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]

-----Original Message-----

From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2015 08:45:51 +0000

Perhaps I was being a little too fatalistic when I suggested that we
are all at the mercy of ‘the system’.  I guess at the back of my mind
- and what I didn’t make explicit in any form - was a desire to avoid
the impression that I was blaming anybody for the position that we are
in now.

But, surely as a result of the competing drivers on the many players
the result is a ‘system’ that many find sub-optimal - whether it is
the academic in arts and humanities who has to wait over a year after
acceptance to see their paper published, the library that has to
cancel journals (or other resources) to meet increasing big deal
bills, the university or society press that finds that it can no
longer run an independent publishing operation, or the large
commercial publisher who has to deal with ever increasing profits.
Oh, OK, scrub that last one.

We have a wonderful example of how ‘the system’ works in the UK at the
moment.  There has been a massive push for open access.  Government
and research funders have been convinced and universities have been
given extra cash to allow researchers to meet APCs.  More and more UK
research is now freely available to the world’s readers - great.  But
a significant proportion of the cash is going to large commercial
publishers to pay inflated APCs for hybrid journals.  And the majority
of that proportion is going to publishers - most notably Elsevier- who
refuse to engage meaningfully with the UK community on double-dipping.
This is essentially free cash to those publishers - over a £1million a
year to Elsevier, for example.

Now, I’m not blaming Elsevier for taking this free money - it is their
job to maximise profits - but I can’t imagine that this was the ideal
that the funders were looking for when they budgeted this extra cash.
When you only have control over some aspects of a much wider system it
is hard to change that system in a ‘controlled’ way.  So yes, we did
all build the ‘system’, but unfortunately we were working from many
different, and occasionally contradictory, blueprints.

David


On 15 Jul 2015, at 01:33, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Richard Brown <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 08:14:30 -0400

I tend to agree with David, and I know we have our fundamental
differences. But I take issue with the claim, "it is just the way the
system works," which suggests that we--librarians, publishers,
vendors, researchers--are simply passive bystanders to events beyond
our control. In fact we and our forebears built this "system," didn't
we? And isn't that the purpose of forums such as LibLicense? To talk
to each other and improve the system, as hard as that may be? Or am I
hopelessly naive?

Richard Brown


Richard Brown, PhD
Director
Georgetown University Press
Washington, DC 20007
[log in to unmask]
www.press.georgetown.edu