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Open Season: Kluwer's Open Access
Experiment Tests New Distribution Models |
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22 March 2004 |
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Publishers of pricey scholarly journals have hemmed and
hawed for some time now as open access journals have sprung
up to offer peer-reviewed research papers for free to all
comers. But as a recent article in
Azom
pointed out,
Kluwer Academic Publishers is trying a brief experiment
on free access to some of its major online imprints that
could be the beginning of change in the traditional
journals marketplace. The experiment may be small, but the
consequences are potentially huge for both publishers and
the aggregators who rely on their premium wares for their
own revenues. Open access is beginning to open up all kinds
of new opportunities and questions - with answers still
trailing behind. |
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Sometimes
significant announcements come out with fanfare and
celebration; other times they sneak out like a cat through a
cracked-open door. The funny thing is that oftentimes you don't
know which ones are more likely to be the ones that wind up
shaking the world. A nearly washed-up reporter covers an
arraignment of some burglars who traipsed through some offices
at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. and before you
know it Jerry Ford is President of the United States. Then
again, all the world awaited with 'bated breath the unveiling
of a mysterious new product codenamed "Ginger", only to find
that in spite of all of the hoopla that an electronic culture
could offer a Segway
scooter is not likely to bring world peace and an end to
hunger. So it was with some interest that I read an item that
my favorite news search engine found in
Azom, an
online journal focusing on materials science. The
article revealed that
Kluwer Academic
Publishers is making fifteen prominent titles from its
mathematic and chemistry journals available for free online
until the end of April. I looked for press releases and major
coverage in vain: this was a bona fide sleeper.
Is this just a little marketing
experiment or something more profound in the works? As Shore
Senior Analyst
Christine Lamb detailed in her
recent research, major publishers of academic and
scientific journals worldwide are trying to discern how to
manage the push for "open access", a movement that calls for
scholarly papers to be published online free of charge to
readers. This "f" word is certainly no stranger to other
premium publishing realms, but the obligatory panache of print
journals has kept peer-reviewed scholarly research expensive to
its readers long after the economics of online publishing
demanded other approaches. With open access publishers
such as
BioMed Central, the
Public Library
of Science and numerous others beginning to make inroads
into the field, established publishers are wrestling with where
to take their business models, even as governments in countries
with major R&D interests are trying to find new ways to
maintain their competitiveness via the most efficient research
distribution methods possible. So what looks like something
small with Kluwer's experiment could very well be the beginning
of something rather big - if the experiment brings back data
that can help the majors to take a new direction.
Why should the most elite bastions of
premium content consider publishing via an open access model?
Here are a few key factors that are likely to push these
publishers towards variants of open access publishing sooner
rather than later:
- The world of real-time research.
With so much information both in and
beyond peer-reviewed journals freely available on the Web,
journals no longer represent the exclusive gateway by which
their audiences learn of new and significant developments in
their realms of expertise. Emails, discussion boards,
collaborative tools, Web sites and weblogs on the public Web
and within institutions all contribute content that's
locatable by search engines and that can move research
forward in a market-driven economy far more efficiently than
traditional publishing cycles can manage. Publishers can
squeal all they want about the challenges that they face in
producing a quality product, but if they cannot create
something in a time frame that is going to help their readers
pay for their invoice, it's going to be a rather moot point
before too long. When one's primary distribution technology
goes from state-of-the-art knowledge facilitator to weak
excuse for inefficiency that your markets can no longer
tolerate if they are to respond to their own competitive
pressures, it's time to rethink one's approach to
pricing and distribution.
- The decline of traditional
aggregators. When premium electronic content databases
held a far more significant portion of the world's published
materials, it was far easier for journal publishers to feel
safe within a distribution model that upheld their
traditional pricing and distribution schemes. But now that
major aggregators are feeling the pinch in their subscription
revenues in the face of globally accessible content, their
supplying publishers are as well. The writing is on the wall
for publishers relying on traditional premium aggregators:
it's only a matter of time before these licensing deals will
do more to harm their revenue streams than enhance them.
Being able to position their assets in a manner that will
allow their content to flow to whatever context makes sense
to their client base via whatever distribution technology is
winning at the time is the key to the survival of premium
journal publishing.
- The rise of new content
monetization models. While much of the emphasis in the
current debate on open access focuses on the old "free versus
fee" flap, the core question of how journal publishing adds
value is still largely unaddressed. The recent crop of open
access outlets tries to address this with various back-end
schemes to recoup costs, but the opportunities to add new
value on the front end - the readers' end - are still largely
unaddressed. As search engines such as Google and others
begin to become more adept at crawling private databases, the
need to add some more subtlety as to what constitutes free
access and for whom will only increase. Journals will have to
learn how to follow more commercial models as they begin to
introduce premium layers of content, links and social
networking opportunities that provide value above and beyond
review and distribution that enhance the value of research in
ways that traditional academic societies only begin to
service.
So although Kluwer's little experiment
may lead to nothing in and of itself except a management report
on downloading statistics, it's a sign that inevitable changes
are afoot. Be it open, closed, or any number of shapes in
between, scholarly content needs to adopt to a world that is no
longer awaiting publishers' latest balance sheets to determine
the needed rate of change. Hear that little jingling sound?
Methinks the cat just slipped out the door.
-
John Blossom
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