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>