Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2004 19:11:16 +0530
From: sathya
A good example Arun. It is like, you see the movie because you have read
the book that the movie is based on; or you buy the book to read because a
movie is made out of it. The underlying factor is not the "Book" or the
"Movie", but the "Economics". One medium fuels the market (or need) for
the other. "Pricing" is only an exchange factor; it could be "Nil", or it
could be any sum.
The concept of OA is not new to the society. How much do you pay for your
morning newspaper? The Newspaper publishing houses are real big. The sales
revenues of the Hindu which wrote the recent editorial on OA runs into a
few thousand million Rupees. What you pay may not even cover the cost of
the ink incurred by the Hindu! How much do you pay for your favorite
movie you watch on the TV? This is "Pure OA".
The publishing industry is the corner stone of knowledge economy. It is
quite concerned about the "OA wave" and its impact on scholarly journals
market but is surely not as worried as the proponents of OA want them to
feel threatened. According to Welcome Foundation's report on "Economic
Analysis of Scientific Research Publishing (2003), the money spent by all
the UK academic libraries for buying scholarly journals is around 0.35
percent of UK's publishing industry turnover! To quote this report --
"Academic journals are a small and peculiar part of this (publishing)
world. They are vitally important for the dissemination of knowledge but
tiny in the context of publishing turnover".
There is lot of merit in moving scholarly journals to OA Model in the new
technology environment. Springer has followed suit with the "author-pays"
model of PLoS, by offering to declare any article to Open Access if author
pays a fee. Don't forget, a large number of journals published today by
commercial publishers are those started by various professional societies
and sold of to commercial publishers as they found it hard to sustain. The
challenge before us is to find a viable economic model that sustains. It
is important to focus on this challenge without getting lost in the
emotional tirades of who makes how much profit?
Sathya
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N V Sathyanarayana
Chairman & Managing Director
Informatics (India) Ltd
Bangalore 560003, India
Phone : 91-80-23365940
www.informindia.co.in
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-----Original Message-----From: Mailing List Manager
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Sent: Friday, August 06, 2004 6:15 PM
To: lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in
Subject: [LIS-Forum] OA and copyright
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2004 16:44:26 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Friends, in particular Sathya:
Please see this news item from Peter Suber's blog:
More on Lessig's Free Culture Give It Away and They'll Buy It
<http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2004/julaug/farm/news/lessig.ht
ml>, Stanford Magazine, July/August 2004. On Lawrence Lessig's new book,
Free Culture, which is available in both open-access
http://www.free-culture.cc/ and priced/printed
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1594200068/qid=1091586887/sr=
1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-2808347-4161631?v=glance&s=books> editions. Excerpt:
"You can pay $25 for Lawrence Lessig's new book. Or you can download it
for free. What's the catch? None, according to Lessig, a law professor who
specializes in intellectual property and is the author of Free Culture:
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control
Creativity. A memo Lessig wrote to his publisher convinced Penguin Books
that releasing Free Culture online actually would increase sales of
hardcove copies. Which may be true: there have been more than 180,000
downloads --and Penguin is on its third printing."
Subbiah Arunachalam
Distinguished Fellow
M S Swaminathan Research Foundation
Tel: +91-44-5528 4776, 2254 1229, 2254 2791
Fax:+91-44-2254 1319
