Re: How much advertising is there?

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I have no argument with you, Adam, except that we'd still have 
bills to pay in an OA environment, and without much prospect of 
deriving income from advertising, we'd have to rely on fees from 
authors or their institutions, which in the humanities are so far 
very scarce.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

> I remember once trying to read the article in which Godel proved 
> his incompleteness theorem. I perservered but my understanding 
> did not carry me through....If you look at scholarly publishing 
> in the manner of an estate agent it does not appear to be very 
> promising terrain. The really good stuff may be almost 
> incomprehensible. Not enough eyeballs and some of them are on 
> very thin stipends with low disposable income.
>
> But this really isnt the point. The value of scholarly 
> publications is clearly not to be measured in the terms of the 
> Google ads the page might transact, nor indeed in terms of the 
> subscription income through which it may be currently supported. 
> What matters is its accessiblity and its citeability, and its in 
> those areas that the Open Access argument wins the day.
>
> To put it rather crudely: the value of the Godel-watching 
> eyeballs is not to be measured in terms of the ads which might 
> appear on the Godel-content pages. The value for Google is in 
> the overall intentional record and reading/seeking pattern of 
> the web user. From that standpoint the value of the shape and 
> patterns of research and scholalry activity may be really very 
> high and they may be realised in ways which we find it hard to 
> conceive. Google surely knows this and that is one reason why it 
> has made its big commitment to Google Book Search.
>
> There may be more value in openness than in the transaction 
> where the page which meets the eyeball.
>
> Adam