University Presses Disagree With Publishers Group on Bill to Curb Public Access
The battle over public access to federally funded research is heating up again, and university presses have been drawn into it. In the past week, several scholarly publishers, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s press, have parted company with a major publishing association over a bill in Congress that would curb public-access mandates.
U.S. Reps. Darrell E. Issa, Republican of California, and Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, introduced the bill, known as the Research Works Act (HR 3699), last month. The bill would forbid federal agencies to do anything that would result in the sharing of privately published research—even if that research is done with the help of taxpayer dollars—unless the publisher of the work agrees first.
If passed, the bill would undo policies such as the National Institutes of Health’s public-access mandate, which requires that the results of federally financed research be made publicly available within 12 months of publication.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
Things seems to be heatening up!
Source: infoneer-pulse
Publishers are also struggling to cope with vast changes in the industry, as brick-and-mortar stores such as Borders go under and online vendors such as Amazon have started selling e-books for far less than the print editions.
“It is a fluid and dynamic time, and many publishers are reevaluating their business model as it relates to retail and libraries,” said David Burleigh, a spokesman for OverDrive Inc., which serves as an intermediary between publishers and libraries.
In the short term, libraries may not be able to meet customer demand for e-books, he said.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the major enemies threatening the future of the library are the publishers:
Source: Washington Post
Amazon Publishing Launches New Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Imprint | paidContent
Now Amazon is stepping forward with it’s publishing strategy - this time with SF, Fantasy and Horror Imprint. And it is maybe symbolic because this will most likely turn into real horror story for traditional publisher.
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.
Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a “keep out” sign on the gates.
You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50. Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities’ costs, which are being passed to their students.
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
Source: Guardian
British Libraries Push Back
Major research libraries in Britain have told the two largest journal publishers that they will not renew their “big deals” with them if they do not make significant real-terms price reductions.
Research Libraries UK, which includes the Russell Group university libraries, as well as Britain’s national libraries and Trinity College Library Dublin, have told Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell that they will not renew their current deals when they expire at the end of this year unless the concession is made.
Big deals involve libraries paying a blanket fee for electronic access to a publisher’s entire journal catalog. They were initially welcomed by librarians when they were first introduced a decade ago. However, David Prosser, RLUK’s executive director, said consistent above-inflation price increases and the current squeeze on library budgets meant that big deals were accounting for an ever-greater proportion of libraries’ budgets and were no longer affordable.
» via Inside Higher Ed
I think this is the start of a fight which really is about the future for both the publishers and the academic libraries. If they collaborate both could survive by redining their boundaries and responsibilities and see to that they provide real value to researchers and the universities, but if they don’t it becomes a zero-sum game where just one of them will survive. The fourth scenario is of course that they both find themselves irrelevant by a transformed structure of universities and the research process.
It will however be a an interesting struggle!
Source: infoneer-pulse
Disintermediation and Its Discontents: Publishers, Libraries, and the Value Chain
Open access services are thriving, however; they just aren’t thriving in libraries. BioMed Central, a commercial venture, created an author-pays model for open access that has now been widely imitated. BMC, of course, was subsequently acquired by Springer, among the largest publishers of scientific research. The Public Library of Science has established a highly regarded open access service, and they have done it entirely outside of libraries. Now PLoS has attracted many imitators: Wiley Blackwell, BMJ, and, in the social sciences, SAGE. Most intriguing is an open access service from AIP, which seems likely to create competition for the library-sponsored physics arXiv at Cornell. What we have seen with open access publishing is that publishers, rather than being disintermediated, are learning how to coopt it. With open access publishing, libraries have succeeded in disintermediating themselves.
In the book world, there are signs that publishers are indeed being disintermediated; the question is how exceptional are these instances of disintermediation. An established mystery writer named Joe Konrath decided to move his books over to Amazon’s self-publishing service because of the promise of earning higher royalties. I doubt that there is a trade publisher in the world who has not been following Konrath’s career closely, praying that he will fail. Even more fascinating is the case of a young woman named Amanda Hocking, who came to self-publishing with no prior publishing experience. Her young adult novels earned her a small fortune, attracting the interest of major commercial publishers, one of which has now signed up Hocking to a million-dollar contract. One emerging pattern seems to be that publishers are initially threatened with disintermediation, whether through open access or self-publishing services, and then find a way to reinsert themselves into the value chain. Having a big checkbook helps.
Interesting and pretty nuanced article about what is happening in the book value chain. Well worth reading!
(I have a million comments about this but this is just Tumblr… right?)
Philip Greenspun's Weblog » How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?
Aside from wondering who will pay more than the cost of a Wall Street Journal subscription in order to subscribe to the New York Times, my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). […] What am I missing?This is really an important question, where the answer has huge implications for the future. The reason that traditional organizations spend so much on solving problems in general, and on IT solutions in particular, is what constitutes their main challenge. When small and young organizations, who is built on domain specific knowledge and bottom-up principles do something they are spending less resources by several magnitudes. And part from spending less resources on building the solution, the methodology and the lower threasholds to understanding the customer situation gives then a much higher probability of succeeding. They are simply closer to their customers and their problems. Modern organizations are not as hierarchical, mechanistic or has as many internal dependencies as traditional organizations and will never understand why it costs 40 million USD to build e g a paywall solutions. This is really the main challenge for traditional organizations like many newspapers publishers. And we haven’t even talked about if a paywall will really work or not…
Book Publishers Need to Wake Up and Smell the Disruption
evidence continues to accumulate that e-books aren’t just something established authors with an existing brand can make use of, but are also becoming a real alternative to traditional book contracts for emerging authors as well — all of which should serve as a massive wake-up call for publishers.
Full Story: GigaOm
Source: emergentfutures
CHART OF THE DAY: iPad Magazine Sales Tank
This curve reflect my own feeling when considering buying magazines on my iPad. They feel overprized when comparing to real physical magazines or most other available content on the iPad.
It could be that this is the last chance for publishers to survive the transition to a digital world - so why are they not using the pricing logic to attract new customers in huge number?
It is interesting to note that Apple will sell $2B worth of apps and the vast majority of them are prized at $1…
Source: Business Insider
California libraries gearing up for fight against Nature
The library system of the University of California may call upon the schools’ faculty to boycott journals originating from the Nature Publishing Group if they can’t come to an agreement on licensing costs for journal access. The libraries are being hammered by budget cuts resulting from California’s deteriorating state budget situation, and have already alerted content providers that it would need to work out flexible licensing arrangements in order to maintain journal access for their faculty and students. NPG has apparently chosen not to heed that request, raising the potential for a showdown.
» via ars technica
Source: infoneer-pulse
