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Re: Raym Crow on publishing cooperatives

Heather: I don't mean to be provocative, but one cannot go to the SPARC Web site and believe that SPARC truly supports the not-for-profit publishing sector. The call for Open Access is simply diminishing the NFPs. If one diminishes the NFP sector, it means more money for the for-profits. Actions have consequences, however unintended.

For the umpteenth time: I am very much an advocate of various forms of OA publishing--such as, to cite the obvious example, publications in areas where there is indeed no market, either because the number of researchers is small or the discipline is still emerging. Nor can I imagine anyone finding fault with the beneficence of Cornell University in supporting the OA arXiv, or the role the Moore Foundation is playing in PLoS. But there are 24,000 peer-reviewed journals, and for many of them OA is the problem, not the solution.

A truly progressive strategy would be for the major research universities to make big commitments to their university presses, who would aggregate large numbers of society journals, yielding the efficiencies Raym Crow outlines in his excellent paper, even as they continue with their mission-based programs--good for the professional societies, good for the universities, and good for the academic libraries.

There is no inherent reason, unless a failure of imagination is inherent, that there are not at least a half-dozen billion-dollar university presses, challenging the market dominance of the commercial publishers. Wouldn't it be a great thing if Harvard decided to put its balance sheet to work?

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Heather Joseph" <heather@arl.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: Raym Crow on publishing cooperatives

Dear Joe,

Glad you found the Publishing Cooperatives article of interest.
SPARC has actively worked with the non-profit publishing
community since its inception - working directly in partnership
with dozens of scholarly societies to help them make the
transition to electronic publishing on projects like BioOne and
Project Euclid. You can see the range of partnerships that SPARC
supports at: http://www.arl.org/sparc/partner/index.html

The publishing cooperatives paper doesn't signal a policy shift
at all - rather it is simply a continuation of our original
mission of exploring new models of scholarly publishing that
address the inequities and inefficiencies in the current models.

Best,

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heather Joseph
Executive Director, SPARC
21 Dupont Circle NW
Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
202.296.2296
heather@arl.org
www.arl.org/sparc