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Re: Decision making by Libraries on serials and monographs and useage (re puzzled by self-archiving thread)
Joe, I think Anderson's primary point is about market extension
(number of titles for which there are customers), more than
intensification (number of copies for which there are customers)
- although both are important.
My point on possible differences between average and marginal
returns was based on reported citation differences between
subscription and OA articles, particularly in so far as it
related to research use (intensification?), and on the "long
tail" idea in general, particularly in so far as it related to
potential non-research use (extension?) - although the mapping
was obviously far from perfect.
IF Amazon sells anything like twice as many titles as are stocked
in the largest physical bookstore, it does at least suggest that
extension might add significantly to intensification. And, to get
back to the original point, rather than speculating as to whether
marginal returns are decreasing or possibly even increasing, we
used average returns as a starting point for preliminary
estimations.
Perhaps its an Australian (small/remote country) perspective, but
tails seem an important potential benefit of OA from here. Try
getting a history of Fiji published by one of the major North
American or European publishers and, regardless of its scholarly
merit, you would be unlikely to succeed, because they don't think
the market for it (that they serve) is big enough. And yet, if
you look at download statistics from institutional repositories
at local universities where there are significant Asia-Pacific
research schools, you see thousands of downloads of things like
histories of Fiji (a number of downloads sometimes 2, 3 and 4
times the average print run of the popular/mainstream academic
titles that are published). So there does appear to be a
substantial un(der)-served market - for more titles and more
copies.
Regards, from the tail end of the world...
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
Joseph J. Esposito wrote:
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