Richard,
I drafted a response yesterday, but didn't send it because
I
couldn't quite get my thoughts into a concise message. Your
new
post helps, thank you. The point I was going to make was
this: it
takes more than an ideal publishing system and OA to
maximise
audience reach. It also requires old fashioned promotion and
marketing - and this also costs money.
Why do I say this? Here's a couple of stories.
1. In the UK we license most of our statistical databases to
a
database aggregator called MIMAS. They've also got data
from our
peers - the World Bank, IMF, Eurostat, UN et al. MIMAS have
the
right to make all this data freely available to the all
higher
educational institutions in the UK. By some estimates,
that's
around 1.5 million students and faculty. So, we've got the
ingredients you propose: OA and an ideal publishing platform
-
result? Well, for our data around 9,000 sessions a year.
That's
not a lot for an audience of this size and we think this is
'way
below what the usage could be. In other markets we're
learning
that it's important to make presentations and promote our
content
to users, and when we do, usage goes up. Seems we've got a
missing ingredient in the UK.
2. Would I be right in assuming that your ideal publishing
system
uses Google or the other search engines as a key discovery
tool?
If so, then read on. We're adding all our scholarly reports
into
Google Books (they're also in Google Scholar, but that's
another
story). Google Books is a bit like your ideal publishing
system
in that the full text is there and users can see the pages
they've searched for freely (there's a limit on the total
number
of pages they can see in a session - so not perfect OA).
Google
have thoughtfully provided publishers with a tool so we can
see
the number of visitors to each of our reports (we've loaded
around 1500). The surprise is this: our French language
editions
are getting visitor levels 500 - 1000 times MORE than our
English
language editions. Via any other channel (print, online,
whatever) our French editions usually get about 7% of all
traffic. So what's going on? Our conclusion is this: with
French
we've got first-mover advantage because so few French books
are
available in Google. While in English, we're competing with
an
ever-growing mountain of other stuff, so we're having to
fight
for market share. As we all know, searchers rarely look
beyond
the first ten or so results, so the game becomes one of
finding
ways to boost your rankings - a Red Queen game if there ever
was
one. Our conclusion is that those that have the ability and
money
to do search result boosting, promotion and marketing will
probably get more of their stuff read than those who can't.
So the moral of my stories: the need for marketing and
promotion
won't go away even with a perfect platform and OA. This
will
require money too.
As to your theoretical question - I'm sure all publishers
want
maximum access to their content. However, to achieve this
they
need a stable and predicatable business model to make it
work.
Maybe an author-side payment system will prove to be
sustainable
and, if it is, it will surely displace the reader-side
payment
system over time. Why am I so confident? Because in spite of
everything, I trust the market - it has an uncanny knack of
producing the most efficient system in the end.
Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate
http://www.oecd.org/Book
shop
http://www.SourceOECD.org - our award-winning e-library
http://www.oecd.org/OE
CDdirect - our new title alerting service
-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l lists.yale.edu] On Behalf
Of Richard Feinman
Sent: 20 June, 2006 1:38 AM
To: liblicense-llists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Q 1. on OA
Maybe the Q. wasn't phrased well. I am trying to propose a
thought experiment. Suppose there were all the money needed
to
get what ever publishing model one wanted, that miraculously
we
could pay for whatever quality is needed. Is there then any
argument that OA is not an ideal. You can say the ideal is
not
practical or it will never happen, or whatever. I am only
trying
to settle the difference between a best case and the
practical
barriers to that goal. Net income is financial benefit no
matter
how messianic the ultimate disposition of the money is.
So, rephrasing: if money were freely available from whatever
sources, is there any argument against OA? Not money is
never
freely available, but if it were freely available, Gedanken
Experiment, if you like. You, know, frictionless pulley,
freely
reversible chemical reaction, totally altruistic society,
whatever.
Richard D. Feinman, Professor of Biochemistry
__________
"Lisa Dittrich" <lrdittrichaamc.org>
06/18/06 08:47 AM
Yes--our journal "benefits" only in the sense
that any income we
make somewhat offsets our associations significant
investment in
the costs of running our journal (and we are now
published--but
not owned--by a commercial publisher). We provide excellent
services to our authors (who routinely praise us for the
substantive editing we do) and keep our subscription prices
low.
We charge no authors fees, and few of our authors are
subsidized
by grants from the government or anyone else. They therefore
would likely balk at being charged any kind of fee should we
move
to all OA. Should we move to OA, my guess is that our
association would (reasonably) decide that we should simply
let
the publisher take over all copyediting (which they do a
rather
poor job of) and that I let go of many of the high-quality
dedicated staff members who have contributed to making our
journal the high-quality journal it has become over the
course of
the past 17 or so years (in the name of cost savings, since
they
would completely subsidize the journal). You might say this
is
the cost of the "greater good."
I say if I want quality, I pay for quality. If an artist
writes
a novel or paints a painting using funding from a government
arts
agency, I don't think I should get that work for free. You
might
argue that, well, the journal is "stealing" the
researchers'
works. Well, no--I and my staff are adding value that costs
time
and money, too, for which we deserve compensation.
Why no one seems to get this is beyond me. Let researchers
post
their research to blogs if free and fast access is all that
is
needed. If what journals add is so worthless and if we are
so
evil, then let us die off.
anyway, to return to your original question--we make no
profit.
And I, as managing editor and speaking only for myself and
not
for my association, am entirely opposed to OA.
Lisa
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