From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:17:06 -0400

It doesn't have to be a sale to a large publisher.  It could be a
publishing services arrangement, which is more common.

Like Kevin, I have no knowledge of the particulars of this case.  It's
intriguing because it is not every day that a university press is a
defendant in a lawsuit.

Joe Esposito


On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 6:45 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 11:18:23 +0000
>
> The decision to bring a lawsuit is always made, of course, by the
> plaintiff, in this case the Social Science History Association.  I think
> we must assume that they believed that the litigation would be worth the
> cost to them.  And if we assume that, there appears to be only one way
> that there could be a sufficient payoff to justify those costs -- if the
> SSHA is ultimately able to sell the journal to a commercial press and
> collect tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits.  To do that,
> it probably needs to be the original journal title that is sold to Wiley,
> Sage or whoever, since that carries the "goodwill" that is a big part of
> the journal's value (its "brand").  Of course, that scenario implies that
> the cost of subscriptions for libraries will increase by orders of
> magnitude, as has happened with other society journals that are shopped
> around in this way.
>
> By the way, this is speculation on my part; I have no inside knowledge
> about the lawsuit and no involvement in its defense.  I base this
> speculation solely on what I read in the press reports.
>
> Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
> Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communications
> Duke University Libraries
> P.O. Box 90193
> Durham, NC 27708
> [log in to unmask]