Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road

peter.suber's bookmarks 2014-06-05

Summary:

"We suggest that the academic publishing industry is as resistant to change as the music publishing industry was. But the music industry lost its ability to protect the status quo of excessive profits through sustained assault by people who used the latest technology to distribute music through alternative channels. Once it became easy to access music for free (albeit by means of questionable legality), the price of supply through legitimate sources had to fall. And fall it did, without obvious deleterious effects on the production of music itself. We do not suggest that people engage in outright piracy of academic works, not least because the penalties for perpetrators can be severe. But it may be that we could be more sympathetic to the ‘trading’ of academic knowledge, just as the Grateful Dead allowed people who made tapes of their concerts to trade them on a not-for-profit basis (Fraser and Black, 1999): ‘the legally regulated world of intellectual property rights and copyright enforcement actions is replaced by a self-regulating enterprise in which commercial interests do not influence the values of the group or subculture’ (Fraser and Black, 1999, p.33). Thus it is that doing nothing to prevent the trading of electronic copies of our academic work could act to circumvent the perils of engagement with the academic publishing industry."
[For the background controversy surrounding this piece, see the June 5, 2014 article in Times Higher Education.]
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/resignations-threat-over-taylor-and-francis-censorship/2013752.article

Link:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/.U4cqUShnDHY

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.publishers oa.profits oa.business_models oa.copyright oa.prices oa.revenues

Date tagged:

06/05/2014, 20:44

Date published:

06/05/2014, 16:44