never been so low. Intellectual capital is much more important 
than financial capital in launching a journal.  This makes 
scholarly publishing very different from bookshops, restaurants, 
and supermarkets.)

By the way, I would love to have a look around Princeton - is 
that an invitation?

David

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: 17 June 2008 02:35
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees

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?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>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