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 -------------------------------------------------- N V Sathyanarayana Chairman & Managing Director Informatics (India) Ltd Bangalore 560003, India Phone : 91-80-23365940 www.informindia.co.in -------------------------------------------------- -----Original Message-----From: Mailing List Manager [mailto:mailman@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in] 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