<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div><br> Open Access, library and publisher competition,<br> and the evolution of general commerce<br><br> Andrew Odlyzko<br> University of Minnesota<br> <a href="mailto:odlyzko@umn.edu">odlyzko@umn.edu</a><br><br><a href="http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf">http://www.dtc..umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf</a><br><br>Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually<br>devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and<br>boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in<br>this market. Publishers, through the oft-reviled ``Big Deal'' packages,<br>are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal<br>literature, an approximation to true Open Access. In the process they<br>are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of<br>the resources going into scholarly communication. This is enabling a<br>continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been<br>called "unsustainable journal price escalation." It is also inhibiting<br>the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of<br>publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing.<br><br>The "Big Deal" practices are worth studying for several general<br>reasons. The degree to which publishers succeed in diminishing the<br>role of libraries may be an indicator of the degree and speed at which<br>universities transform themselves. More importantly, these "Big Deals"<br>appear to point the way to the future of the whole economy, where progress<br>is characterized by declining privacy, increasing price discrimination,<br>increasing opaqueness in pricing, increasing reliance on low-paid or<br>upaid work of others for profits, and business models that depend on<br>customer inertia.<br><br><br> COMMENTS INVITED<br><br> <br><br><br><br></div></div><br></body></html>