Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, December 08, 2005

It's not the newcomers but the landscape

Good advice from John Blossom for publishers frightened of search engines and OA competition:
The solution is not to blame the newcomers to publishing but to learn how to adapt to a new landscape that will not have much tolerance for paying for things just because it suits outdated business models.

(PS: The context is book publishing and the clueless, almost other-worldly complaints of Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council, blogged here yesterday. But Blossom's advice carries over to the domain of journals and self-archiving. If applied to the 11/24 Royal Society position statement, it could be translated this way: The solution is not to blame OA archiving but to learn how to adapt to a new landscape.... Or, as we've been saying for years, the purpose of OA is not to punish publishers who make excessive profits but to take advantage of new opportunities created by the internet to advance all the purposes of science and scholarship.)