B8, OA, GSU and the crux of the matter

"During both the Berlin 8 conference and the Open Access Week events at Duke, the word “sustainability” was everywhere. At the conference in Beijing, for example, the question was posed to some publisher representatives about what they needed to support OA. Their answer was a sustainable income, not surprisingly. Similarly, at a panel discussion on OA here at Duke, several Duke Press employees posed pointed questions to panelists challenging the idea that open access offered a sustainable business model.....Traditional scholarly publishing is built on a model where publishers obtain the content they publish for free, then charge universities and others to get that content back....This model, I suggest, is the one that is really not sustainable....We need to reverse the question of sustainability and ask how long the traditional model of scholarly publishing can be sustained before authors simply refuse to participate any more. It seems that more and more researchers are discovering that this model is not in their best interest; soon the idea of giving away scholarship in order to buy it back will seem a foolish option in a world of online scholarship. As I listened to the talks in Beijing I came to feel that the time is shorter than I had realized. Experiments in open access should be vigorous and varied, even when profitability is not guaranteed, because that is where the sustainable alternatives will ultimately be found. It is urgent that we seek a transition to these new business models precisely because the old one cannot, and should not, be sustained."