Re: popular speculative philosophy?

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

There are at least three theoretical errors in this analysis.

The first is the assumption that if you had a large group of 
readers, you would necessarily earn advertising revenue. 
Perhaps, but not necessarily. Let's imagine that all 6 billion 
humans living today were diligent readers of the Journal of 
Speculative Philosophy.  Who would advertise in this medium? 
Advertisers have many venues and assess them carefully.  Why JSP 
when you can advertise on the Superbowl?  What's important is not 
"eyeballs" per se but the kind of eyeballs and the context they 
are found in.  There is an unambiguous precedent:  Life magazine. 
Life had a huge readership, but advertisers abandoned it for 
other venues.

A corollary to this error is that even if advertisers were 
interested in this audience, they may choose to advertise on a 
search engine instead of the target pages of JSP.  Google, in 
other words, steals advertising from the content it links to.

The second error is that something has to be OA to find an 
audience.  This is indisputably not true.  I am not familiar with 
JSP myself (the only person among the 6 billion, perhaps), but it 
is likely to be online already through Muse; or if it isn't, many 
publications like it are.  Muse is a huge marketing success; its 
publications potentially reach millions in academic communities. 
How many pageviews do we find for JSP?  I doubt the number is 
very high, and it isn't because JSP isn't freely available to 
millions.  If JSP is sampled at most by 1 percent of millions, 
why would we assume that it would be sampled by a higher 
percentage of billions?

Medline is a huge success, but not because it is OA.  It is a 
huge success because it is online and searchable.  This is error 
#3:  the idea that OA equals online.  Online is important, OA is 
marginal.  Most of a target audience most of the time have access 
to toll-access publications.  The important word here is 
"target."  Most is not the same thing as all--but, paraphrasing 
Voltaire, we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Sandy is doing a heroic job in tough circumstances.  He is to be 
commended, not chided for cowardice.  If you think managing a 
specialized academic publishing operation is easy, try it 
sometime.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Heather Morrison" <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 01, 2007 4:54 PM
Subject: popular speculative philosophy?

> There is more to heaven and earth than was every dreamed of in 
> our philosophies... [Shakespeare, I think]
>
> Sandy Thatcher wonders whether there is any hope of advertising 
> revenue for an esoteric journal like the Journal of Speculative 
> Philosophy.
>
> How will we ever know the appetite of the public for 
> speculative philosophy, unless we experiment with open access?
>
> When the NIH made Medline openly accessible in the 90's, 
> thinking of expanding access to all the physicians and medical 
> researchers, it came as a surprise that usage increased more 
> than a hundredfold, and daily usage exceeded the numbers of 
> physicians and medical researchers.
>
> If there were no love for philosophy, why would there be an 
> entire academic discipline with this name?  I suspect that not 
> many sign up for this, as a quick and easy way to land a 
> high-paying job after graduation.
>
> For Sandy Thatcher's latest question on this topic, see: 
> http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0709/msg00089.html
>
> Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author 
> alone, and does not reflect the opinion or policy of BC 
> Electronic Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.
>
> Heather Morrison, MLIS
> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com