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Re: Decision making by Libraries on serials and monographs and useage (re puzzled by self-archiving thread)
I don't want to engage the argument between Sally Morris and John
Houghton, but I do want to point out an error of fact in one of
Houghton's sources. Houghton quotes Chris Anderson's The Long
Tail (not a very good book, by the way: read it and see) to this
effect: " 'if the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market
for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is
larger than the market for those that are.'" This is simply
wrong.
Amazon's statistics are not a guide. It is apparently true that
Amazon's sales come predominantly from "long tail" titles, but
Amazon has enormous market share for those titles--for some
titles that share is 100%. For better-selling titles (the
130,000 Houghton cites, though a figure a third of that would
make more sense, if the aim is to reflect the realities of
bricks-and-mortar bookselling) the share is distributed across
thousands of booksellers. The market for books outside the top
130,000 is decidedly not bigger than that for the 130,000.
To the extent that Houghton's argument is propped up by
Anderson's authority, it has to be said that Houghton's thesis is
unproven.
Joe Esposito
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Houghton" <John.Houghton@vu.edu.au>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 4:15 PM
Subject: Re: Decision making by Libraries on serials and monographs and
useage (re puzzled by self-archiving thread)
Sally Morris wrote:
I am no economist so my questions are common-sense ones (I think)
Increasing access I can understand in principle - but how does
one increase 'efficiency'(as an input)? Your most prominent
definitions of 'efficiency' are related to 'relevance' and I
really don't see how that could be increased. Wouldn't the
arguments be more convincing if one looked at the increase in
just one variable, anyway?
As noted before, efficiency is used in two related senses: the
usefulness/use of the knowledge created by R&D and the
efficiency of the conduct of R&D. In the report (pp31-34 and
Appendix II) we outline some of the potential impacts of
enhanced access, including a range of ways in which the
efficiency of research might be increased (e.g. increased speed
of discovery, reduction of duplicative research, etc.) and its
use might be extended (e.g. enhanced access to industry,
government and society, the emergence of new industries such as
weather derivatives, etc.). These are discussed in the context
of developing an "impacts framework" that focuses on the issues
of access, use and efficiency. As for treating access and
efficiency separately: its an option, but we thought that
access, use and efficiency of R&D were likely to positively be
related... for all the reasons outlined in the literature
review in Appendix II.
As to the one-to-one relationship between a given percentage
of increased access (or anything else) and increased benefit -
could you clarify that? I'm not assuming that most users have
access already - just that those who do are likely to be those
most able to benefit, and that ability to benefit will decline
as access increases. The same would go for any impact on the
efficiency of the users' own research.
To a simple non-economist like me, it all seems to rest on
huge and rather implausible assumptions...
I'm not sure we are making any assumptions. The estimates are
presented in the form: IF... THEN... Obviously, the things
following the IF are the variables. We are simply putting
forward range estimates of the possible impacts on social
returns to R&D, and based on a literature review we use
plausible ranges of social returns from 25% to 75% and 1% to
10% increases in access and efficiency (the thinking behind
which we discussed in the last message). Purely for the
purposes of discussion we then use examples based on a 25% rate
of return to R&D and 5% increase in access and efficiency.
As noted before, we use average rates of return because we are
not changing the level of R&D expenditure. The extent to which
there may be diminishing marginal returns to access depends on
how far we are from optimal access at the moment. In his
discussion of the "long tail", Anderson noted that:
/"What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size
of it... Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000
titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from
//outside// its top 130,000 titles. [so].. if the Amazon
statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not
even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market
for those that are. In other words, the potential book market
may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get
over the economics of scarcity./"
As also noted before, the evidence from the Open Citation
Project and from OA repository download statistics suggests
that there is much more reading/use with OA... perhaps, when
one adds zero pricing (to the user), there may be a scholarly
publishing long tail. If the market that isn't reached is
bigger than that which is, and its been reported that OA
articles get 2-5 times the citations, suggesting that use by
researchers alone may increase by 100% to 400%, then the
difference between average and marginal returns is unlikely to
be large - be they increasing or diminishing.
Regards,
John Houghton
--
Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES), Victoria University
VoIP: (FireFly) 88207699 (Skype) John.Houghton
E-mail: john.houghton@pobox.com
Web: www.pobox.com/~houghton