The national academy of sciences press (nas press) experienced the same effect years ago and has a similar policy. The rand corporation publications department has followed this policy for years too. Both are members of the american association of university presses (aaup) which just challenged the legality of the google library project to digitize millions of books. The google print program deals directly with publishers, digitizing whatever participating publishers send them.
For further coverage, go to http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks on tuesday and see my story on the topic. bq -----Original Message----- From: Stevan Harnad <har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> Sent: May 27, 2005 6:26 AM To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Subject: Comparing Open Access Effects for Books and Journal Articles The following appeared in Lawrence Lessig's Blog http://www.lessig.org/blog/ South African lessons: Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) One of the most interesting presentations at this fantastic conference http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002913.shtml was given by Eve Gray, of Eve Gray & Associates. Gray was asked to study the publishing strategy of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in South Africa. This research institution had a traditional strategy of publishing lots of research books, and selling them. Gray convinced them to change their strategy -- to give away all their research books for free online, and offer a high quality print-on-demand service for anyone who wants the paper version. The result: "the sales turnover of the publishing department has risen by 300%." As she concluded her presentation, "giving away books and lead to an increase in our book sales." There's much much more in her interesting analysis. She has generously offered it for downloading. http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/eve_gray.pdf Here's the press release http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/HSRC_pressrelease.pdf A comment follows: COMPARING OPEN ACCESS EFFECTS FOR BOOKS AND JOURNAL ARTICLES Stevan Harnad It is undeniable that for certain small-market books (and perhaps even for some larger-market books), providing the full text online toll-free for all ("open access") not only does not interfere with sales of the print version but even enhances them. No one knows, however, whether this is true of most or all books. One of the reasons this might be true of all books is that books are long, and continuous reading is not optimal on-screen (yet). It is not clear, however, to what extent this extends to the main target of the open access movement http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml which is, very specifically, peer-reviewed research journal articles. There are about 24,000 such journals, publishing about 2.5 million articles per year. Those articles are mostly read and used on a piece-wise basis by researchers; the journals are not read cover to cover. Although the number of open access journals http://www.doaj.org/ is growing (1574), it is not yet clear whether journals whose full-text contents are all accessible online toll-free will be able to continue making ends meet from sales-revenue for the print version; nor is it yet clear whether the alternative cost-recovery model -- payment by the author-institution for publication instead of payment by the user-institution for (subscription or license) toll-access -- is a viable one (or a viable one just yet). There is a middle road for journal article access, however, between the "golden" road of publisher-provided open access to all of the journal's full-text contents online toll-free and the "gray" road of toll-access-only, and that is the "green" road of author-institution self-archiving of (only) their own journal article output "piece-wise", each institutional author supplementing the journal's toll-access version of his own article with an open-access version for any would-be user who cannot afford the toll-access version. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/harnad/ There are several parallels with what appears to be happening with the books that are being made accessible toll-free online: (1) The journals whose authors have been self-archiving the most and the longest (some for close to a decade, with their contents -- piece-wise -- close to 100% self-archived) report that this has not diminished toll-based sales for the print version or the publisher's official online version: <a http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4336.html (2) The self-archived versions (just as in the case of open-access books) are increasing the visibility and impact of the articles, and are thereby increasing the visibility and impact factor of the journals in which they are published (hence perhaps eventually even their sales-revenues). <a http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html Stevan Harnad Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum <a href="http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html"> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html</a> barbara quint editor, searcher magazine 932 11th st., suite 9 santa monica, ca 90403 310/451-0252 310/393-6911 (fax) bqu...@mindspring.com http://www.infotoday.com/searcher