RE: Reply to David Prosser

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

Dear Joe

I would be very interested in seeing such comments from NFPs, 
especially if they could be placed in the context.  Perhaps a 
piece of work could be commissioned to ask NFPs what they see as 
the greatest threats to their operations and the greatest 
opportunities over the next ten years.  Open access is just one 
part of a changing environment (including falling subscriptions - 
both institutional and personal, site and national licenses, new 
publishing technologies, etc.).

My comment on the big deal was a specific one and I may not have 
expressed it well.  I see the increasing proportion of library 
budgets being spent on the big deals offered by a small number of 
large publishers as being a threat to NFPs.  With a few 
exceptions (e.g., BioOne, Project Euclid, the ALPSP Learned 
Journals Collection), NFPs are not able to package their titles 
in big deals and so are not able to compete on a level playing 
field. So this is not a question of whether big deals are good or 
bad for libraries, but what effect they have on NFPs. 
Personally, I think that they are a much greater threat to NFPs 
than open access.

Best wishes

David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARC Europe
E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph J. Esposito
Sent: 17 September 2006 23:31
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Reply to David Prosser

David Prosser wrote:

"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?"

This is a fair question.  I know of no such paper.

Perhaps this would be a good time for the participants in 
not-for-profit academic publishing to offer their thoughts on 
this matter.  In any number of offline discussions, I have been 
told of the problems that OA poses for the NFPs, but David is not 
out of bounds in asking to hear the evidence. Could the NFP 
publishers who are part of this mailgroup share some of their 
comments with David and others who are of his point of view?  If 
people keep silent, it is hard to see why the advocates of OA 
would temper their activism.

As some NFP staff members may have institutional constraints on 
public statements, I would be happy to forward their anonymous 
comments to this list, assuming I can get them by the stern gaze 
of our moderator.

There is one item in David's post, however, to which I am 
compelled to respond personally:

"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."

I don't know where this question comes from.  I have never been a 
supporter of the so-called "big deals" from a library's point of 
view.  The "big deal" substitutes quantity for quality.  But if 
these bundled packages have been successful, it is because 
libraries [and/or their readers] have wanted them.

Joe Esposito