Dr Robert Muller - Tutoring to Excellence in Education: Unless the Industry Rethinks Open Access Prices, Universities Could Soon be Publishing Peer Reviewed Work for Themselves

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-10-19

Summary:

"Kicking off the Open Access Perspectives in the Humanities and Social Sciences eCollection, Patrick Dunleavy sets the context of disruption for academic communication and publishing models.  If the academic publishing industry does not quickly adjust its premium pricing, universities will look to directly organise and publish their own peer reviewed journals, monographs and books. The leitmotif of the digital age is ‘disintermediation’, an ugly name for the process of ‘cutting out the middle person’ - in other words, making transactions simpler and more direct. It’s often better for customers to do this - to go direct to the source of a product and buy what they need, without having to pay a fee to other people involved in an intermediate delivery chain. Yet in goods markets this is often not feasible because of the information, bargaining and transportation costs involved. So long as books and journals lived in the world of physical products - and incredibly enough all too many academic books still languish on in this status alone - the roles of publishers and book retailers and book sellers all made sense. And modern publishing has generally developed in ways that in many countries (like the USA) and in some markets (like popular fiction) deliver remarkable value for money. But academic publishing has been a great exception to the rule, especially in high cost countries like the UK and (even more so) Australia. Paper books have for years competed unavailingly against journals, as academics and universities move towards setting (and to a large extent only discussing in classes) items that can be accessed directly and simultaneously by whole class groups from learning management systems like Moodle and Blackboard (Dunleavy, 2012a and 2012b). Journals secured a key advantage by going digital first, radically improving their accessibility versus books, for a time and at a huge price. Yet now journal articles are all online, most serious or major books will move into electronic format, and scholarly work will become a fully digital product (Weller, 2011). Add in open access and the possible scope for disintermediation widens dramatically. Many large publishers are still charging around $2700 for an open access paper in a good journal, while the sustainable future rate will probably be around $600. This is a huge premium, and it is not going to do academic publishers’ already battered reputations any good at all to try to defend it. Serious, big universities will be thinking, are already thinking - why don’t we publish digitally and open access ourselves? ..."

Link:

http://tutoringtoexcellence.blogspot.com/2013/10/unless-industry-rethinks-open-access.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.universities oa.prices oa.fees oa.colleges oa.publishing oa.hei oa.journals

Date tagged:

10/19/2013, 17:55

Date published:

10/19/2013, 13:54