Open and Shut?: Media research analyst at Exane BNP Paribas Sami Kassab on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Use the link to access the interview.  An excerpt from the introduction reads as follows: "Sami Kassab is an Executive Director at the investment company Exane BNP Paribas, where he runs the Media Research team covering professional publishing. Amongst the companies Kassab monitors are Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Informa, John Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, and Pearson. Currently, Kassab is positive about the sector, arguing that scientific publishing offers 'best in class defensive growth in a very resilient industry'. Kassab believes that Open Access (OA) is still a marginal activity and in any case poses neither a short-term nor a long-term threat to large scholarly publishers. In fact, he says, it will enable them to monetise more articles than they have been able to monetise historically. Kassab’s views will undoubtedly challenge OA advocates, who have long maintained that Open Access will mean that publishers will play a much smaller role in disseminating research in the future. This, they add, will force them to downsize, and so reduce the financial burden on the research community. Indeed, it was in the expectation that OA will lower the costs of scholarly communication that many people joined the OA movement in the first place — especially librarians, who have long sought relief from the so-called serials crisis (Whereby the cost of serials has consistently outstripped libraries’ ability to pay for all the journals they need). Concomitantly, OA advocates argued that Open Access will inevitably reduce the profits of scholarly publishers, a belief that gained credence from the way in which publishers have persistently lobbied against OA over the past decade or so. Until a few years ago Sami Kassab and his colleagues at BNP Paribas viewed OA as a threat to publishers too. In 2003, for instance, the website newratings.com reported that BNP Paribas had downgraded Reed Elsevier to 'underperform' — on the grounds that the investment firm had concerns 'regarding the company's current subscription based access, as compared to the newer and more successful article-fee based open access system.' But this is no longer the view of Exane BNP Paribas, or of Kassab. Today the investment company is upbeat about the future of large scholarly publishers like Elsevier ..."