RE: Raym Crow on publishing cooperatives

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

Joe

Could you provide a paper where the your claim that

'The call for Open Access is simply diminishing the NFPs.'

is explored in more detail?  You have stated it, ex chathedra, a 
number of times but I really can't see the logic of it and would 
appreciate a more detailed argument. It would also be useful to 
have an explanation for why in your view open access is a greater 
threat to NFPs than, say, the continued success of big deal 
offerings from large publishers.

For those that do not accept your central tenet that open access 
diminishes NFPs there is no contradiction between a call for open 
access and support of NFPs.

Best wishes

David C Prosser PhD
Director, SPARC Europe
E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk
http://www.sparceurope.org

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph J. Esposito
Sent: 15 September 2006 00:09
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: 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
> Washington, DC 20036
> heather@arl.org
> www.arl.org/sparc