From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2015 07:03:24 +0000

The trouble with these musings (apart from the usual ‘I’m a perfectly
reasonable person; you’re a raving partisan’ attacks) is that they are
rather empty.  They don’t actually give a vision of what the world of
scholarly communications would look like if we entered the nirvana of
blissful cooperation.  Rather disappointing.

David



On 20 Jul 2015, at 00:51, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: T Scott Plutchak <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2015 22:20:13 +0000

I think Karin is very much on the right track.  My own musings on the
subject are here:

http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2015/07/what-we-share.html

Scott

T Scott Plutchak | Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies
UAB | The University of Alabama at Birmingham
The Edge of Chaos ­ LHL 427
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4712-5233



>From: Karin Wikoff <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:09:23 +0000
>
>I think the relationship is symbiotic.  It doesn't have to be as
>antagonistic as it sometimes is.  The common shared goal is a desire
>to sustain academic publishing.  Each party gets something different
>out of academic publishing, but if it becomes so unsustainable that it
>crashes and burns, every party loses out.  So, we have a shared
>interest in making things work.  The trick is that we each do have to
>protect our interests, which can lead to taking actions which
>exacerbate the conflict and do not help the larger goal of keeping it
>sustainable.  (Or perhaps making it sustainable, because I am not at
>all sure that it really is right now).  Sticking to an insistence on
>continuing to maintain a much-larger-than-any-other-publishers profit
>margin in the face of disruptive change, for example, -- that's not
>sustainable.  (Kevin Smith had a blog about this a couple years ago,
>with a link to a financial analysis on the impact of open access on
>Elsevier if they continue on the same path).  On the other hand,
>libraries can't just expect publishers to change everything around to
>meet our needs to the total detriment of their profit margin either -
>and yet, we are squeezed in ways beyond our control.  We are not a
>bottomless well.
>
>I would love to see publishers, vendors, authors, and librarians sit
>down and talk straight about what can be done to reach that shared
>goal because right now, it feels like we are on the edge of a freefall
>where academic publishing is increasingly not sustainable, and all the
>parties are just more entrenched than ever.  It's very, very hard to
>get people to set that stuff aside and work together towards making it
>all work.  I don't know if it can be done, but we are not getting
>there the way we've been operating up to now -- in a competitive,
>antagonist way.  (I also think such a step would be harder for
>publishers and vendors than for librarians, but that could just be my
>prejudice).
>
>It still costs -- money, time, effort -- to create and distribute
>quality academic content.  Open access, regardless the model, just
>shifts those costs.  The question still hangs there -- how can we make
>it pay for itself in a sustainable way so libraries can continue to
>purchase, so publishers can continue to be profitable enough to exist,
>so authors can be compensated for the intellectual work, and so that
>patrons can have access to the important academic information they
>need?
>
>My opinion,
>
>Karin
>--
>Karin Wikoff
>Electronic and Technical Services Librarian
>Ithaca College Library
>Ithaca, NY 14850
>Email: [log in to unmask]