Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce.
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 grea...
| Published in: | Evaluation Review Vol. 39; no. 1; pp. 130 - 164 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Sage Publications Inc.
Feb2015
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=101691391&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 101691391 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 0193841X EVR jtl: Evaluation Review issn: 0193841X maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Feb2015 vid: 39 iid: 1 pid: 344 pub: Sage Publications Inc. artinfo: ui: 101691391 10.1177/0193841X13514751 ppf: 130 ppct: 34 formats: tig: atl: Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce. aug: au: Odlyzko, Andrew M. affil: School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA odlyzko@umn.edu su: Publishing Equality Scholarly communication Open access publishing Price discrimination sug: subj: Publishing Equality Other publishers Book Publishers All Other Publishers Scholarly communication Open access publishing Price discrimination keyword: big deals open access price discrimination big deals open access price discrimination ab: 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 unpaid work of others for profits, and business models that depend on customer inertia. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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