Open Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce

Connotea: stevanharnad's bookmarks matching tag oa.new 2013-02-05

Summary:

Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in this market. Publishers, through the oft-reviled ``Big Deal'' packages, are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal literature, an approximation to true Open Access. In the process they are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of the resources going into scholarly communication. This is enabling a continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been called "unsustainable journal price escalation." It is also inhibiting the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing. The "Big Deal" practices are worth studying for several general reasons. The degree to which publishers succeed in diminishing the role of libraries may be an indicator of the degree and speed at which universities transform themselves. More importantly, these "Big Deals" appear to point the way to the future of the whole economy, where progress is characterized by declining privacy, increasing price discrimination, increasing opaqueness in pricing, increasing reliance on low-paid or upaid work of others for profits, and business models that depend on customer inertia.

Link:

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Connotea: stevanharnad's bookmarks matching tag oa.new
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Amsciforum
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new andrew odlyzko oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.copyright oa.libraries oa.librarians oa.prices oa.profits oa.economics_of oa.monopoly oa.bundling oa.libre

Authors:

stevanharnad

Date tagged:

02/05/2013, 07:52

Date published:

02/05/2013, 05:15