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Re: Bad Times are Good Times for Open Access?
It appears that the link in the post below is broken. I have
written FirstMonday to get this fixed, but in the meantime, I
have found a copy of the article here:
http://outreach.lib.uic.edu/www/issues/issue9_8/esposito/index.html
Joe Esposito
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 4:30 PM
Subject: Bad Times are Good Times for Open Access?
> In a long and polemical post, Leslie Chan stated that "OA is
> the only sustainable way to build local research capacity in
> the long term." I don't wish to argue the broad open access
> issue yet again, but I would like to know in what sense OA is
> more sustainable than toll-access publications, assuming OA is
> sustainable at all.
>
> The fact is that neither OA nor toll-access publishing is
> "sustainable." How could they be? They are both subject to the
> same vagaries of the marketplace, the economy, and the changing
> interests of funding agencies and the research community, not
> to mention the technological transformation known as "Cloud
> computing," which, through streaming, will pretty much put an
> end to unauthorized copying.
>
> One would have thought that the recent meltdown on Wall Street
> would have rid us of the term "sustainable" once and for all.
> A toll-access publiction is not "sustainable" if customers
> cannot pay their bills. An OA service (of whatever kind) that
> is supported by an institutional sponsor or philanthropy may
> find funding cut back when the size of an endowment plummets.
> Surely many members of this list are facing such cutbacks now.
> An author-pays service (e.g., PLOS or BMC) may be challenged
> when authors have difficulty coming up with the cash. In a
> connected world, when Wall St. loses, libraries starve.
>
> The sustainability idea is the Miss Havisham of scholarly
> communications. We all want to stop the world at a particular
> momentous time. Sooner or later, however, someone pulls down
> the drapes and we see Havisham's wedding banquet and the
> sustainable models of publishing for the nostalgic illusions
> that they are.
>
> Better, I think, to imagine what is likely to survive the bad
> times we are now living through. Provided one is not too
> particular about all the trappings of legacy publishing, I
> believe bad times will be good times for OA for the simple
> reason that one form of OA--the simple posting of content on
> the Internet without benefit of any editorial review--is very
> inexpensive and potentially almost entirely automated. This is
> not "greeen" OA or "gold" OA but "unwashed" OA. In good times
> DSpace is simply an annoyance to an Elsevier or a Wiley; in bad
> times DSpace may become the preferred, indeed the only, venue
> for some researchers and some disciplines. This assumes that
> DSpace and other OA vehicles are run in a bare-bones way, with
> little overhead. Perhaps that is yet another fantasy.
>
> So, looking out beyond the economic crisis, assuming anyone can
> see that far, we are likely to encounter a great amount of
> unmediated OA material on the Internet, indexed by Google, free
> for anyone to review. It is likely that commentary will be
> built up around at least some of that material, a form of
> post-publication peer review. Over time this could lead to a
> new publishing paradigm: low-cost Internet posting of
> materials directly by authors, with increasingly elaborate
> community-based commentary surrounding it. We already see this
> kind of thing in the consumer Internet.
>
> I described this scenario in an essay several years ago: "The
> Devil You Don't Know: The Unexpected Future of Open Access
> Publishing." It can be found at http://firstmonday.org. If you
> take the trouble to read this, be sure to also read Stevan
> Harnad's nuclear critique of it, affixed to the target article.
> It is one of his best, and it inadvertently proves my thesis.
>
> Joe Esposito