From: "Stern, David" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:13:59 +0000

I disagree with the statement “the author-pays model is a splendid
one” … at least not for all involved in the scholarly community.

The author-pays model drives all the costs (even if they are reduced
over time) onto the producer, when in fact the readers gain from the
distribution and could/should contribute toward the costs of peer
review and distribution. The far fewer author institutions would be
hard-pressed to provide the same amount of money as the existing
subscriptions provide … which will make the system unstable when it
hits the trigger point.  (If you think costs are untenable now,
imagine if all the costs become loaded onto a far smaller number of
participants.)

Open access can happen with many other types of revenue streams such
as grants, institutional fees based upon use, direct federal subsidies
for discipline based servers, etc.   Let’s not equate Open Access with
author-pays … they are complete equivalents.

David

********************
David Stern
Associate Dean for Public Services
311 Milner Library
Campus Box 8900
Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790
Email:  [log in to unmask]

*******
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 10:22 PM
From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>

Jan,

The author-pays model is indeed a splendid one and has succeeded
beyond the expectations of all but a few visionaries.  What do you
think it will look like in 5 years?  The number of services for
author-pays continues to grow.   Perhaps they will all survive;
perhaps there will be even more.  But they have certain economic
challenges ahead, namely, that they are in a commodity business where
it will be very hard to make money when this market gets more crowded.
Will the $1,200 author fee drop to $1,000 under market pressure?  Why
not to $800?  Why not $600?  Some people working in this field believe
that $600 is breakeven.  I don't know about that, but suppose it's
true.  Doesn't this mean that all these competitors move out of the
First World to get less expensive labor? And if prices still have
downward pressure, what kind of temptation will there be for reducing
some of the services?  Will there be even less rigorous peer review?

Because of the monopoly nature of copyright (subject to exceptions
under fair use), publishing is inherently not a commodity business.
But author-pays moves in the direction of a commodity business.  We
really don't know what it will look like when it matures, but there is
a case to be made that it will be low cost and low quality.

Joe Esposito

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 7:09 PM, Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Rick describes it extremely clearly. There is no, and cannot be,
> competition between publishers on price, because their journals
> (the primary research ones - the vast majority) are monopoloid.
> Where publishers compete is where there is choice. They compete
> for authors and their papers, and authors are the only ones in
> the system with a realistic choice (albeit that even that choice
> is heavily influenced by peer-pressure).
>
> That is why, in spite of possible practical issues, the principle
> of author-side payment of the 'service' of publishing is so
> attractive, from a functional market point of view. And
> author-side payment of the service of publishing also makes open
> access possible without any financial repercussions for the
> publisher. And open access has so many advantages for academic
> research, that it can be seen as very research-unfriendly to
> stick to subscription models for the sake of tradition or of
> cold-water-fear of change, or simply because of inertia.
> Wholesale change cannot be effected overnight, of course, but
> companies like Springer, for example, demonstrate that moving
> into open access publishing makes business sense as well as
> academic sense.
>
> Jan Velterop
>
> On 12 Nov 2011, at 00:35, Rick Anderson wrote:
>
> >> Libraries need to grasp that the more Big Publishing dominates
> >> the market, the more demanding it will become, and for that
> >> reason it is in the interests of libraries to do what they can
> >> to support smaller publishers, to encourage diversity in the
> >> supplier base.
> >
> > Believe me, librarians grasp these things perfectly well. The
> > problem is that subscribing to journals isn't like buying cars.
> > With rare and well-funded exceptions, we don't select journals
> > by going out into a competitive marketplace and trying to find
> > the best product for the best price we can get. The journals we
> > subscribe to are the journals our faculty members tell us they
> > need in order to do their work. If we respond by saying "But
> > that journal is from Megapublisher X, and we're already giving
> > that publisher 35% of our serials budget. In order to encourage
> > diversity in the marketplace, we need to spend more of our
> > money with other, smaller publishers -- many of which offer
> > journals just as good as the one you're requesting," their
> > rejoinder will be "Are you crazy? The journal I'm requesting is
> > the core journal in my field. I don't care who publishes it; as
> > things stand now, I can't hire faculty in my department because
> > when they find out the library doesn't subscribe to that
> > journal they withdraw from consideration." (That, by the way,
> > is a virtually direct quote from one of the associate deans on
> > my campus.)
> >
> > This isn't the fault of publishers, by the way. It's simply the
> > way the information marketplace works. Copyright is a monopoly
> > right, and that means that each journal article is a
> > nonsubstitutable commodity. You get it from the copyright
> > holder, or you don't get it (or anything functionally like it)
> > at all.
> >
> > ---
> > Rick Anderson
> > Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
> > J. Willard Marriott Library
> > University of Utah
> > [log in to unmask]