" ... For all the talk of disruptive technology, it’s hard to find evidence of it anywhere. This is true not just of journals publishing, whose arc for the next several years seems clear, but for most other publishing segments as well. The K-12 publishing business continues to be dominated by three giants, and is likely to continue to be dominated by them in the foreseeable future. What disruption that has taken place in K-12 has not been technological in nature; the biggest disruption is the growing reluctance to fund public education, but you hardly need a computer to know that people don’t like to pay taxes. Trade publishers are supposed to be doomed, doomed, doomed. Meanwhile, they grow modestly and make more money than before, as they reap the higher margins that ebooks make possible. I can’t imagine that any trade publisher likes Amazon’s growing dominance, but for all the news, the fact is that Amazon has disrupted other retailers, not publishers. The college publishing area seems ready to implode, but it hasn’t: the same five publishers continue to generate the vast majority of revenue, and those same publishers are now using digital technology to license campus-wide access to their texts, augmenting their market share and driving a stake into the heart of the used-book market ...
So if there has been no significant technological disruption of journals publishing, why is everyone running around as though it were the end of the world? In part this is because people don’t distinguish between disruptive technologies and sustaining technologies, but it’s also because for many people, any kind of change is a disruption. You used to have a workflow that generated PDFs at the end, which were then used for print editions and were also mounted on a Web site. Now — horrors! — you are told that the PDF is not enough. You need HTML and you need a format-agnostic workflow. So you make some investments, you may switch some vendors, and some staff may be shown to the door. None of this is fun, but it is not disruptive to the business. It may be disruptive to the vendor that lost the account and it surely is disruptive to people who are dismissed, but the same old business continues on its way, sour expression in its face, receiving 85% of its revenues from academic libraries as it has for years. Most innovations are in fact sustaining innovations, and most of them are cooked up by established companies; the largest are the most innovative of all ... Cowboy-infested PubGet gives us an entirely new view of how to discover and manage academic materials, and no established publisher dreamed it up. Mendeley created a huge community for the sharing and management of scientific documents, a posse of cowboys until the very end. But now Mendeley is part of Elsevier and PubGet has been acquired by CCC. Our cultural bias gets in the way of the facts on the ground, which are not romantic — the big get bigger, the big coopt technological innovations, the big continue to derive 85% of their revenues from academic libraries.One would think that the new Gold OA services would be disruptive, and ultimately they may be. In the meantime, however, the money flowing into them is mostly additive. That is, as predicted, the amount of money expended on scholarly communications is rising, not despite the growth of OA publishing but because of it. What makes Gold OA a very special kind of business activity is that it derives much of its revenue from a new source, authors or authors’ sponsors. OA publishing, at least of the Gold variety, differs from traditional publishing in many ways, but this, the new market, is the biggest difference of all. So we have the sustaining technologies of the established publishers on one hand, the potentially disruptive technologies of Gold OA on the other. Over the next several years, though, these two paradigms are not likely to battle each other directly, much like China and the U.S. eyeing each other warily but stopping short of full and violent confrontation. A forecast for 3-5 years for academic journals puts the market at its current size or perhaps a wee bit bigger, with growth largely coming from Asia and perhaps Eastern Europe. That market is likely to be dominated by today’s leading players unless one buys another. In other words, in research publishing it’s going to be the same old same old for some time to come. And this is because for all the appeal of Gold OA, there is at this time no group of librarians from the major research institutions who are meeting with their provosts to recommend a 30% cut in their materials budgets, nor are provosts meeting privately to come up with ways to make comparable cuts over the librarians’ objections. The nature of institutional markets is resistant to