RE: Homer Simpson at the NIH (renaissance?)

["Armbruster, Chris" <Chris.Armbruster@EUI.eu>]

The idea that the publishing is a no-growth market is based on 
the now faulty perception that the Oldenbourg model of conjoining 
peer review with dissemination in a final archival publication 
may be transposed to the internet era. True enough, this kind of 
publishing is a no-growth market. I would go even further and say 
that in the medium term it has no future at all. My argument 
would be that digital technology and economics strongly favour 
the severance of certification from dissemination. In that 
scenario, the functions of registration, dissemination and 
archiving will lie with (digital) libraries-cum-repositories, 
wheras certification and new kinds of value-adding navigation 
services will be a growth market.

I therefore suggest that we will witness the renaissance of 
society publishers and the return of the library for scientific 
and scholarly publishing. In this segment I would be more afraid 
for the big commercial publishers that, because of their size and 
inflexibility, might find themselves in a big squeeze quite soon.

For more details on this argument, please consult
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=997819

Armbruster, Chris, "Society Publishing, the Internet and Open 
Access: Shifting Mission-Orientation from Content Holding to 
Certification and Navigation Services?" (July 2007).
Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=997819

or, for an overview, go to
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=434782

Joe Esposito wrote:

If there is less money in the system, the bigger players are 
better positioned to survive; if there is more money in the 
system, the bigger players are better positioned to survive. The 
issue is not the size of the market; it is the maturity of the 
market.  Publishing is close to a no-growth business.  In 
no-growth markets, consolidation is a likely, if not inevitable, 
strategy.

The only reason that academic journals are published by such a 
huge number of publishers--unlike, say, college texts (6 players 
in the U.S. have 85% of the market)--is that the not-for-profit 
status of many of the players makes them resistant to some 
aspects of the marketplace.  That is neither good nor bad; it is 
what it is.  If all journals publishers were publicly traded and 
thus subject to Wall Street's stern review, consolidation would 
come quickly; we would be down to three publishers in 5 years.