RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees

["David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>]

I know that I'm not going to convince Sandy and Jim, but I think 
they over-estimate the Wal-Marts and underestimate the smaller 
publishers.

But just think about the business model that the CEO of a large 
publisher is going to have to propose to create the market that 
Sandy and Jim imagine. They are going to have to go to their 
shareholders or owners and say 'To drive out small publishers we 
are going to have to starve them of authors over the next five 
years.  To do that, we need to vastly improve the services we 
offer while massively cutting our revenue.  In physics, for 
example, we will need to reduce income per paper from $5000 or 
above to less than $2000 so as to put the APS out of business. 
The sector of our business that has been cash- and profit-rich 
over the past 20-40 years will, for the foreseeable future, have 
to run at a loss.' I imagine that a few CEOs will be going 
without their bonuses!  The point being that to make this change 
the large publishers not only have to compete against the smaller 
publishers, they have to compete against their internal 
expectations of what returns this market brings - and I suspect 
that is going to be the hardest thing for them to do.

And while they do that, look at where most of the innovations in 
service and dissemination have come from over the past ten years 
- I would argue it's been from the small and society publishers, 
not the large commercials.  It is the commercials who play 
catch-up.  (In the field of online journals, for example, the 
large commercial publishers took quite a few years to come 
anywhere near what was being offered by HighWire).  Obviously, 
'innovations' in sales, where library budgets are tied into a 
small group of large publisher in multi-years deals, have come 
from the commercial publishers. But in terms of services?  I 
would say less so.

So, I think that with a bit of imaginative thinking, focussing on 
what they do best, and greater collaboration on infrastructure 
issues small and society publishers are uniquely placed to take 
advantage of the changing environment and reassert themselves. 
(Which is much better, of course, than the main alternative on 
offer - their slow starvation of subscription revenues.)

David Prosser
SPARC Europe



-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: 12 June 2008 00:29
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees

The big publishers have far more capital to invest in providing 
sophisticated, cutting-edge "services"--and don't forget that 
they can afford to pay good stipends to academics to edit their 
journals, too.  The consortial solution you suggest, David, is 
the best way for the smaller publishers to compete. But even a 
large consortium like Project Muse has nowhere near the 
investment capital that the biggest STM publishers do, so it will 
always be a game of catch-up.

Appeals to scholars to support non-profit alternatives have had 
very limited success so far: witness the migration of 
AnthroSource to Wiley. We'll see how successful initiatives like 
Harvard's opt-out mandate is. In view of the UC report on faculty 
attitudes, which showed most scholars (especially in the 
sciences) satisfied with their current publishing arrangements 
and feeling that it is other people who have problems, not 
themselves, I say "good luck."  Faculty attitudes and habits die 
hard.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>Jim:  Your WalMart comparison is interesting, but I draw a
>different conclusion from it than you do.
>
>The first thing to note is that for the publishing process the
>most important input is the intellectual.  Editors and reviewers
>have no greater incentive to work with a big publisher than they
>do with a small society publisher.  The ability to extract
>intellectual effort from the community is not one that the big
>publishers through their market position can leverage.
>
>Where they can dominate is in sales and marketing.  Big
>publishers can go to individual libraries and consortia and offer
>large bundles, in multi-year packages that tie-in large
>percentages of the libraries' budgets.  They can employ large
>sales-forces to ensure that their products continue to be
>purchased by the consortia.  Small publishers find it harder to
>compete as they do not have the sales-forces and they do not have
>the bundles.  So, it is the current big-deal subscription model
>that encourages WalMart-type behaviour and is leading to the
>consolidation of the market.  We can see this in the trend for
>small and society publishers to move away from independence - a
>move that has nothing to do with open access.
>
>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.
>
>Now if we just replace the current model where users (authors and
>readers) are insulated from the subscription costs of journals to
>a new model where users are insulated from publication charges
>then the possibilities of generating a functional market will be
>diminished and small publishers will be disadvantaged as they
>will find it harder to compete against big publisher publication
>charge big-deals (of the 'For a yearly payment of x hundred
>thousand dollars the fees for publishing in any of publisher y's
>1000 journals are covered for all researchers at institution z'
>type).  That is why it is important that the prices become
>transparent to the users and they become more closely integrated
>with the decision making.
>
>(I should add as an aside that I do think there are places where
>small and society publishers could usefully come together more in
>cooperatives to share development of submission systems,
>publishing platforms and such like. That would provide them with
>some economies of scale while allowing them to concentrate on
>what they are best at - selection and certification.  There have
>been some efforts in this direction - e.g. BioOne - but I would
>like to see more.)
>
>David Prosser
>SPARC Europe