[GOAL] Andrew Odlyzko on Open Access, libraries, publishers, and general commerce

[Stevan Harnad]

          Open Access, library and publisher competition,
             and the evolution of general commerce

                         Andrew Odlyzko
                    University of Minnesota
                         odlyzko at umn.edu

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf

Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually
devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and
boycotts.  That ignores what seems a much more important development in
this market.  Publishers, through the oft-reviled ``Big Deal'' packages,
are providing much greater and more egalitarian access to the journal
literature, an approximation to true Open Access.  In the process they
are also marginalizing libraries, and obtaining a greater share of
the resources going into scholarly communication.  This is enabling a
continuation of publisher profits as well as of what for decades has been
called "unsustainable journal price escalation."  It is also inhibiting
the spread of Open Access, and potentially leading to an oligopoly of
publishers controlling distribution through large-scale licensing.

The "Big Deal" practices are worth studying for several general
reasons.  The degree to which publishers succeed in diminishing the
role of libraries may be an indicator of the degree and speed at which
universities transform themselves.  More importantly, these "Big Deals"
appear to point the way to the future of the whole economy, where progress
is characterized by declining privacy, increasing price discrimination,
increasing opaqueness in pricing, increasing reliance on low-paid or
upaid work of others for profits, and business models that depend on
customer inertia.


      COMMENTS INVITED

     




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