Unintended Consequences

It is certainly ironic, although not particularly surprising, that one of the results of the open access movement has been to provide Elsevier with a new revenue stream.   Ironic, because, as Ray English noted in his presentation at Charleston last year, at least some of the passion with which librarians embraced open access was driven by their frustration and anger at Elsevier's pricing policies.  Not surprising, because if anybody is going to figure out a way to turn the changing terrain of scholarly publishing to their advantage, it is going to be the smart people at Elsevier.

As I've noted before, I have nothing against Elsevier  and the other commercial publishers.  I have good friends who work in that sector, and many of the people are just as dedicated and high-minded about what they're doing as any librarian.  In my dream world, I'd like to see the commercial outfits out of scholarly publishing (and all of the people who work for them happily making money and good lives elsewhere) only because I think that universities, scholarly societies and other not for profits could do a perfectly fine job of taking care of scholarly communication needs, while keeping all of the money within the system, rather than siphoning some off to shareholders.  But since we don't live in my dream world, the commercial publishers are every bit as much our partners in this enterprise and we should be treating them as such.

But it's hard for me to see how the HHMI/Elsevier agreement (or the similar agreement they have with the Wellcome Trust) meets any of the fundamental goals of the open access movement.  The author's manuscript versions get deposited in PubMed Central, which is a good thing, I suppose.  But it's still a six-month embargo.  It's also the case that for those journals six months should be sufficient to prevent significant (if any) cancellations, so Elsevier gets a public relations boost and a new revenue stream to boot.   It is certainly a good outcome for them.  Perhaps, if librarians had worked harder to encourage faculty to publish in, say, the Highwire journals that make their content freely available after an embargo period anyway, things might have turned out differently.

Comments

[Katharine]

You may have "nothing against Elsevier," but plenty of researchers do.

Reed Elsevier’s Elsevier division is the monolith of the medical publishing world, producing thousands of books in all health-care disciplines and more than 2,200 journals. But another division, Reed Exhibitions, strives to ensure that everyone in the world has enough weaponsby hosting arms fairs. This is in direct opposition to medicine’s dictum "First, do no harm."

Go to http://editor-mom.blogspot.com/2007/02/arming-to-heal-while-arming-to-kill.html for details.