[GOAL] Re: The open access movement slips into closed mode

[Andrew Odlyzko]

Jan is surely right.  Large commercial publishers are pretty sophisticated
about avoiding taxes, and so I doubt they pay much.  (Even the numbers that
are listed in their shareholder reports have to be treated with extreme
caution, as often they represent money that might possibly be due at some
very distant time, but is not actually being paid right now.)

But even aside from corporate taxes (which, I am pretty sure, are outweighed
in politicians' minds by the effect of substantial employment of educated
people at decent salaries, and the taxes those folks pay), there is the
very basic factor that publisher revenues are small relatively to the cost
of running libraries.  What is going on is that publishers are squeezing out
librarians.  What may be under consideration in those secret UK discussions 
is a deal in which Elsevier will provide free access to everybody in the UK in 
return for slightly more than they are collecting right now from all the UK 
universities and university consortia.  And in the next round of budget
allocations to academic institutions, those institutions will be told they 
should shave their library expenditures to pay for the deal.

I am not claiming this is the optimal solution.  But given how slow librarians
and especially scholars have been to embrace Open Access and to set up alternative
journal systems, politicians may see this as attractive, as it will deliver 
improved service to their constituents.  It does entrench the large commercial 
publishers and perpetuates their high profit margins, but it does provide
much better access to scholarly information for the whole nation, and reduces
the costs of the entire system by eliminating the high internal costs of 
university libraries.  

A recent paper of mine on these developments is "Open Access, library and publisher 
competition, and the evolution of general commerce," Evaluation Review, vol. 39, 
no. 1, Feb. 2015, pp. 130-163,

     http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0193841X13514751

with preprint (for those without subscriptions) at

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

An earlier paper that predicted such developments is "Competition and cooperation: 
Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals,"
Journal of Electronic Publishing 4(4) (June 1999)

    http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0004.411

Andrew Odlyzko

P.S.  Secret national-level negotiations with commercial entities about pricing
are not uncommon.  That is what pharmaceutical industry economics are based on.








Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:

> What a rubbish argument! This can only be true of a small country with a 
> disproportionally massive commercial scholarly publishing sector (that 
> isn't avoiding taxes via some small island tax haven).
>
> The Netherlands? Perhaps Britain? That's it.
>
> Jan Velterop
>
> On 30/12/2015 12:25, Richard Poynder wrote:
> > As Keith Jeffery puts it, “We all know why the BOAI principles have 
> > been progressively de-railed. One explanation given to me at an 
> > appropriate political level was that the tax-take from commercial 
> > publishers was greater than the cost of research libraries.” 
> > http://bit.ly/1OslVFW.