The Cash Cow Has Left the Room: What will it take for publishers to wake up to our reality?

Richard Poynder's interview with Derk Haank in the January 2011 issue of Information Today is not yet online. Here Barbara Fister offers some summary and comment. Excerpt: "Haank, former chairman of Elsevier Science and current head of Springer...brings good news: that serials crisis we used to have? Relax, that ended years ago. He explains "there was once a serial pricing problem. But it was the Big Deal that solved it." I'm not making this up. According to Haank, the Big Deal enabled libraries to "get back all the journals they had had to cancel, and they gained access to even more journals in the process." And because electronic publishing saves the publisher money, that means the Big Deal is affordable. Who knew? ... His company is moving (as many publishers are) to offering authors the chance to buy their research's freedom for a few thousand dollars per article, costs that will probably be passed on to the taxpayer. But he doubts many scientists will bother. "The reality is that (outside the biomedical field) most people just don't see a sufficient problem for OA to become a big movement," he says. I'm pretty sure he's not including librarians in this depiction of "reality" —we're just the intermediary, and our opinion isn't relevant....There is one scenario that does make him a little less sanguine. He doesn't mind if the occasional author self-archives an article; not enough people can be bothered to do it, and they are inconvenient enough to locate that it shouldn't upset Springer's business model. Well-organized mandates, however, such as grantee requirements set by the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, are troubling. He say, "there is a real danger of destroying the equilibrium that we have achieved over OA." The equilibrium he's talking about is continuing to reap most of their profits from library subscriptions, adding a new revenue trickle as a tiny minority of scientists purchase freedom for their ideas, and a smidgen of green OA, provided it remains largely ineffective...."