Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

David's comment that we hear little about the viable alternatives 
to open access for small publishers suggests to me that someone 
isn't listening.  While there are undoubtedly many who are 
arguing that OA has no real possibilities, there are many people 
working responsibly in this area, and they have found that the 
number of options for small publishers is large.  OA is just one 
of many things that a small publisher can do, and not necessarily 
one of the stronger options.

Before I say more here, I want to note that I spent most of 
yesterday working with a client on an OA business model.  It 
looks promising.  More and more of my time goes into this kind of 
project.  Personally, I am agnostic about whether a service is OA 
or toll-access (though I am not keen on advertising-supported 
content services because of its corruptive nature).  What I do 
care about is that the service works and the claims for it are 
not disproportionate to its benefits.

The problem is not big publishers versus small publishers.  The 
problem is that many small publishers are small because they 
think small.  A conversation about publishing on the Internet 
that begins with a statement about the low-cost nature of 
Internet dissemination is a waste of everybody's time.  To think 
big, a publisher has to focus on creating value, not counting 
pennies.  If we approached higher education the way some people 
approach digital publishing, our students would not yet have 
caught up with Watson and Crick and by current affairs we would 
mean the conference at Yalta.

Small publishers can organize themselves into groups with more 
marketing clout.  They can outsource all their technology and get 
the best in the world (no in-house technology at even the largest 
commercial publishers in 2008 is as robust as what various 
service organizations now provide). They can create international 
marketing consortia; they can create their own "big deal" 
programs.  They can retain top-flight search-engine marketers to 
improve traffic and drive up citation counts. They can create 
centralized production services that will offer the benefits of 
scale.

Is there a shorthand way to do all this?  Sure:  bring your 
journal to a university press, a half-dozen of which can provide 
all these services.  But you can also do these things without a 
university press umbrella.

At bottom, the problem for small publishers is governance, not 
toll-access publishing or competition from commercial firms. 
Few not-for-profit academic publishers have boards that are 
really qualified to help direct a management team.  Typically 
boards are staffed with high-ranking faculty, with no experience 
in commerce, digital media, and the challenge of meeting a 
payroll.  A distinguished professor of history has as much claim 
to sit on the board of an academic publisher as the head of the 
warehouse has to be the chairman of the department of history. 
Intelligence means nothing without domain knowledge.

OA is just another tool.  What matters is the hands that grasp 
that tool or any other.

Joe Esposito