Re-sending after an email host crash on 2/20/2013.
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From: Andrew Odlyzko <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:55:25 -0600
The first version of this message that I sent out (which may or
may not make it to the list) was missing a crucial word, marked
in this version in capital letters, "NOT." That is a mistake that
one could expect a copy editor to catch! :-)
I have to thank Sandy Thatcher for the kind words about my work.
On many topics, there will clearly be differences of opinion, and
I admit I am extreme in my views on copy editing. Many of my
closest friends and collaborators view copy editing much more
positively than I do. We will just have to wait and see how
the world evolves.
There is one point where I clearly did NOT express myself clearly
enough (and in this case copy editing would not have helped!).
My projection that libraries would be marginalized further by
making books available digitally does not assume that books
will be in some form of OA. I fully expect books to be available
on a subscription model far into the future. (Although for an
increasing number of books OA will make sense.) And I do expect
librarians to handle the licensing. The issue is that there
is simply not as much to do in licensing as there is in curating
physical volumes. This is compounded by the moves to consortia,
in which case just one central group handles all the publisher
agreements for all members of the consortium, and a single
institution's library just negotiates its share of that
consortium's costs.
The basic reality is that the move to digital formats is allowing
the elimination of much of the duplication of work that was taking
place among different institutions. In the old days, Penn State
and Minnesota had to have separate staffs and physical facilities,
since their faculty and students were restricted to accessing material
some hundreds of feet away. Furthermore, since each institution could
only afford a fraction of all that was available, libraries had to
customize the collections to fit local needs. But (and this is
projecting a few years into the future from the current trends
as shown in my paper) if there are just a handful of giant bundles
that cover the entire literature, and they are available directly
from publishers who host the material, both Penn State and Minnesota
will buy them, and it is just a matter of negotiating the price.
(The logic of price discrimination in a world of very low marginal
costs would lead the publishers to sell to everybody, and simply
try to extract as much as possible. This might lead to some
temporary blackouts, as has happened with some video channels
on cable systems, where the content provider and the cable network
could not agree, and engaged in extensive PR to try to get the
public to blame the other player.)
Further, Penn State and Minnesota might even form a consortium
where a single team handles all the negotiations. (This may seem
really fanciful, but something like a Big 10 consortium is less
so. And for some small countries where the university systems are
run by a government ministry, it could happen very soon.)
Giant digital bundles that cover books, journals, and other
materials relegate libraries to the roles of purchasing agents,
and enforcers of usage restrictions. (Quite a heretical thought
for librarians whose mission in life has been to make information
widely available, but true!) OA (whether Green or Gold) offers
libraries a more promising future, but it requires them to move
into areas that used to be controller by publishers (as well as
some areas, such as curating evolving databases, that did not exist
in the old days). Support, financial as well as administrative,
for new low-cost journals, ..., are natural things for libraries
to provide. We see this happening, but it appears to be small,
and growing slowly, while publishers are moving far faster.
Andrew Odlyzko
> Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:36:17 -0500
> From: LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Paper on Open Access and library and publisher competition
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:42:49 -0600
> Odlyzko has long been one of the most interesting commentators on the
> evolution of scholarly communication, and this new paper doesn't
> disappoint. It is chock full of insights and provocative arguments.
> I do agree with his general view of the positive contributions of the
> Big Deal, which is refreshing to hear coming from someone in academe.
> On the other hand, I must take exception to his assessment of
> copyediting for journal articles as "useless." Obviously, he has had
> some bad experiences with copyeditors, but this is no reason to
> declare copyediting as a whole an unnecessary cost in the system. I
> do accept his point, though, that copyediting in the digital age needs
> to adapt itself better to the medium and dispense with some practices
> that make sense only for print journals.
> As for the general theme of the changing roles of libraries and
> publishers, I think he may not be foreseeing as much disintermediation
> of libraries arising from the advance of Gold OA as I do, though he
> does acknowledge that publishers will likely succeed as well
> financially with a Gold OA system as they do now with a
> subscription-based system.
> As for books, it puzzles me that he thinks the move toward making
> books available digitally will result in more marginalization of
> libraries. Perhaps eventually this will happen as books move toward an
> OA model also, but right now the offerings of Project Muse, JSTOR,
> Oxford Online, etc., with books included along with journals all are
> based on the subscription model making libraries key players in the
> current evolution of books as digital objects.
> Among the many perceptive observations Odylzko makes is his remark
> that the biggest Universities pay more to hire their football coaches
> than it cost their libraries to buy a subscription to all of
> Elsevier's journals.
> Sandy Thatcher
> > From: Andrew Odlyzko <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2013 07:03:00 -0600
> >
> > This paper might be of interest to the list, as it presents a rather
> > contrarian view on what is happening in scholarly publishing.
> >
> > Comments are invited.
> >
> > Andrew Odlyzko
> >
> > http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf
> >
> > Open Access, library and publisher competition,
> > and the evolution of general commerce
> >
> > Andrew Odlyzko
> > University of Minnesota
> > [log in to unmask]
> >
> > Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually
> > devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and
> > boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in
> > this market. Publishers, through the oft-reviled ``Big Deal'' packages,
> > are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal
> > literature, an approximation to true Open Access. In the process they
> > are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of
> > the resources going into scholarly communication. This is enabling a
> > continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been
> > called "unsustainable journal price escalation." It is also inhibiting
> > the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of
> > publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing.
> >
> > The "Big Deal" practices are worth studying for several general
> > reasons. The degree to which publishers succeed in diminishing the
> > role of libraries may be an indicator of the degree and speed at which
> > universities transform themselves. More importantly, these "Big Deals"
> > appear to point the way to the future of the whole economy, where progress
> > is characterized by declining privacy, increasing price discrimination,
> > increasing opaqueness in pricing, increasing reliance on low-paid or
> > upaid work of others for profits, and business models that depend on
> > customer inertia.
> >
> > http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf
> >
> > <http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf>
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