Re: digital-copyright Digest 27 Sep 2004 15:00:00 -0000 Issue 425

[Edward Barrow <edward@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 28 September 2004 06:53, Downes, Stephen wrote:
> Hiya,
>
> From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> > It won't be negotiable for long.  Interlibrary loans of digital
> > materials (not hardcopy) raise the specter of a publisher only being
> > able to sell a single copy of a publication, with other copies being
> > disseminated free of charge.
>
> The flip side, of course, is that the same technology allows publishers to
> make one copy of a resource, and then to sell it many times to multiple
> resources with virtually no additional expenses.

> >  I don't know of any institutions that would be willing to
> > shoulder the cost (500x?  2,000x?) of providing a subscription for the
> > the entire library community.  Widespread interlibrary loan will
> > simply mean that many things simply won't get published.
>
> I don't know of many institutions that think it is reasonable to continue
> paying print-based prices for resources that cost much less to produce than
> the books and journals of old. It makes more sense to simply post resources
> on institutional websites, bypassing the publishers completely, and
> incidentally, also, the cumbersome mechanics of interlibrary loans.

Steven's understanding is a widely-held fallacy. Even in the case of print on 
paper, the cost of reproduction (print, distribution etc) is small compared 
to the cost of production (editorial, peer review etc). Switching to 
electronic distribution doesn't reduce the cost of production, neither does 
it eliminate reproduction costs: servers and bandwidth are not free.   

It's easy to reduce mechanical costs like printing; print costs have been 
falling in real terms since Gutenberg. It's hard to reduce costs that depend 
on the input of skilled human beings such as authors, illustrators and 
copy-editors.

Scholarly publishing, though, is a special case. Publishers provide 
substantial editorial input, but typically neither authors nor referees are 
paid. Most of it operates within a closed academic circle, and the costs are 
met out of academic library budgets. Under the emerging "open-archiving" 
models, the costs will come out of research department budgets, but still out 
of academia.

It is worth bearing in mind, however, that by far the biggest gainer out of a 
wholesale shift to the new model will be the pharmaceutical industry, which 
has long been a major purchaser of biomedical journals. Under open-archiving 
models, it will get a free ride.

-- 
Edward Barrow
Copyright Consultant
edward@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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