Maximizing access (RE: Q 1. on OA)

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

>> As to your theoretical question - I'm sure all publishers want
>> maximum access to their content. However, to achieve this they
>> need a stable and predicatable business model to make it work.

Toby hits on an important issue here, and one that I think too 
often falls by the wayside.  Yes, publishers and authors would 
like to maximize access to their content -- but for both parties, 
maximum access is usually a means, not an end.  Publishers (even 
nonprofit ones) want to maximize access to their content so that 
they can keep revenue streams healthy and stay in businesses. 
Scholars want to maximize access to their work to the degree that 
doing so will help them in their careers.  This doesn't mean that 
publishers and scholars have no interest in the benefit of 
mankind -- I believe that most of them do. But that doesn't mean 
that the benefit of mankind is generally the most urgent concern 
driving their publishing decisions from day to day.

Hence the problem of scholarly publication.  Getting a maximum 
number of readers is easy; getting paying readers is hard, and so 
is getting tenure.  To the degree that publishers can maximize 
income without maximizing readers, they're likely to do so (hence 
the existence of subscription fees), and where authors can 
maximize their career advancement without maximizing readers, 
they're likely to do so as well (hence their tendency to submit 
papers to pricey refereed journals rather than simply post them 
online).

Unless we accept the fact that journals exist for reasons other 
than the pure dissemination of scholarship, we'll never be able 
to make sensible decisions about pricing and access models.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu