What Is Publishing? A Report from THATCamp Publishing - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"THATCamp Publishing provided a forum for three stakeholders in this changing industry: traditional academic publishers, libraries-as-publishers, and faculty. While traditional publishers are interested in the bottom line, libraries-as-publishers are focused on the problem of access. Faculty, on the other hand, are concerned with how their publications will lead to promotion, tenure, and the advancement of knowledge. THATCamp Publishing highlighted how the evaporation of funding for scholarly publishing and the rise of the Internet as a low-cost, easy-access means of dissemination are radically changing the nature of this industry, and the inter-relationships of these three stakeholders....Thus, in relation to the work involved in manuscript production, open access publishing can be either a boon or a curse, depending on which side you are on. Academics and library publishers generally embrace open access as a means of raising visibility and the democratization of knowledge. But for traditional scholarly publishers, open access makes it difficult to recoup the costs of producing manuscripts. Open access journals—where there is no charge to access the content of the journal—do not generate any subscription revenue. This raises the question “If paid journal subscriptions are the main source of revenue for scholarly presses, where is the funding for the production of monographs going to come from if we move towards open access?” ..."