From: Karin Wikoff <[log in to unmask]> Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 14:09:23 +0000 I think the relationship is symbiotic. It doesn't have to be as antagonistic as it sometimes is. The common shared goal is a desire to sustain academic publishing. Each party gets something different out of academic publishing, but if it becomes so unsustainable that it crashes and burns, every party loses out. So, we have a shared interest in making things work. The trick is that we each do have to protect our interests, which can lead to taking actions which exacerbate the conflict and do not help the larger goal of keeping it sustainable. (Or perhaps making it sustainable, because I am not at all sure that it really is right now). Sticking to an insistence on continuing to maintain a much-larger-than-any-other-publishers profit margin in the face of disruptive change, for example, -- that's not sustainable. (Kevin Smith had a blog about this a couple years ago, with a link to a financial analysis on the impact of open access on Elsevier if they continue on the same path). On the other hand, libraries can't just expect publishers to change everything around to meet our needs to the total detriment of their profit margin either - and yet, we are squeezed in ways beyond our control. We are not a bottomless well. I would love to see publishers, vendors, authors, and librarians sit down and talk straight about what can be done to reach that shared goal because right now, it feels like we are on the edge of a freefall where academic publishing is increasingly not sustainable, and all the parties are just more entrenched than ever. It's very, very hard to get people to set that stuff aside and work together towards making it all work. I don't know if it can be done, but we are not getting there the way we've been operating up to now -- in a competitive, antagonist way. (I also think such a step would be harder for publishers and vendors than for librarians, but that could just be my prejudice). It still costs -- money, time, effort -- to create and distribute quality academic content. Open access, regardless the model, just shifts those costs. The question still hangs there -- how can we make it pay for itself in a sustainable way so libraries can continue to purchase, so publishers can continue to be profitable enough to exist, so authors can be compensated for the intellectual work, and so that patrons can have access to the important academic information they need? My opinion, Karin -- Karin Wikoff Electronic and Technical Services Librarian Ithaca College Library Ithaca, NY 14850 Email: [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2015 08:45:51 +0000 Perhaps I was being a little too fatalistic when I suggested that we are all at the mercy of ‘the system’. I guess at the back of my mind - and what I didn’t make explicit in any form - was a desire to avoid the impression that I was blaming anybody for the position that we are in now. But, surely as a result of the competing drivers on the many players the result is a ‘system’ that many find sub-optimal - whether it is the academic in arts and humanities who has to wait over a year after acceptance to see their paper published, the library that has to cancel journals (or other resources) to meet increasing big deal bills, the university or society press that finds that it can no longer run an independent publishing operation, or the large commercial publisher who has to deal with ever increasing profits. Oh, OK, scrub that last one. We have a wonderful example of how ‘the system’ works in the UK at the moment. There has been a massive push for open access. Government and research funders have been convinced and universities have been given extra cash to allow researchers to meet APCs. More and more UK research is now freely available to the world’s readers - great. But a significant proportion of the cash is going to large commercial publishers to pay inflated APCs for hybrid journals. And the majority of that proportion is going to publishers - most notably Elsevier- who refuse to engage meaningfully with the UK community on double-dipping. This is essentially free cash to those publishers - over a £1million a year to Elsevier, for example. Now, I’m not blaming Elsevier for taking this free money - it is their job to maximise profits - but I can’t imagine that this was the ideal that the funders were looking for when they budgeted this extra cash. When you only have control over some aspects of a much wider system it is hard to change that system in a ‘controlled’ way. So yes, we did all build the ‘system’, but unfortunately we were working from many different, and occasionally contradictory, blueprints. David On 15 Jul 2015, at 01:33, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: From: Richard Brown <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 08:14:30 -0400 I tend to agree with David, and I know we have our fundamental differences. But I take issue with the claim, "it is just the way the system works," which suggests that we--librarians, publishers, vendors, researchers--are simply passive bystanders to events beyond our control. In fact we and our forebears built this "system," didn't we? And isn't that the purpose of forums such as LibLicense? To talk to each other and improve the system, as hard as that may be? Or am I hopelessly naive? Richard Brown Richard Brown, PhD Director Georgetown University Press Washington, DC 20007 [log in to unmask] www.press.georgetown.edu