Alex Lankester, The Value of Publishers, Library Connect Newsletter, April 2006 (scroll to p. 4). (Thanks to William Walsh.) Lankester is a Global Marketing Manager for Elsevier. Excerpt:
At a meeting of the British
Computer Society Electronic
Publishing Specialist Group,
the motivation for authors to get published and be seen
in particular journals was described [by Stevan Harnad] as being primarily to
“reach the eyes of their colleagues.” Here the publisher
has a role to play not just in ensuring a fast and efficient
publication process and maintaining a journal’s reputation
but also in dissemination, ensuring findings are rapidly
accessible to the research community....
Publishers in the electronic era are the guardians of content,
guaranteeing 24/7 access to articles today and into the future.
Elsevier’s investment in ScienceDirect, offering 25% of the
world’s STM full-text scholarly articles and seeing 36 full-text
article downloads per second on a typical workday, has been
substantial. Such a service is no small feat to maintain....
As well as delivering the latest research findings to users in
the most immediate way, through online publishing and
value-added services such as personalized alerts, publishers
today must ensure these findings are forever accessible....
Today’s learned journal publishers are serving as much more
than a traditional vehicle by which research findings are
published. Today’s publishers are making a huge contribution
to the ways and means in which content is delivered to
research communities. If a publisher is innovative, invests
in development of content technologies and is a leader in
cross-industry initiatives, the value added is immense. In
such a context the publisher and researcher community
benefit from a mutually reinforcing relationship — expanding
knowledge and increasing access to it.
Comment. I've always acknowledged that publishers add value, and even praised Elsevier (at some cost among my colleagues) for its green policy and experiment in free online access. But some of Lankester's claims are clear and ironic exaggerations. It's ironic that Elsevier would boast about making research "rapidly accessible" in "the most immediate way" and "increasing access" to it when, by these measures, open access is superior to toll access. If Lankester meant that, and intended to boast about Elsevier's green policy, she forgot to mention it. It's ironic that she would invoke Stevan Harnad's criterion for meeting author needs and then fail to show that Elsevier fulfills it as well as the OA that Harnad clearly had in mind. It's ironic to boast about ScienceDirect when evidence shows that customer satisfaction with it has been declining for years. It's ironic to boast that Elsevier helps make content "forever accessible" when long-term preservation requires making copies to migrate content to new formats and media to keep it readable as technology changes --something permitted by OA but blocked by the Elsevier licensing agreement. Finally, it's ironic that Elsevier would boast about being "guardians of content" when researchers are looking for ways to remove the guardians of content.
(BTW and much appreciated, Elsevier's Library Connect Newsletter, where this article appeared, is OA.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/13/2006 09:49:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
