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Re: PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access: excerpts from article in Nature Magazine

Somebody at Wiley/Blackwells should really have made sure that the non-negotiation of the Norwegian license did not happen in the same month as the 'Pit-Bull' turn in the PR profile which also had a Wiley impetus. For the Norwegian side of the Norway fiasco see this link:

http://nyheter.uib.no/lib/utskrift.php?meldingstype=engelsk&id=35023&medium=nettavis

In fact, this all sounds like, which means it IS, terrible PR for the whole industry and it is very likely that whoever, on the Blackwells side, failed to negotiate the Norwegian licence satisfactorily is regretting the fact. The University of Bergen link reflects the library view.

It is improbable that Blackwells will go public, but there is bound to be a resonable side to the Blackwells position -- eg the 7% pa rise sounds too steep, but does it anticipate/reflect significant growth in scale and number of journals? In which case there may be some justification for increased prices. Blackwells have been one of the most creative and effective publishers in the STM area for decades, not known for pricing at the top. But such public failure to agree a deal speaks of a dysfuntional relationship between publishers and librarians. If Blackwells are in the dock, what hope for their even more hard-nosed competitors?

Time to look again at the 'Big Deal' style of negotiating, perhaps? Perhaps, but I suspect that libraries and their users are even more addicted to the aggregation model than are the publishers; without big deals, librarians have to work very hard to make difficult a la carte choices, which tend to leave minorities disaffected.

Is there scope for a Really Big Deal which incentivises the publishers to make OA happen? Here is a suggestion. Major libraries might resolve that they will only do Big Deals with content collections which offer all-guaranteed-Green for established journals and only-Gold for all yet to be launched research journals.( An emphasis on new Gold journals in big deals will encourage publishers to launch new ones and capture more OA articles from the legacay. Of course new Gold journals are also by definition outside big deals and that is fine). Otherwise subs are only done on a case by case basis ....The logic of the situation, with increasing concentration of ownership and delivery on the publisher side, broader consortial buying from the libraries, says that something of that sort should happen to secure OA and offer publishers a rationale for slashing costs and prices and redirecting investment. Can it be squared with the competition rules? That might be difficult, but competition is being squeezed out of the market by the current trends.

Its either an agreed vision for the way research is published or we can expect more frayed tempers and dysfunctional non-deals.

adam

Adam Hodgkin

On 2/20/07, Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
Charles:

I must say that this is not a good accounting practice.  It
results in the "creeping overhead" problem.  Organizations that
do this (working only with marginal costs and without allocating
fixed overhead), whether in the for-profit or not-for-profit
world, find it difficult to extricate themselves from certain
projects and also inexorably get cash flow headaches.  Nor does
this kind of set-up address the need to accumulate capital for
future investments.

This matter of future investments is not small.  It appears that
many people involved with scholarly communications are advocates
of "once and for all" information technology:  the technology we
have today will do just fine forever.  This won't happen.  Needs
change and grow.  A surplus or profit is essential to have money
to invest when the time comes. With IT (operating under the
jurisdiction of Moore's Law), that time comes every 18 months.

This is not a statement against OA projects.  Rather, the point
is that even OA projects have to do more than cover their costs.
If not, they will become creaky and eventually disappear.  Think
of such things as underinvested civic infrastructure to see where
this can go.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles W. Bailey, Jr." <cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 4:00 PM
Subject: Re: PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access: excerpts from article in
Nature Magazine


Sally:

People and infrastructure costs are indeed important.

My assumption is that the SFU Library (and/or its parent
institution) is subsidizing most of these costs (people, in
this case, meaning technical support staff) and charging modest
fees to recoup some incremental costs that are not covered by
in-place, baseline human/technical/facility infrastructure.
(Heather can clarify if this is not so.)

The external "publishers" paying these modest fees then only
have to worry about the costs of editorial and journal
production support (the latter may be as simple as creating
PDFs from Word files and putting them and metadata into OJS).
Editorial support may be done entirely by volunteers, whose
salaries are being paid as part of their real jobs by various
universities and other organizations worldwide.

http://software.lib.sfu.ca/docs/software.prices.pdf

So, from the external "publishers" point of view, the only real
costs are as outlined above, and, from the SFU Library point of
view, the costs are not viewed as if there was no
infrastructure already in place: to a large degree, it was
there already for other purposes, and it is the incremental
cost on top of this base that is required perform the new
journal-hosting function that is viewed as their "real" cost.

Best Regards, Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Digital Scholarship
http://www.digital-scholarship.org/
E-Mail: cwbailey@digital-scholarship.com


Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:


I think all of those involved in publishing recognize that the
major element of cost is people;  infrastructure is also an
important element - e.g. buildings, heat and light, computers
and their systems (quite complex if they are hosting
e-journals). If these costs were ignored, I'd be prepared to
guess that many publishers, both commercial and otherwise,
could come up with a similar figure. We have to be careful not
to compare apples with oranges!

Sally Morris
Consultant, Morris Associates (Publishing Consultancy)
South House, The Street
Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Email:  sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk