Stevan Harnad wrote: > Although it was the library community and its journal budget crisis that > first brought the research-access problem to the research community's > attention, the journal-pricing problem and the research-access problem > are not the same problem!
I agree that self-archiving and OA publishing are frequently and inaccurately conflated, and that I am sometimes guilty of this myself. There is, however, a good reason why this happens: self-archiving cannot be a solution in itself, since it feeds (today at least) off traditional publishers. Nor is it sustainable, since the more researchers self-archive, and the more effective the OAIsters become at connecting researchers with relevant research material outside the financial firewalls of commercial publishers, the quicker the point arrives where traditional publishing stops working. Self-archiving, therefore, can only be a preparatory phase. While there is a distinction to be made between self-archiving and OA publishing, conflation is inevitable since beneath that conflation lies a reality that will not go away: self-archiving is not a solution in itself, but a catalyst to OA publishing. As for conflating OA with the journal price problem: the more librarians become reluctant/unable to pay for the journals that sustain self-archiving the quicker the day of reckoning will come. While insisting that self-archiving and journal price inflation are separate issues may help encourage researchers to self-archive, the two issues are nevertheless locked together. Steven's 'just do it' approach to OA is a positive force. If people hadn't just got on with things in the past many positive changes may never have happened. But to discourage speculation about possible outcomes and likely scenarios is not helpful if we want to plan for the future. It is not dissimilar to saying: "Let's do away with our present form of government as it no longer suits our purposes, but let's not waste time speculating about how society will be organised in the future until the future arrives." One possible scenario that Stevan has raised in the past is that publishers will gradually downsize and convert to OA publishing; but is that really likely, and would any such transition be smooth? Companies like Reed Elsevier do not downsize, they exit at as soon as they believe that the margins their shareholders expect cannot be sustained into the future. While Elsevier has always been a publisher, it is worth recalling that Reed began life as a paper manufacturer producing, amongst other things, newsprint and wallpaper. In pursuit of better margins it subsequently moved into the newspaper publishing business (owning, for instance, the UK's Daily Mirror for a while). When newspaper publishing margins were deemed unsatisfactory it migrated to 'must have' publishing, including the legal, education, and science and medical sectors. This was the logic behind its merger with Elsevier in 1993. So companies like this don't downsize, they don't wait for the ship to go down, they get out. This, after all, is what Wolters Kluwer did in 2002, when it sold KAP and announced it would focus on the better margins available in other information markets. This is surely also why Bertelsmann sold BertelsmannSpringer last year. The difficulty next time round could be that if self-archiving has become as successful as OA advocates hope it will be, there might be a shortage of buyers. Certainly VC companies like Cinven and Candover (who bought KAP, and BertelsmannSpringer) are not going to buy again if the industry is no longer the licence to print money it was. They too will be rushing for the exit. What other traditional publisher would want to get into the scholarly publishing business if there was always a free version of everything it sold? Let's face it: what self-archiving threatens to do is to destroy most of the value that traditional commercial publishers (and VC companies) require to breathe. Of course there are new (and certainly better and more desirable) business models to be found, and organisations that will adopt them (and some are already trying them out) but we should not assume that the process of change will be gradual and smooth. Maybe it will be, but maybe it won't. That is the potential transition problem. Who better to puzzle over it than the UK Select Committee? Richard Poynder
