©ollectanea

I read a press release on the Liblicense listserve this morning from Wiley-Blackwell announcing a new series of journals: "Wiley-Blackwell Launches Review Journals in Social Sciences and Humanities -- Cutting-edge functionality added to Compass journals," the title read. I went to visit the site (Compass Journals and glimpsed the future of publishing in a world of open access (OA). Many people still vigorously debate whether OA will result at some point in library cancellations of journal subscriptions. Theoretically, if all journal articles are freely available on the Web, why would a library subscribe to a database containing them? Sounds rational enough, enough to cause any thoughtful publisher to 1) resist OA or 2) accept OA and find a way to build a business on its back with customers you already have ...

Publishers are doing both. In addressing their admittedly different but pretty much parallel challenges to copyright control, so is Hollywood (see Lawrence Lessig's OpEd piece in the Washington Post. At last, so it the music biz.

I don't believe that resistance will thwart OA (or remixing, or p2p file sharing). OA has such obvious advantages for the "progress of science and the useful arts" to borrow a line from the Constitution. Nevertheless, resistance slows it down long enough for the new business models to start to take shape. Far from saving libraries money, however, OA is going to be a gold mine for publishers who can offer brave new services built on the treasure trove of high-value articles that are going to be out there free for the taking.

Is this a bad thing? Certainly not. It's the American Way (at least), and libraries will buy the services (rent the services actually), and prices will continue to spiral like they always have because that too is the American Way. If you are not growing (profits) you are dying.

Debate about this seems academic at this point. While I'm not that concerned about the future of Hollywood or the music biz, I do care deeply about the future of scholarly publishing and I applaud those at the helm of our University Presses who spend as much of their time as possible concentrating on new business models, not just debating whether OA will cause subscription cancellations (or whatever else it might cause). We have to figure out, like Wiley-Blackwell (and Lucasfilm and EMS in their worlds), what we can do to take advantage of this new OA, socially networked world of digital scholarship, either as businesses, or as more integrated parts of the institutional framework -- whichever works.