Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

["James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 6:06 PM, David Prosser

<david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Open access with input fees allows publishers to compete on the 
> level of author services - something that small and society 
> publisher have traditionally been very good at.  Rather than 
> being the death-knell for society publishers it could be their 
> best chance of survival - especially compared to the current 
> big-deal environment.

"Traditionally" means little here.  If you exempt publishers from 
having to have sales and marketing forces and subscription 
management and fulfillment offices and tell them that henceforth 
the competition is going to be in the price-to-author and 
service-to-author, the WalMart powers will turn all their 
resources to winning on that front and quiet learned societies 
will no longer look so user-friendly to authors.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown