Economics 404: Fixing What’s Broke | Peer to Peer Review

There is a great retrospective of the first decade of the open access movement by Heather Joseph in this article in PLoS Biology. This year, several announcements and blog posts combined to focus my attention on a slightly different question. What problems can open access solve? The answer seems obvious; open access will solve the problem of highly restricted and limited access to scholarship. One of the greatest achievements of the OA movement is to have largely won this debate about access. The times are past when publishers argued that the access problem was illusory; now they are tripping over themselves, by and large, to get out front and trumpet their commitment to improved access, as long as it increases their revenues. And therein lies the problem I want to focus on here; a somewhat different problem that OA can solve. A variety of items over the past couple of weeks have reminded me that the economics of traditional publishing are a mess; it is a deeply inefficient business that has been protected, largely due to the copyright monopoly, from the ordinary competition that usually forces businesses to get smarter and operate better. So one of the problems that open access can help solve is the problem of scholarship locked up in the hands of badly run businesses that have come to believe that their inefficient and ineffective ways of doing business must be preserved at all costs. The best example of this attitude that needs to be resisted and refuted came recently in the reignited debate—a real “do as I say and not as I do” situation—about the business practices of Harvard Business Publications (HBP). As many librarians know, HBP has long restricted use of articles that are available in the EBSCO databases, trying to make them hard to use as course materials in order to force the payment of additional fees. Apparently some students and professors were still finding a way to use this material, for which they had paid as part of their EBSCO subscription, so this summer HBP imposed more restrictions, requiring that EBSCO disable persistent linking, printing, and downloads for selected articles. These functions can be turned back on, however, upon the payment of a further licensing fee, which was quoted, for my institution, in the six figures. Obviously this move generated a lot of complaint, including an article in the Financial Times by a business professor that suggested that HBP should be punished for this behavior. That article was followed by a defense of HBP’s new licensing fees by a professor and Press official from Harvard. That defense is a remarkable piece of reasoning, which really amounts to a simple claim: 'we need more money' ... Why do they need this extra money? Apparently the only answer is that they are not very good at running their own business. HBP seems unable to live within its means, or to manage on the same revenues that other publishers can and do survive on, so they want to charge institutions more for reduced services.  The issue is why libraries and their parent institutions should bear the costs of these inefficiencies.   One of the ironies is that these ever more convoluted methods of restricting access themselves surely increase costs for HBP. Like many other publishers (think Harper Collins and ebooks), HBP seems determined to invest a good deal of money into making the digital experience of their products as inconvenient, or more inconvenient, than it was in the print era. This in addition to maintaining bloated staffs that are often committed to doing jobs that simply do not need to be done in the digital age.  In the digital age, we have the opportunity to stop paying for inefficient practices that are rooted in attachment to print ... In recent weeks I have seen several proposals—some already made public, like Knowledge Unlatched, and some still being formed—that will offer better return for library collection dollars ... Breaking this cycle will not be easy. Libraries need to stand up to this kind of demand and decide what they can do without. Those decisions are inevitable, as we can see from the stories of the courageous librarian at SUNY Potsdam who has rejected package 'deals' from both the American Chemical Society and Sage because the new pricing models would leave her without control over her own budget ... In a post on the Scholarly Kitchen blog, publishing consultant Joseph Esposito talks about what a 'web-scale university press' would look like. There are lots of good points and interesting ideas in this post ... The question he does not ask is whether the publishing process, as traditionally defined, really should be underwritten. One of the fundamental prerequisites for a web-scale publishing operation, it seems to me, is a radi