The rise of the Internet has been a boon to the National Academies Press, or NAP, the book-publishing arm of the National Academy of Sciences. But by the start of this decade, the promise of the web also posed some potential pitfalls.
In 2001, the leading scientists on the board of the Academy were suggesting that NAP executive director Barbara Kline Pope take advantage of new technologies to offer its books on the web in a downloadable PDF format -- free of charge. According to Pope, the scientists told her they wanted the ability to disseminate the scientific information as widely as possible, explaining "that we could give away PDFs for free and it would build knowledge around the world. They were also saying to me, 'Don't worry about your business model because people will still buy printed books.'"
But Pope wasn't convinced. So in 2002...she obtained outside funds for hard research, retained two academic marketing experts and called upon the tools of marketing science. The researchers developed a study showing that free online PDF-format books would have cannibalized existing print sales on the order of $2 million a year -- a potentially crippling blow to the publishing house.
Pope and the two marketing experts -- P.K. Kannan from the University of Maryland and Sanjay Jain from Texas A&M -- presented their research at Wharton recently as an entry in the INFORMS Society on Marketing Science (ISMS) Practice Prize Competition, a contest designed to highlight the ways that advanced marketing science can improve the bottom line.
For their development of a strategy on how to price online PDF-format books in a way that would maximize both revenues and book sales, the NAP team was awarded first prize in the competition....
Comment. You wouldn't know from reading this article that NAP offers free PDF editions for nearly half of its books (1,800 out of 3,700 or 48.6%). Nor would you know that it offers free online access to all of its monographs in a home-grown (non-PDF) format. Nor would you know that it's famous for pioneering dual (OA and non-OA) editions for research monographs --a feature of the press since 1994-- and demonstrating that the free online editions increase the net sales of the print editions. For the NAP's use of OA editions, see three articles by its own Mike Jensen (in 2001, 2005, and 2007).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/13/2007 11:30:00 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.
