At times the online information and publishing industry sounds beset with woe as it faces an ever increasing number of challenges. But the latest financial results from scientific heavyweight John Wiley & Sons refute this. Wiley has broken the $1bn ceiling for revenue in the last financial year; this is an increase of eight per cent over the previous year. Wiley reports that all of its businesses added to this figure. $1bn attracts headlines, and will no doubt add fuel to the open access fire. William Pesce, president and CEO of Wiley puts the figure down to highly regarded brands, "must have content", and the ability to adept to customer's needs. The fact that users around the world have purchased this "must have content" shows there is still a strong demand for high quality information that has been through the respected channels of peer-review and publishing. When all around predict demise for the industry in the face of Wikipedia and other free resources, the bare facts of this financial statement show that a very sizeable number of important people in science, technology and business are prepared to pay for content.
Comment. The idea that these results challenge OA shows several misunderstandings of OA.
The OA movement has the constructive goal of providing OA to more and more literature, not the destructive goal of putting publishers out of business. As I put it in my Open Access Overview, "the consequences may or may not overlap (this is contingent) but the [goals] do not overlap."
The fact that people are willing to pay for high-quality content is not a blow to OA. On the contrary. OA has expenses too, and we hope that people will be willing to defray them. The essence of OA is not that it costs nothing to produce but that the bills are not paid by readers and therefore do not become access barriers.
The fact that people are willing to pay for literature that has "been through the respected channels of peer-review" is not a blow to OA. On the contrary. OA articles (or the kind on which we focus) are peer-reviewed, usually by the very same journals as their non-OA counterparts.
Finally, Wikipedia is not the poster child of the OA movement, which focuses instead on peer-reviewed research.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/16/2006 12:35:00 PM.
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.
