Re: How much advertising is there?

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

But Bernie is right:  risks have to be taken.  And one of those 
risks is to operate at the edge, and sometimes over it, of the 
latitude afforded most presses.  You can't go to your supervisory 
board and ask permission to stir the pot.  You have to stir the 
pot first.  I don't happen to believe that the particular item 
that initiated this thread (advertising-based models to support 
scholarly communications) is particularly useful, but the 
principle still holds. To some extent the presses today are 
reaping the rewards of an overly timid publishing strategy, which 
has confined many of them to small and shrinking corners of 
academic publishing.  Why did we have to wait for Nature to come 
up with the Precedings service or for entrepreneurs to develop 
SSRN?

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandy Thatcher" <sgt3@psu.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2007 3:03 PM
Subject: Re: How much advertising is there?

> The reality is, Bernie, that university presses have very 
> little latitude to take risks. Traditionally starved for 
> capital and taken to task for any deficits incurred, presses 
> just can't afford to take such risks.
>
> As the Ithaka Report recently pointed out, university presses 
> also suffer from this Catch-22: "When they perform well (in 
> financial terms), they are 'rewarded' by having subsidies cut. 
> When they run too large a deficit, they are threatened with 
> closure."
>
> This is the "rational" universe in which our presses operate!
>
> Sandy Thatcher
>
> > Sandy Thatcher's question brings to mind an old axiom...your
> > mileage may vary.
> >
> > I don't think anyone is saying that relying solely on advertising revenues
> > will work for every publisher or content provider. So, this model *might*
> > not work for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, or the Shaw Annual, or
> > the Chaucer Review. But it might (or might not) work for other publishers
> > of small circulation journals. We need experimentation. We need to have
> > people push the envelope. We need to have curious people take a chance and
> > see what happens. We won't know what is possible along these lines unless
> > people take risks.
> >
> > Bernie Sloan
> >
> > ****