Re: Oxford Journals release preliminary findings from open access

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>]

ALPSP held a scenario planning meeting a while ago and homed in 
on scenarios to do with selfarchiving and OA publishing.  One 
hypothesis was that large publishers would be able to push 
smaller publishers out of business because they could afford to 
offer unrealistically low OA fees, thus setting an expectation 
among authors and their funders which their smaller competitors 
could not match, and then adjusting prices when they had achieved 
their competitive objective.  However, this does not seem to be 
what is happening. Larger publishers were by and large the first 
to set high and IMHO realistic publication charges, and smaller 
and nonprofit presses are now tending to converge on very similar 
figures.

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "Indiana Univ. Math. J." <iumj@indiana.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2006 2:08 AM
Subject: Re: Oxford Journals release preliminary findings from open access
experiments: final report now available online

> When I find a publisher whose print journals are at the (very) 
> high end of the spectrum *and* which also advocates Open 
> Access, I ask myself:  What's wrong with my brain---why does it 
> expect coherence...?  Maybe there is a vast conspiracy out 
> there :-) Maybe the "big publishers" advocate OA as a means to 
> make sure that the small, independent journals go out the 
> board?
>
> Would someone care to list all the "big publishers" whose 
> *majority* of print journals are expensive (take the per page 
> cost, if you will) and who also advocate OA?
>
> Best, Elena Fraboschi