From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2017 11:03:37 -0500

Just had a chance to get to this. This article is particularly
ill-informed, even by the standard of pieces about OA. The 30% profit
margin argument is bogus and makes inaccurate comparisons to other
industries. The history of ESA is simply wrong. The "proper" use of income
from publications is in fact the norm for professional societies and has
been for decades. The point about the cost of a subscription to a journal
overlooks the most significant trend in scholarly publishing today, namely,
that most materials are purchased in aggregations, not on a stand-alone
basis (and if you can figure out the cost of a journal that is part of an
aggregation, good luck).

Whatever we may think about OA or traditional demand-driven publishing,
can't we at least get the basic facts straight? One would hope that a
discussion of scholarly publishing would not easily be compared to the
fulminations on Fox News and MSNBC.

Joe Esposito


On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 9:54 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2017 19:56:38 -0700
>
> Ecological scientists on OA in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
>
> http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Fallacy-of-Open-Access/
> 241786?cid=wsinglestory
>
> Their argument is roughly that high-priced journals are unacceptable, but
> APCs are also unacceptable, and so they recommend that scholarly societies
> take the lead in journal publishing.  An article unlikely to be the last
> word on its subject.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> ASU
>