open access a danger to professional societies?
This is a follow-up to my previous entry (A shift in scholarly attention? From commercial publishing to open access publishing) prompted by Open Access? Some Sparks Fly at ALA. (thanks to Open Access News).
In the article, IEEE's Durniak makes the following unsubstantiated statement: "Free open access runs the risk of destroying professional societies."
One can do an extensive analysis to show that the above statement is not necessarily true. However, it suffices to note that commercial publishers are only one of the actors in the scholarly publishing cycle. As such, the totality of the functions performed by the commercial publishers can definitely be taken over by the professional societies themselves, or perhaps by a non-profit umbrella organization that would deal with scholarly publishing for various professional societies.
It is really unprecedented and uncalled for the commercial publishers to claim that without them the entire scholarly publication process will fail and that professional societies will be destroyed. It is indeed true that the commercial publishers provide value added services. However, none of these value-added services are outside of the competency of the professional societies themselves, especially with all the open source software available. Even if it means that the processional societies would have to hire IT staff to deal with the maintenance of the process, it would definitely be less costly than the cost to the host institution for buying back the intellectual output of their staff.
Sooner or later, the commercial publishers will have to relax a bit and see how they can honestly contribute in the process to moving to open access. Their stakeholders might not be happy, but, hey, the dynamic is changing and the power base is shifting.
- democracy through open source - Jul 16, 2003
- the blogsphere topology - Jul 12, 2003
- on role of the freedom of information - Jul 10, 2003
- does "the little person" really drive the agenda for the Web? - Jul 09, 2003
- open content in education - Jul 09, 2003
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it should not be true, but it might be, but it won't be pure open access to journals that is the cause, but more likely it will be the inability to provide the cost sustaining benefits which justify their existence. journals are one of those benefits, if they become open access, then there is one less reason to join, it is the same with proceedings, if they become open, and you don't have to join to read them, then there is one less reason to join. as the internet inserts itself into more of the relationships that once could only be had at professional meetings, also, there will be less reason to join. at what point then does the professional socity become not cost effective for its members? many of the large ones are also bureaucratically large, with paid managers, and such, who will pay the salaries when the money drops off? likewise, if people don't pay for subscriptions who will pay the graduate student labor that usually does the copyediting in journals, and the basic journal management? money, money, money.... it's not funny, so the song goes. money flows around publishing journals, and some of it comes directly back to the academy, the societies, graduate students, etc.
so yes, open access can sour things, traditional things, but that might not be bad.